Does hard work alone lead to prosperity? Increasingly, Chinese citizens say no.

Li Guilan rises at dawn to travel three hours from her small, one-story farmhouse in Hebei province to sell fruit in Beijing, often not heading home until 8 p.m. For her trouble, she earns only about $14 a day, or $420 a month.

“My economic situation is no good. … I’m exhausted,” Ms. Li says, as she hustles to sell apples, cherries, and other fruit piled high in a wooden cart. “Buy another,” she urges. “It’s sweet. I picked it myself.”

As China’s Communist Party (CCP) leaders convene a highly anticipated party plenum this week to chart the country’s long-term economic policy, new national survey data shows that many Chinese, like Ms. Li, are far less optimistic than in past decades about their prospects for getting ahead.

The survey data, collected last year and published this month, reveals a growing perception that China’s economic system is unfair, and that opportunities are unequal – regardless of hard work. People’s confidence in their ability to advance economically through their own merits has also fallen.

This is a stark contrast from earlier surveys, carried out from 2004 to 2014, that found most Chinese feeling positive about economic opportunities and the rewards of hard work, says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) at Stanford University, who helped lead the survey research.

“There’s a huge rise of pessimism,” he says.

The negative turn in public sentiment on the economy is significant because it underscores a key variable dampening China’s growth: the lack of consumer confidence. As China’s economy continues to slow – hurt in part by weak consumer spending and a prolonged property market downturn – pressure is mounting on the party to alleviate the pain.

A chance to course-correct

Leading up to this week’s Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee of the CCP, Chinese economists have urged Beijing to adopt fiscal and tax reforms to increase social welfare spending and spur consumption. 

“The entire government’s … orientation needs to be changed … from investment and project-oriented policies to policies that provide basic social welfare and help people increase disposable income to boost consumption,” said Li Daokui, finance professor at the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

Dr. Li, speaking at a Tsinghua forum in early July, called on the central government to ease the debt burdens of financially-strapped Chinese provinces, and incentivize them to expand services.

Yet it’s uncertain how far the Party leadership will go in reforming the economy to bolster growth and reduce China’s high economic inequality, which is similar to that of the United States. 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has acknowledged China’s persistent inequality, promoting a slogan of “common prosperity” that could translate into improvements in the social safety net, experts say. 

But Mr. Xi’s clear priority remains an investment-heavy industrial policy aimed at making China a global leader in critical advanced technologies. Many Chinese lack the education and skills to compete for jobs in such industries. Indeed, millions of rural workers, jobless during the pandemic, have gravitated to the less secure, informal economy as delivery drivers, nannies, and food stall workers. 

“I lost my job some time ago,” says Ma Yifei, a burly, middle-aged delivery driver, taking a break while he charges the battery of his electric scooter on a noisy Beijing street. 

Since his hot pot restaurant in the city of Shijiazhuang went bankrupt during the pandemic, Mr. Ma has been bouncing from one gig to another. He sleeps in a dorm and earns about 300 yuan ($41) a day, making deliveries from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. 

“The income gap is getting greater,” he says. “It’s inevitable, you can’t change it. … But the question is: how big? There should be a standard. People at the bottom still have to make a living.”

Shifting attitudes on poverty

Sluggish growth has brought into sharper focus the inequities of China’s economic system, the new survey data suggests. Unequal opportunity was cited by respondents as the top reason people are poor. In the past, people attributed wealth or poverty to a person’s inherent abilities, effort, and education – now, they blame it on an unfair economic system, Dr. Rozelle says.

Higher-income people agree that the system is tilted in their favor, the survey shows, with many saying that their connections, rather than their talent, are a central factor in their success. People’s hopes for prosperity have also waned.

“The number of people who think they’re going to be better off five years from now has fallen significantly,” says Dr. Rozelle.

Dr. Rozelle and Martin Whyte, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard University, analyzed and guided the survey together with colleagues in China. Their findings were published by Big Data China, a collaboration between Stanford’s SCCEI and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

For Ms. Li, a mother of three whose husband farms their small plot of land in Hebei province, inequality is built into China’s economic system. Rural pensions are tiny, and on the farm, “everything we produce is really cheap,” she says. Corn, for instance, sells for about 14 cents a pound. 

So Ms. Li, now in her 60s, feels she must keep working to make ends meet. In recent years, she was employed as a maid and later as a cook at a construction site, where she made steamed buns for 50 workers each day. But “this year, there’s no work,” she says.

All around her, relatively wealthy Beijingers fill the sidewalks, sometimes stopping to buy fruit. “When city people retire they get a pension – we only get a little over 1,000 yuan ($137) a year,” she says. “We get nothing.”