China View: Public Opinion on Chinese Governance
The Chinese Communist Party has often been under severe scrutiny from powers from all over the world. The main reason for this has been the long-lasting divergence between the Chinese ideology and the predominant liberal and capitalist ideologies wide-spreading throughout the 20th and 21st century in the West, Chinese governance has undergone an even more severe examination under the current COVID-19 pandemic period.
“Global Views of China.” (CREDIT: PEW RESEARCH CENTER)
To the side, line graphs listing 12 different democratic countries show that, from 2002 to 2020, favorable views on China have overall dropped and the unfavorable evaluation of this country’s system has risen. In particular, a significant graph is that of Japan, which public opinion declares that in these 18 years, favorable views on China have dropped from 55% to 9%; consequently, unfavorable perspectives have risen by 46%. Most graphs follow the trend viewing favorable and unfavorable views taking opposite paths, while only Italy seems to show overall maintenance of unfavorable views between 61% and 62%, but rising favorable views going from 27% in the middle of the 2000s to 38% in 2020.
The argument that disagrees with China's approach to propaganda, corruption, human rights, and rapid development is well-known. However, often overlooked is the role of public opinion within the Chinese context. This is an underrated topic, which instead could shed the light on better understanding Chinese values and approaches to society, economy, politics, and everyday life. So what do Chinese people think of their government? And is there enough reliable data to show their perspectives?
First of all, it is important to look into the structure of the Chinese system to understand its modus operandi in governance. The single-party state is ruled by a small number of people at the center. This is to ensure and speed up government performance. For instance, this is one of the reasons responsible for China's latest economic development which occurred in an extremely rapid manner, overlooking social values and morals that may be instead important in other countries. Having one only party to decide the fate of a whole country naturally cuts down bureaucracy but also implements accountability. While China is not a democratic system, this does not mean that people do not have a say. While the central government is important, local governments may be even more essential because they take care of each province, county, and township in China. This means that while the government at the center may retain the most important decision-making powers, it is the local governments that are responsible for running the everyday life in China and addressing the problems of each locality. In this sense, the single-party system it's not as simple as the word “single” may imply, because governing more than a billion people means that the government at the local levels could be way more complex than at the highest levels. This is one of the main reasons why one must be cautious when reading about the Chinese system of governance. Often, the resources that do not go into detail about the structure of the system overlook a huge part of what China is and how China is ruled.
“The Structure of the Chinese Communist Party.” (CREDIT: Quora.net)
Source: Cunningham, E., Saich, T., Turiel, J., 2020. “Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time”, p. 3.
A study from the Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School shows the results of Chinese public opinion and the satisfaction of people towards different levels of government. The data from the table on the right provide the average satisfaction of a sample of individuals asked to evaluate government performance on a scale of 1-4: 1 indicating “very dissatisfied”; 2 “fairly dissatisfied”; 3 “fairly satisfied”; and 4 “very satisfied.” This has been done over 4 levels of government, namely “Central,” “Provincial,” “County,” and “Township.” This order gives an idea of the scale and size of these governments. The township-level would be the smallest representation of the Chinese government covering towns in rural areas or even districts in larger cities. Subsequently, the county-level government is of bigger size and may cover a specifically designated area within a province. The provincial government is instead the highest administrative-level division, which includes 34 claimed divisions by the PRC classified as 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions, and 2 special administrative regions. Even within the simplified categories on the right, therefore, there are many more subdivisions that make the whole system a lot more complex. To visualize these, a map below shows the main administrative divisions of China. Going back to the data on the table, one can easily see that overall satisfaction for the four levels of government has increased between 2003 and 2016, however, one can also see that the smaller divisions of the local government record the lowest levels of public satisfaction. Data on township-level government shows that, in 2003, dissatisfaction widespread among over 51.6% of the respondents, whereas, in 2016, 70.2% were instead satisfied with township government performance. Likewise, there is a rising positivity also reported for county-level governments, in which data on satisfaction has grown by about 21.9% in the designated period of time. The categories receiving higher scores are the provincial and central government which, in 2016, show an overall 81.7% and 93.1% of general satisfaction respectively. Whether this is because of propaganda or effective performance however remains uncertain.
“China’s Administrative Divisions.” (CREDIT: NATIONSONLINE.ORG)
Source: Cunningham, E., Saich, T., Turiel, J., 2020. “Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time”, p. 9.
While foreign sources often claim that public opinion is highly restricted in China, however, it is still true that China values rating systems to help improve any sector, from the food and beverage sector to the local government sector. While this does not necessarily mean that the argument that China should stress more on developing human rights-related legislation is incorrect, however, it is also incorrect to say that Chinese public opinion is not valued. Wherever one may go in China, anyone from the taxi driver to the person working at the bank will eventually ask to fill in surveys after delivering services. While this may be an unconventional method, it is true that if China's approach to governance really did not take into consideration people’s opinions, China would have never reached the economic success it has now. This, of course, does not leave the system without potential challenges or fallacies, in fact, another set of data from the same Harvard's Ash Centre study shows that local governments are ranked the lowest in attractive investment, creating a safety net for families experiencing hardship, unemployment insurance, creating jobs, and punishing corruption.
The final aim of providing this alternative perspective is to reflect the mainstream schools of thought that might have targeted China and its government as inadequate. A tendency scholars have when researching and analyzing developing countries is to apply Western values to countries that essentially have little to share in terms of culture, society, economy, and politics with the West. The characteristics of China englobe a deeply diversified context that needs further reflection and evaluation prior to being labeled and compared to an opposite system of governance like that of the US. Values and morals applied by the US government in the US might be great for the US public, but if one were to apply the same in China for the Chinese public, then these may be inadequate for the Chinese socio-economic system.
Below, a videoconference of US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provides a more elaborate view on the mainstream perspective, which certainly challenges the main points discussed in this article, but invites the reader to acquire further information and draw individual conclusions on the topic.
