The Cultural Consequences of Market Transition: An Empirical Examination of Rising Materialism in Twenty-First-Century China

This study examines how markets affect personal culture in the context of postsocialist China. Drawing on several bodies of literature, I argue that China’s transition to a market economy promotes materialist values via two causal pathways. First, market transition entails a process of economic liberalization, which accentuates economic incentives and exacerbates existential insecurity. Second, market transition also entails a process of commodification that, by immersing individuals in market relations, crowds out intrinsic motives and normalizes the pursuit of material self-interests. My empirical analysis uses repeated cross-sectional data from a large-scale national survey to demonstrate the effect of market transition through the lens of work values. Taking advantage of China’s regional variations in the pace of institutional change, I show that, between 2005 and 2015, provinces where market transition had made greater progress tended to experience a sharper rise in materialist work values. Additional analyses reveal significant differences in work values between state-sector employees and workers in the market sector, and that the relationship between market transition and materialist values extends beyond the work domain. These findings contribute to the theoretical literature on the cultural consequences of markets and the empirical knowledge on cultural change in contemporary China.