China’s much-discussed “moral crisis” looks less like a collapse and more like a change of values. People who grew up after the economic reforms condemn fare dodging, theft and violence more firmly than their elders, and the whole population has grown stricter over time.
The study is by Xue Gong of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. It was published online in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology on December 3, 2025.
Gong set out to test two competing stories. One, rooted in social anomie theory, holds that rapid modernization tore up shared norms and left a scramble for self-interest. The other, drawn from modernization theory, holds that rising prosperity pushes people toward “emancipative” values such as autonomy, gender equality and tolerance, and that the clash between old and new values is what feels like decline.
Three waves of the World Values Survey
The analysis uses the World Values Survey conducted in China in 2007 (1,991 respondents), 2012 (2,300) and 2018 (3,036). Respondents born before 1980 were classed as the pre-reform generation and those born after as the post-reform generation, since living standards took off in the 1980s.
Moral standards were measured by how unjustifiable people found three acts: avoiding a fare on public transport, stealing property and using violence against others. Moral values were measured with Welzel’s emancipative values scale, covering views on divorce, abortion and homosexuality, desirable traits in children such as independence and imagination, and women’s equal access to education, jobs and political power. Gong dropped the scale’s political “voice” questions because they are sensitive in China and more than 20% of answers were missing.
All models controlled for gender, media use and education.
Younger people judged wrongdoing more harshly
In 2007 the generations did not differ. By 2012 the post-reform generation rejected fare evasion significantly more strongly, and by 2018 it rejected all three acts more strongly, with the biggest gap on violence. The effect sizes were small, and Gong describes the first hypothesis as only partially supported.
The population-wide shift was clearer. On an acceptance index running from 0 to 1, tolerance of fare evasion and violence fell from around .26 in 2012 to about .16 in 2018. Stealing was rated the least acceptable of the three throughout.
“The substantial decline in the acceptance of immoral behaviors over time indicates a general rise in societal moral standards,” Gong writes.
More diverse and more liberal values
The post-reform generation scored higher on the emancipative index in all three survey years. Its values were also more spread out: the variation within the younger cohort was larger, a difference that was statistically significant in 2012 and especially in 2018.
The largest single gap concerned homosexuality, and it widened sharply between 2007 and 2018. Gender equality was the component with the strongest overall generational difference.
Average emancipative scores for both generations rose from 2007 to 2012 and then fell from 2012 to 2018. Gong notes this matches other research finding a turn toward more conservative values during Xi Jinping’s tenure, which began in 2012.
An age-period-cohort analysis found no effect of age once period and cohort were accounted for, suggesting the gaps reflect when people grew up rather than how old they were when surveyed.
Gong flags one key limitation: the survey’s measures capture universal values and miss China-specific moral frameworks such as familism, Confucian ethics and collectivism. The paper also points to a coming tension, as younger Chinese favour personal freedom while the state promotes traditional gender roles, family formation and diligence, a gap visible in the rise of feminism and the “lying flat” trend.
Study Details:
- Title: Rethinking Modernization and Value Change in China: Moral Decline or Emancipative Shift?
- Authors: Xue Gong
- Journal: Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
- Publication Date: December 3, 2025
- DOI: 10.1177/00220221251385541