Perceptions Of Social Justice Among Youth Living In China’s Tourist Areas:the Case Of Dali

Since ’Reform and Opening Up’,China has experienced fast economic growth accompanied with a myriad of changes in social structure.China’ s 2016 Gini Coefficient was.0.465,well within the United Nations’ "warning area",compared to a Gini Coefficient of 0.288 in 1980.Thus,it’ s clear ’that objective inequality has greatly increased along with economic growth.Many scholars have voiced concerns that increasing social inequality might threaten social stability,and have even characterized China as a ’Social Volcano’,arguing that widespread anger regarding social inequality is likely to threaten overall stability.Martin K.Whyte’ s research has shown that apart from objective measures of inequality,how people perceive social justice and equality is also very important.Some scholars have already conducted research on the perceptions of justice amongst people living in tourism areas,but as this field of study is still quite new,there are many holes in the current literature to fill.Dali,as a tourism area that is neither completely urban nor rural,is especially well suited to studying perceptions of social justice.As China’ s domestic tourism industry continues to grow and flourish,issues regarding social justice among tourism area inhabitants will become increasingly important.This paper takes a socio-psychological perspective,incorporating both qualitative and quantitative research methods,to explore perceptions of social justice among young people who reside in Dali City’ s tourism areas.Past scholars have delved into perceptions of social justice among young people,but none have specifically targeted perceptions of social justice among Dali’ s youth.Thus,the author spent seven weeks in Dali conducting survey,interview,and participant observation based research to find;1)Most informants are very optimistic concerning their own personal standard of living,but are pessimistic concerning trends in social justice on a macro-level.2)Most informants think that income inequality on a national level is too high,while our survey yielded mixed results concerning income inequality within their communities and workplaces,showing that their subjective ideas about incomeinequality are different.3)Most informants tend to emphasis personal merit over exogenous factors that cause people to become richer or poorer,thus it can be surmised that our sample has a relatively high income inequality tolerance.4)Most informants favor reasonable government redistribution policies,but disagree with limiting the incomes of the most-wealthy.5)The author learned through informal interviews and participant observation that an informants reference groups tends to change according to specific issues,thus saying they have only one primary reference group is an imperfect assumption at best.