According to a survey done on February 4th, China's most developed areas – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Zhejiang Province – are also the most unhappy. The 2009 real estate boom and the ever-increasing home property prices have made life in the developed cities so stressful for many residents that they can no longer enjoy their modern surroundings.

Photo: Xinhuanet.com

Manulife-Sinochem is a joint venture life insurance company that started the survey two months ago, investigating over 100,000 people and covering 35 cities in 10 provinces. According to the report entitled “White Paper on the Happiness of Chinese Middle-Class Families”, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Fujian and Chongqing are the top four areas with the most happy middle-class families. Those surveyed named health, sound management of love and relationships, stable finances, family values and social environment as the top five interrelated factors that were important for a happy household.

Results show that almost half of those surveyed are content with where their families stand at the moment. Nearly 70% of survey participants named income as a major factor contributing to the happiness or the lack thereof in their family life, with many of them pointing out that a careful management of income and expense is needed to sustain a better financial future for their families.

The survey also showed that 2009 marked an unprecedented boom for the Chinese real estate markets, and with the home property prices on the rise, many Chinese families are increasingly disturbed by the mounting economic pressure. The rise in housing costs without parallel gains in income has started a chain reaction that has shaken the core of how families operate and relate to each other. More and more couples are working overtime and spending long hours away from home to afford better jobs to pay for mortgage, and thus the stress is encroaching on their family life and their ability to feel happy. Despite living in China’s most modern cities, the economic pressures facing middle-class families residing in these regions has led to large parts of the populations being more unhappy than their counterparts in less developed regions.

 

Source: ifeng.com

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