A Study on Environmental Concern in Mainland China Based on the Latest Three Waves of the World Values Survey

This study uses the latest three waves of the transnational survey database World Values Survey to empirically investigate the relationships between environmental concern and a set of demographic variables relevant for the postmaterialist thesis including (1) age (2) education level (3) income and (4) urbanization in Mainland China. Responses on (1) priority over economic growth or environmental protection and (2) activeness in environmental organizations are chosen to represent environmental concern. This study employs a two step approach conducting both separate regressions for each wave and an aggregate regression with all the waves combined. Results show that age and education seem to be better “predictors” for environmental concern than the other demographic variables, in other words, the “socialization hypotheses” seem to work better than the “scarcity hypotheses” under the postmaterialist framework in Mainland China, a “natural laboratory” with large demographic variations and a “Confucian” background. The inconsistencies in how the demographic variables perform by question item and wave and the difference in the separate and aggregated regression results show the relevance of the “Asian uniqueness” argument. The example of environmental concern shows how citizens possessing liberal values and positive attitudes toward New Left issues in Mainland China can have diverse demographic backgrounds.