Abstract: Previous studies have shown that post-materialistic values have an important impact on public political participation of the public in Western countries, but there is a lack of research on its role on public political participation in China. Based on Chinese data from the World Values Survey(WVS2018), this paper investigates the impact of post-materialistic values on Chinese residents' political participation from the perspective of generational differences. The selected measurement options of post-materialistic values are assigned different weights and aggregated according to the priority order of goals. Political participation is operationalized into three main types:intra-system, extra-institutional, and online political participation. The generational differences are divided into four generational cohorts:initial construction, reform and opening-up, marketization, and the new century. The study found that:firstly, the score of the current post-materialistic values of Chinese residents is generally not high, but there is a clear generational difference-significantly higher for those who grew up after the reform and opening up, as well as an increasing trend as the generations move forward. Secondly, the generational effect of political participation varies in different aspects. The generations growing up after the reform and opening-up show a generational increasing trend in the political participation outside the system and online, but it is opposite in grassroots elections. Thirdly, post-materialistic values have no significant impact on grassroots election participation but have a significant contributing effect on online political participation and extra-institutional participation which shows an increasing trend with each generation. These findings hold true after robustness testing. Therefore, the study confirms that the changes in public values brought about by social development can be used as cultural variables to explain the extra-institutional and online political participation of contemporary Chinese residents. It also suggests that more attention should be paid to the younger generation in the guidance of values and orderly political participation of citizens.

Key words: post-materialistic values, political participation, generation difference