Inequality Perception Of Urban Citizens And Analysis Of Its Influencing Factors

The widening gap between rich and poor is a big problem of all countries. China faces much more severe situation. With the deepening of market transition, the gap between different districts, different profession and urban and rural Districts is clearly widening. But present, the academic circle of our country pay their attention more to describing the status quo of the gap between the rich and the poor. Then they analyze the causes of the situation. Few scholars investigated the rich-poor gap from the subjective point of view. It has been proved that the study of the inequality perception is more helpful to explore the influence of the objective inequality of the whole society, and more helpful to predict the possible results of the rich-poor gap.There are two defects about inequality perception of our country’s academic study. First, the study of inequality perception is not of timeliness, the comprehensive study of the issue is mostly done at the first year of21st century. Second, the emphasis of the study of inequality perception is showing the objective situation but not analyzing the influencing factors. To tackle the above problems, I narrow the scope of the study, putting my emphasis on showing the situation of inequality perception and then analyze the objective influencing factors and subjective influencing factors.This study finds that urban citizens generally think there are huge gap between the rich and the poor, Showing in the following areas:First, urban citizens generally have strong perception of inequality, but the perception appears different levels at country, districts and professions. Second, urban citizens all have clear class awareness to some extent. Third, urban citizens generally think they belong to the lower class but not the upper class, and this awareness does not have relation to their objective class situation. Forth, as to the livelihood of the people, urban citizens all have strong inequality perception, and this perception has the character of group connotation. On the whole, the factors that influence urban citizen’s inequality perception shows the specifieness of the theory about "social structure determinism", that is to say, people with higher socio-economic status, more satisfied with their own economic and housing situation prone to think the inequality level is not high, on the contrary, people think the inequality level is very high.Besides all above, I further explore the justification of inequality, that is to say in a highly unequal society, how inequality is accepted and how the inequality is justifiable and It’s possible inner mechanism.