Poor and Lazy: Understanding Middle-class Perceptions of Poverty in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT In moving to address relative rather than absolute poverty, China will need to redistribute income from the middle class to persons experiencing poverty. The challenge is that policy rhetoric has recently prioritised laziness as causing poverty, a view seemingly shared by most of China’s middle class. Drawing on a convenience sample of 2,449 middle-class respondents, binomial and multinomial logisticregressions relate beliefs on the attribution of poverty to personality,and ideological and individual socialisation. When presented with twotypical response-options, most respondents chose laziness over unfair-ness but selected ‘modern progress’ when given more choice. Respondents prioritising laziness were prone to exhibit extravert andauthoritarian personalities and have more faith than others in government policies. They were less well educated and less likely to have studied social sciences. Respondents subsequently attributing poverty to modern progress had similar characteristics but were not extravert. Building support for redistributive policies could therefore prove difficult.