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Beijing: China's happiest town?Posted by Eric Mu on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 5:09 PM
 The Beijing News July 20, 2009 A program aimed at measuring the happiness level of residents of six cities was launched on July 6. Poll machines that allowed people to choose buttons representing either a "happy" or "unhappy" mental state were set up at bus stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kunming, Chengdu and Xi'an. The Beijing News announced the results today: Beijing was crowned China's happiest city with 56.06% of respondents claiming to be "happy." Beijing's ten machines received a total of 820,000 votes over two weeks' time, with 460,000 "happy" votes. The cover image of today's paper shows a China map marked with purple bands of diminishing intensity, information about the solar eclipse coming up on Wednesday, July 22. Beijing is in the lightest band, representing a fairly unimpressive partial eclipse. A total eclipse will be visible to people in the the deepest purple bands, which includes Shanghai and Hangzhou, but there is a high likelihood that it will rain in many of the major cities in the area on Wednesday. The paper's top headline announces that the victims who died in the July 5 Urumqi riot will receive no less than 400,000 yuan in compensation. The latest statistics say that a total of 197 have died in the riot. 200,000 of the compensation will be footed by the government, while the rest will come from the charity donations. The decision was announced by the Autonomous Region chairman Nur Bekri at a media conference on July 18th. Links and Sources
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Comments on Beijing: China's happiest town?
I think it's dangerous to extrapolate a correlation to the entire population. Safest to say that Beijing has the happiest bus riders willing to press buttons attached to bus-stop surveys. Not as impressive, but, hey, it still counts for something.
One would expect Beijingers to be "happier" than Shanghai-nese, although that's really not saying much. I am a bit surprised, however, that the happiness index, in whatever silly, pseudo-scientific way it is measured, would be lower in Chengdu and Kunming, where people have long enjoyed a reputation of being content and reluctant to move anywhere else.
Apart from the intrinsic, perhaps deliberately designed bias in the criteria, I am wondering if recent history of the various cities play into it: after all, Chengdu is still in the shadow of the devastating earthquake last year, Kunming got repeated bus bombings that created a widespread paranoia, while Beijing got the Olympics euphoria.
So the survey didn't really say much about the cities themselves.