The Chinese Dream: How Social Mobility Affects Regime Support in China

• In Event: Social Welfare Provision in Non-democracies: Evidence from China

Abstract

Social mobility is important for social stability--this is true for both democratic and authoritarian countries. In an authoritarian country like China where political legitimacy increasingly relies on the performance of governance and economic development, the political leaders seem to have stronger interests in engineering social mobility to maintain social stability. Does increased social mobility contribute to the authoritarian resilience? I leverage the hukou (household registration) reform in China during the 2000s as an identification strategy to study the effect of social mobility on citizens’ support for the authoritarian regime. In the paper, I argue that first, hukou status is an important yet understudied factor to define social mobility in the context of contemporary China. Taking advantage of the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010 data, I find that through changing hukou status from rural to urban, ordinary Chinese citizens believe that they have achieved upward social mobility; in contrast, changing hukou status from migrant (non-local) to resident (local) has a dampening effect on citizens’ perceived prospect of social mobility. Second, I argue that there is a significant yet heterogenous treatment effect of hukou status changes on citizens’ trust in government. Specifically, I find that among the CGSS respondents, the rural-to-urban status change increased one’s trust in the central government only, while the migrant-to-resident status change increased one’s trust mainly in the local government. I further find that citizens with the hukou status change (from rural to urban or from migrant to resident) are more likely to tolerate or support government intervention in migration. This study highlights the importance of upward social mobility in authoritarian regime. It also sheds a new light on the role of hukou in shaping social mobility in China.

Author

• Xian Huang, Rutgers University