Benefit or Procedure? Determinants of Fairness Judgment in Rural China

• In Event: Social Welfare and Redistribution in Post-Communist Nations

Abstract

“Common prosperity” is a defining theme of Chinese political economy under Xi Jinping, setting critical priorities of the Chinese government across economic and social policy in recent years. Between 2015 and 2020, China launched a Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) campaign that aims to narrow the widening wealth gap by lifting millions of rural poor households out of poverty. Can this government program change rural citizens’ judgement about economic fairness? What drives citizens’ fairness judgement, material benefits or the procedure through which beneficiaries are selected? Using original survey data on poverty alleviation in rural China and the matching method, we find that a transparent and democratic procedure in poverty identification is an important predictor of rural citizens’ fairness judgement about TPA. Specifically, the positive effect of receiving material benefits from TPA on individuals’ fairness judgement about TPA significantly decreases when they are aware of the villages’ democratic deliberation procedure in poverty identification. Moreover, rural citizens who consider TPA to be fair are also more likely to judge that the national income distribution is fair no matter they are recipients of TPA benefits or not, indicating a connection between process fairness (e.g., TPA) and outcome fairness (e.g., common prosperity). These findings not only underscore the importance of procedure justice in fairness judgments but also highlight that even the rural poor, who are the most susceptible to buying off by the regime, care about transparency and openness of the process through which government decisions about income (re)distribution are made.

Authors

• Cai (Vera) Zuo

• Xian Huang, Rutgers University