Since the 1990s, fewer people have been entering the manufacturing labor force as their first job. This change is concurrent with a shrinking demand for workers in the manufacturing industry, which contributed 44 percent of total employment in the country at the end of the 1980s.

Marriage and health

The survey revealed that a majority of Chinese couples, as represented by 58.5 percent of respondents, got to know their spouses through matchmaking friends; 13.5 percent met through blind dates arranged by parents; and 28 percent found their spouses by themselves.

Over half of respondents said that they could not accept the idea of a couple living together without being married, including 21.8 percent who completely opposed it and 30.3 percent who disagreed with the idea.

In terms of satisfaction with their marriages, 13.2 percent of respondents said they were very satisfied while nearly 70 percent said they were satisfied. Only 3.48 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their marriages.

Most respondents believed they were in good health—44 percent reported that they were very or mostly well while only 16 percent reported being in bad or very bad health. People claiming to have no or very rare emotional problems accounted for 71 percent of the surveyed population; only 8 percent said they were emotionally disturbed. There were differences in gender in regards to self-evaluations of health. More men than women claimed to be in good or very good health while more women than men claimed to be in mediocre or bad health.

Happiness

On the part of the survey asking for a self-appraisal of overall life quality, 63 percent of respondents said they were rather satisfied with their general situations. People were more satisfied with their family relations and social networks and less content with their economic situations, housing and work.

The respondents' sense of happiness had improved encouragingly in surveys from 2003 to 2006, the authors said. During the five years covered by the survey, the proportion of people claiming to be happy or very happy climbed substantially from 2003 to 2005 while the proportion of people claiming to be unhappy or very unhappy had dropped from 2003 to 2006.

Classified by age and gender for the happiness scale, females between 18 and 29 were most satisfied with their lives while elderly women of 60 years and older were most likely to claim to be unhappy.

In terms of respondents' political lives, only 4.6 percent of randomly selected respondents thought of themselves as above middle class. When felt unfairly treated by employers, 49.2 percent first thought of appealing to their government or higher authorities while 16.1 percent first thought of taking their grievances to court.