Abstract: Since the reform and opening-up in 1978, China has witnessed simultaneously a rapid economic growth as well as a sharp increase of income inequality as indicted in the Chinese Gini index,the most commonly used measurement of economic inequality. Consequently, Chinese people's perception of distribution equity has aroused widespread academic interest at home and abroad.However, most existing studies on the subject only focus on the fairness of outcomes, and more or less ignore the issue of the fairness of opportunity. Moreover, most studies currently use cross-sectional survey data from a single year, so they only give one-time snap shots of people's perception of distributive justice but cannot analyze anychange over time. This article uses the 2005 and 2015 China General Social Survey Data (CGSS) to study the ten-year changes in Chinese people's sense of distributive justice and reveals that how marketization explains this changing pattern in China. The study found that from 2005 to 2015, the people's sense of fairness on outcomes had improved, but the sense of opportunity fairness had declined. The results of the model analysis support the reference group theory, but they are not entirely consistent with the social structure theory. After controlling the influence of all other variables, the degree of marketization in the region seems to have significant impact the individual's sense of fairness:the more marketization, the stronger perception of outcome fairness and the weaker perception of opportunity fairness. Furthermore, the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that marketization alone can explain 26.9% and 25.5% of variation for the decade change of people's perceptions regarding outcome and opportunity inequality. Our study suggests that as marketization progresses, the opportunity inequality will be an important social issue worthy more attention.

Key words: marketization, perceptions of outcome inequality, perceptions of opportunity inequality, social change