Abstract
As a transitional economy featuring high growth and high mobility, China presents a case where we observe its citizens having high demands for government responsibility to reduce inequalities and accept the deservingness of the rich by rejecting effective redistribution. To explain the sources of such preferences combinations, we develop several hypotheses and test them using an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of 2,500 Chinese citizens. We find that Chinese citizens exhibit strong support for inequality-reducing policies of real personal stakes and income regulation. Priming the "unmeritocratic" component of the income-generating process in either becoming rich or staying poor significantly reduces support for redistributive policies targeted explicitly at taxing the rich, as well as support for the government to regulate the income gap. This effect is mainly driven by those who self-report to have relatively low economic pressure.