Entrepreneurs or Employees: What Chinese Citizens Encouraged to Become by Social Attitudes?

The traditional way of the "troika" cannot support sustainable development for China, and future economic growth should be pushed by entrepreneurship, which can be the key to innovation. The paper analyses the importance and necessity of entrepreneurship in the context of China and its current situation systematically, and methodically studies whether it is entrepreneurs or employees that social attitudes encourage citizens to become. Using Chinese General Social Survey data, the paper explores the essentiality of social attitudes from three perspectives: social equity, social happiness and social trust that can reflect the social atmosphere, and examines the influential factors in terms of personal characteristics through an empirical approach. The paper finds that citizens' feelings and perceptions of social equity and social happiness have a significant positive impact on encouraging them to be entrepreneurs, with positive factors such as income, social security and children, and negative factors such as education, political identity and hukou. The effect can be more significant for urban citizens than rural ones; men and women are affected differently by the same factors in their choice to become employees or entrepreneurs.