Research suggests the two countries actually have similar feelings about wealth
In China, the rich are looked down upon by just about everyone, at least according to years of reports from social media. In the early 2000s, the Chinese phrase Chow Fu Sing Lee (“Hate for the rich”) became one of the most popular search terms. The kids of the nouveau riche are their own derogatory name. FuerdaiFor years, deep-seated resentment towards the wealthy in China has been blamed for the vandalism of luxury cars, harassment of the wealthy and even public celebration at the deaths of certain wealthy individuals.
But are Chinese people more strict on the wealthy than Americans? Or are they more strict? Chow Fu Sing Lee Is it simply a social media creation, exaggerated for effect?
Three social scientists experimentally tested Chinese and American subjects for strong feelings of envy and contempt toward the wealthy in general. They found little evidence of hatred toward either group. Conversely, the findings suggest that average-income workers in mainland China and the United States hold more positive stereotypes about the wealthy than they do about their own countries' middle classes.
According to a study published on November 24, 2010 by Shelley Jueyu Wu of UCLA Anderson, Xuechunji Bai and Susan T. Fisk of Princeton University, “hatred of the rich” appears to be directed only at a small portion of each country's wealthy elite. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
The survey found that China's second-generation wealthy harbor the strongest negative feelings, with US respondents expressing almost the same degree of disdain toward the “young wealthy.”
However, Chinese working-class and American middle-class survey participants described the wealthy as significantly more competent and of equal value than the average wealthy person (Chinese working class and American “middle” class are synonymous terms in this study).
The researchers reached their conclusions after administering computer tasks and questionnaires to subjects recruited through crowdsourcing platforms in both countries. The tests were designed to elicit attitudes through the attributes subjects assigned to the wealthy, as well as responses to more direct questions about their beliefs. The combination of strong envy and contempt for the wealthy, implicit and inferred from the responses, was determined to amount to hatred, likely accompanied by a desire to see the wealthy harmed.
The finding that Chinese and Americans have similar attitudes toward the wealthy was somewhat surprising: Across cultures, the wealthy are generally viewed with envy, though with mixed feelings, according to a 2017 study of dozens of international samples. But history suggests that Chinese people harbor a stronger hatred for the wealthy than Americans do, the authors noted.
In China, open suspicion of the wealthy dates back to the time of Confucius and continues into modern Communist China, where the expansion of the market economy in the late 1990s gave ordinary citizens the power to work to earn their wealth.
American capitalism, on the other hand, asserts that anyone can achieve wealth through hard work. Americans are generally thought to envy the wealthy and to yearn for their wealth, a combination of emotions considered far more harmless than one that is accompanied by contempt.
The researchers suggest that a broader survey of Chinese study participants might have led to harsher stereotyping of the wealthy. “Alternatively, social media may have exaggerated strong feelings toward the wealthy, while in reality such a 'hate the rich' culture was either not fully present or applied only to limited subgroups of the wealthy,” they wrote.
