The Time Trend of Life Satisfaction in China

The overtime changes of life satisfaction have been recognized as an important topic in happiness studies. Unfortunately, most of prior research is confined to Western industrialized countries. A few studies focused on the case of China yet fail to reach a general agreement. This research aims to synthesize multiple national representative samples implemented in China by standardizing the happiness scores. The transformation of datasets yields more observation points and grounds the analysis in much larger samples, which helps to represent a country as vast as China. The analysis shows that in the past two decades, Chinese people has been experiencing a marked decline of life satisfaction, in spite of tremendous economic and societal progress.