This dissertation examines the patterns of popular attitudes and beliefs about economic inequality and distributive justice in contemporary China. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework on social cognition and employing novel quantitative approaches, this dissertation challenges the widely held view that regards distributive injustice as one of the most critical sources of sociopolitical instability in today's China, and presents new empirical findings on how beliefs and opinions about distributive justice are structured in people's minds. Empirical analyses present following results.
