asia program special report no 104 inside china’s ... · no. 104 august 2002 c hina’s reform...

A S I A P R O G R A M S P E C I A L R E P O R T

China’s “Credibility Gap”: PublicOpinion and Instability in China

NO. 104 AUGUST 2002

China’s reform and openness, while keep-ing the country’s engine of economicgrowth running, have created a series of

social problems, including widespread corrup-tion, regional disparity and social protests.While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)promises to deliver wealth to all people, theincreasing gap between rich and poor has shat-tered the credibility of the Party among thegeneral public.The growing numbers of unem-ployed workers and underemployed farmershave provided new sources for social instability.The Party’s recent initiative in redefining itselfas a vanguard team not just for the workingclass, but also for all the Chinese people, reflectsBeijing’s efforts to expand its base of support.However, it may also promote new political

tension between social elites and desperatelaborers in the coming years.

Is China fragmenting? Has the governmentlost the support of the populace? Is the gapbetween public opinion and government poli-cies growing? What does the public in Chinathink about domestic and foreign issues, such asthe pace of economic and political reform, offi-cial corruption, public security, social equality,urban unemployment, rural disorder, economicglobalization, and U.S.-China relations? Is pub-lic opinion supportive of the Chinese govern-ment in general? How has growing nationalismamong the public created new pressures onBeijing? What are the main channels in Chinafor the expression of public opinion?

This Special Report is a follow-up to aMarch 6 seminar on Public Opinion andInstability in China, hosted by the WoodrowWilson Center’s Asia Program.The four essays

INSIDE

MARTIN KING WHYTE

Chinese Popular Viewsabout Inequality

page 4

JIE CHEN

Popular Support for thePolitical Regime inChina: Intensity andSources

page 11

EDWARD FRIEDMAN

How to UnderstandPublic Opinion in China

page 17

YONGMING ZHOU

Information andInterpretation:Understanding ChineseNationalism within aNew Paradigm

page 22

ABSTRACT: This Special Report examines public opinion and instability in China. MartinKing Whyte of Harvard University presents his findings from a survey conducted in Beijing onpopular views about inequality. According to him, most respondents thought that currentincome gaps in China were too large, but believed that they have opportunity to move upward.Jie Chen of Old Dominion University argues that the Chinese regime still enjoys a moderate-ly high level of public support among urban Chinese. However, the overall level of supportappears to be declining in the long run, due to Beijing’s inability to combat rampant corrup-tion and minimize the income gap. Edward Friedman of the University of Wisconsin atMadison maintains that the findings of urban surveys can be misleading because of the tenden-cy of respondents to give the “correct” answer following the official story. Given social polar-ization and regional disparity, Chinese society is less stable than some surveys suggest.YongmingZhou of the University of Wisconsin at Madison points out that Chinese nationalism in the1990s is less emotionally charged or ideologically biased than that in the 1960s, but more ration-ally driven by national interests.Thus, Beijing is less likely to manipulate or control nationalism.This Special Report concludes that China’s stability hinges on how the government embracespublic opinion and addresses popular concerns.

IntroductionGang Lin

ASIA PROGRAM

Gang Lin is program associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program.

collected here explore the above-mentioned ques-tions from different perspective, employing bothquantitative and qualitative approaches.While all theessayists observe an increasing gap between the gov-ernment’s position and public opinion in China,they differ as to whether such a gap has resulted insocial instability in China.

The first essay, by Martin King Whyte ofHarvard University, reviews two different argu-ments—the “stability” scenario and the “chaos” sce-nario—that have been advanced in regard to futuresocial tensions and political stability in China. AsWhyte notes, most versions of the “stability” sce-nario emphasize the extraordinary improvements inthe lives of the Chinese citizens since China’sreform, while those who espouse various versions ofthe “chaos” scenario stress the wrenching and desta-bilizing consequences of the shift from centrallyplanned socialism to a market society.Whyte pres-ents his preliminary findings from a survey projectconducted in Beijing on Chinese popular viewsabout inequality. According to him, most Beijingresidents interviewed thought that current incomegaps in China were too large, and that “system fail-ure” was somewhat responsible for the poverty ofmany families. However, most respondents agreedthat their lives were improving and there was stillthe opportunity for upward mobility under the cur-rent regime.

Whyte admits that his discussion of Chinese pub-lic opinion on inequality may be questionedbecause public opinion in Beijing is not necessarilyrepresentative of other parts of China. Until a larger

survey study in widely contrasting locales in Chinais conducted, however, the Beijing survey data pro-vides more support for the stability than for thechaos scenario,Whyte maintains.

The second essay, by Woodrow WilsonCenter/George Washington University Asian PolicyStudies fellow Jie Chen from Old DominionUniversity, discusses the results of three public sur-veys he conducted in Beijing over the past severalyears. Chen argues that the current Chinese regimestill enjoys a moderately high level of public supportamong urban Chinese, but the overall level of sup-port appears to be declining in the long run.According to Chen, people who highly evaluate thegovernment’s policy performance, have strongnationalist sentiment, or prefer stability tend to bemore supportive of the current regime, while thosewho believe in democratic values and support polit-ical reform tend to be less supportive of the regime.

Like Whyte, Chen admits that the Beijing surveysused in his analysis are not necessarily representativeof all China, but he believes his findings are heuris-tic for understanding the legitimacy of the Chineseregime.The success of the regime comes from thegovernment’s relentless propaganda to portray itselfas the only guarantor for sociopolitical stability andthe defender of national interests. But the failure ofthe regime is its alienation from those who believein democracy and support political reform, and itsinability to combat rampant corruption and mini-mize the gap between rich and poor. Chen believesthat the incoming post-Jiang leadership will inheritboth success and failure of its predecessor instrengthening regime legitimacy, which hinges onwhether the new leadership can take more substan-tive measures to push political reform and addressserious social issues.

In the third essay, Edward Friedman of theUniversity of Wisconsin at Madison provides ananalytic reinterpretation of public opinion in China,in contrast to the urban surveys conducted byWhyte and Chen. According to Friedman, peoplesurveyed in China tend to live on official and unof-ficial levels. Should a question touch on politicallysensitive issues, the respondent’s tendency is to givethe “correct” answer, following the official story. Atthe unofficial level, people express a less censoredview of the world, revealing other political world-views than those scripted in the official discourse.

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ASIA PROGRAM SPECIAL REPORT

THE ASIA PROGRAM

The Wilson Center’s Asia Program is dedicated to the proposi-tion that only those with a sound scholarly grounding can beginto understand contemporary events. One of the Center’s oldestregional programs, the Asia Program seeks to bring historicaland cultural sensitivity to the discussion of Asia in the nation’scapital. In seminars, workshops, briefings, and conferences,prominent scholars of Asia interact with one another and withpolicy practitioners to further understanding of the peoples, tra-ditions, and behaviors of the world’s most populous continent.

Asia Program Staff:

Robert M. Hathaway, DirectorGang Lin, Program AssociateAmy McCreedy, Program AssociateWilson Lee, Program AssistantTimothy R. Hildebrandt, Program Assistant

The results of public opinion surveys in China,therefore, can be misleading.

Studies of public opinion in China should firstask how different groups comprehend China’s poli-cy possibilities in different ways. Friedman listsChina’s four different regions—a patriotic regioncentering on Beijing, a south and east coastal region,a central region, and a vast west region—with greatdisparity in terms of public opinion. In particular, hepoints out that Beijing residents are far more likelyto consider the official story as their genuine opin-ion. Observing how social polarization is vividlycaptured in popular doggerel verse, Friedman con-cludes that Chinese society is less stable than someof the public opinion surveys suggest.

The fourth essay by Woodrow Wilson Center fel-low Yongming Zhou from the University ofWisconsin at Madison explores an emerging para-digm of Chinese nationalist discourse based on atrinity of concepts: comprehensive national power,national interest, and the “rules of the game.”Theconcept of comprehensive national power providesChinese with a much-sought boost to express theirpride in China. The concept of national interestlegitimizes the new paradigm by giving it the basisof rational thinking.The concept of the rules of thegame aims at promoting Chinese interests by joininginternational “games” (such as the WTO) and mod-ifying the existing rules to China’s advantage.

According to Zhou, a general weakness of recentdiscussion of Chinese nationalism is that too muchattention has been given to the nationalism per se,thus missing the broader picture.The fundamentaldifference between Chinese nationalists of the 1960sand those of the 1990s, as Zhou argues, is that thelatter are well informed, and thus less receptive toofficial manipulation. It is therefore not the lack ofaccess to, but rather the interpretation of the avail-able information that is crucial. Compared with pre-vious paradigms—social Darwinism and proletarianinternationalism—employed by Chinese national-ists, this interest-driven-game-playing paradigm isless emotionally charged, less ideologically biased,and more rationally driven, Zhou concludes.

These four essays focus on economic inequality,regional disparity, rampant corruption and risingnationalism as engines of growing discontent withinthe Chinese populace.While the four essayists varyas to the degree of social instability in China, theyagree that the future survival of the current authori-tarian regime is contingent upon how the govern-ment embraces public opinion and undertakes thenecessary reforms to address the people’s concerns.Thus, public opinion, as well as Beijing’s response toit, can serve as a gauge of political stability in China,a country amid unprecedented leadership transitionand social transformation.

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CHINA’S “CREDIBILITY GAP”: PUBLIC OPINION AND INSTABILITY IN CHINA

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Speculating about future social tensions andpolitical stability in China has become a cot-tage industry of late, particularly in

Washington, D.C.When you look at the products ofthis industry, the first thing that strikes you is howwildly diverse are the predictions that are made. Onthe one hand you have a number of analyses thatstress the sources of stability and support for the sta-tus quo, on the other hand you have a variety ofaccounts suggesting that China is a “social volcano”that could explode any minute. Given this lack ofconsensus, one is naturally reminded of the fable ofthe blind men groping at various extremities of anelephant. Is there any way that we can go beyondwildly varying speculations in order to reach moreinformed estimates of China’s potential for stabilityversus chaos?1

In this essay I want to do several things. First, Iwill briefly review some of the arguments that havebeen advanced in favor of either the “stability” orthe “chaos” scenario in these debates. In doing so Iwill particularly focus on inequality trends and theirimplications for popular feelings about social justiceor injustice, since inequality issues are at the heart ofmost discussions of social tensions in China today.Then I will present some preliminary and intriguingsurvey results from a research project that I havelaunched with both U.S. and Chinese collaborators.Our project is designed to shed more light on howordinary Chinese view the changes in the structureof rewards and opportunities within which theyoperate. Perhaps the evidence we are seeking canhelp make analyses of China’s future less speculative.

STABILITY?

Most versions of the “stability” scenario emphasizethe extraordinary improvements that have occurredin the lives of Chinese citizens since China’s reformswere launched in 1978.While recognizing that thepace of such improvements was more rapid in the1980s than recently, the continuing ability ofChina’s leaders to keep the engine of economic

growth going is seen as creating a powerful sourcefor social stability. In essence this analysis contendsthat Deng Xiaoping’s original calculation in reject-ing Mao’s version of spartan socialism and replacingit with the competitive and acquisitive ethos of mar-ket capitalism was correct and continues to pay offtoday.The “carrot” of potential economic gains andnew opportunities, when combined with the “stick”of state coercion against any who threaten social sta-bility, produce an inclination for most Chinese towork hard and keep their nose to the grindstone.Consequently, most take little interest in politics andtry to stay out of trouble.The predominant feelingsare some combination of gratitude, acceptance, andapathy, rather than discontent and outrage.

Awareness of rampant corruption and the role ofconnections in becoming rich do generate popularanger. However, the continued generation of newopportunities for economic gain by ordinary peo-ple, the acquisition of new consumer goods, andimproving lifestyles convince many Chinese that the

Martin King Whyte is professor of sociology, Harvard University.

Chinese Popular Views about InequalityMARTIN KING WHYTE

benefits of China’s evolving reforms are not beingmonopolized by the powerful and wealthy. Rather,much of China’s new prosperity is seen as “tricklingdown” to the common people, who can take advan-tage and prosper despite the existence of bureaucrat-ic corruption and the unfair advantages of the well-connected. Many of those whose lives haveimproved in recent years feel that China today is amore equitable society than in the Mao era, despiteprevalent corruption and injustice. Individuals andfamilies can try to improve their lot through theirown efforts, rather than being locked into thebureaucratic dependency of the Mao era. Thosewho work harder or contribute more are likely tobe rewarded, rather than receiving just the same astheir more slothful neighbors and colleagues.

Even those groups that have been “losers” in thereform game have their potential for anger andprotest blunted by a number of features of the cur-rent scene. For example, laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have clear reasons to feelthat they are being treated shabbily after years oreven decades of loyal service. However, to date theproblems of SOE workers have been manifested inmany local and mostly brief protests, but no seriouschallenge to state authority. The reasons that themillions of unemployed and laid-off workers havenot produced more turbulence can be debated.Among the factors at work, in addition to the threatof state coercion, may be some combination of newemployment possibilities; fear of losing retainedlivelihood supplement, housing, and other benefits;the government’s concessions and at least partialpayments in response to some protests; and perhapseven some grudging acceptance of the claim thatmany SOEs are overstaffed and inefficient.Workersmay blame their firm’s managers for their poor fate,rather than themselves or bad luck. But they do notseem all that likely to blame the system or its topleadership.

Seen in these terms, Deng Xiaoping’s dramaticalteration of the social contract between the stateand its citizens may contribute to political stabilityby defusing an important but often overlooked vul-nerability of centrally-planned socialist societies.State socialism is so structured that the Party elitemonopolizes all power and decision-making. By sodoing they are able to claim credit for any improve-ments that occur in the lives of citizens, thus poten-

tially reinforcing Party prestige and legitimacy.However, by that same token when people’s livestake a turn for the worse, there is a natural tendencyto hold the system and the Party elite ultimatelyresponsible. In a well-developed market society, incontrast, the connection between individual eco-nomic fates and decisions at the top of society isconsiderably more indirect and obscure. People whoare not doing as well as they think they should bemay blame themselves, bad luck, or perhaps individ-ual employers or local officials. However, they areless likely than in a centrally planned economy toblame the system as a whole. China is still engagedin the transition to a market society, but the situationregarding disgruntled groups such as laid-off stateworkers might suggest that some of this tendencythat markets diffuse and thus defuse blame mayalready be at work.

Another way to frame the “stability” scenario isto say that after an interlude of experience in thevery peculiar social order that Mao Zedong presidedover, China has once again become a “normal” ifcontentious society. Normal means not only a soci-ety more similar to market societies around theworld, but more like China itself in the decadesprior to 1949. It is a society with very substantialinequalities of power, wealth, and other resources,and in all such societies, individuals and groups donot have equal opportunities to get ahead. However,the stability scenario stresses that it is also a fairlyopen and dynamically growing society in whichthere are lots of opportunities for ordinary individu-als to succeed and enrich themselves and their fami-lies, despite the unevenness of the “playing field.”These opportunities and the optimism they createcan help to make the status quo acceptable to manyChinese.

CHAOS?

Those who espouse various versions of the “chaos”scenario, on the other hand, stress the wrenchingand destabilizing consequences of the shift fromcentrally planned socialism to a market society.The“rules of the game” by which Chinese citizensplanned their lives for so many years have beenundermined, producing an altered set of winnersand losers. Many of the social evils that socialism wasdesigned to eliminate—foreign ownership, land-

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lordism, unemployment, criminal syndicates, prosti-tution, and so forth—are abundantly in evidenceonce again. Inequalities in income and wealth areseen as growing rapidly, and as not justified bynational needs or meritocratic efficiency. Many ofthe benefits of the reforms are seen as monopolizedby the rich and powerful, whose gains are due tocorruption and connections, rather than to entre-preneurship, hard work, or contributions to socialwelfare. Gratitude for past improvements in generalliving standards has faded as the struggle to meetfamily needs has become more difficult and unpre-dictable.The specter of loss of employment, healthinsurance coverage, and other basics of life that hasresulted from the state-led assault on the “iron ricebowl” security of the socialist era fosters nostalgiafor the days when Mao Zedong was in charge of thenation’s fate.

In this context many Chinese feel that their lead-ers and the Party have turned away from their tradi-tional worker and peasant allies and are mostly con-cerned these days with the needs and concerns ofentrepreneurs, foreign businessmen, and othergroups that already enjoy advantages.The emphasison economic growth when combined with market-oriented decentralization has placed heightenedpower and autonomy in the hands of local elites andgatekeepers—local officials, managers, and entrepre-neurs.These key actors are not only given free rein,but are also strongly pressured, to adopt whatevermeasures they deem necessary to squeeze moreprofits out of their economic undertakings. Theresult is that the needs and past contributions ofordinary employees are increasingly ignored, whilethe potential for local elites to abuse their power andenrich themselves has increased immeasurably.

The collapse of the socialist project and of faithin Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought, inthe context of market competition and the emer-gence of capitalist or quasi-capitalist institutions, isseen as producing an amoral, man-eat-man strugglein which leaders at all levels are increasingly venaland self-serving.The rules of the game in China’sincreasingly marketized society are stacked in favorof the powerful and wealthy, while ordinary peoplehave few resources with which to challenge orchange the situation. Official coercion is the mainforce supporting the status quo, since it remains diffi-cult for any discontented voices to be heard, and

particularly to find organizational form.The appar-ent stability and disinterest in politics stressed in thestability scenario are seen as illusory by the rival,chaos camp. Anger and alienation from the systemand its leaders are seen as increasingly widespread,but hidden beneath the surface maintained by offi-cial coercion. If the coercive diligence of the stateshould be weakened, as happened in 1989, thenChina may be headed for a social explosion and avery uncertain political future.

It is obvious that these competing scenarios seethe contrast between the Mao and the present erasin quite different terms. In the stability scenario,Maoist socialism was the “bad old days,” and what-ever the defects of the distributional system today,China at least is a better society offering much morerewards and opportunities to most of its citizens. Inthe chaos scenario, in contrast, the Mao era, whatev-er its defects, offered considerable security and pre-dictability, with an accepted ideology that made itseem fair to most—enough so to qualify as the“good old days.”The current scene, in contrast, isseen as much more insecure and unjust, with thenation and its fate increasingly at the mercy of therich and powerful.

Put in these terms, it is clear that the tradeoffsinvolved are ones debated for decades if not cen-turies, and in many places besides China.Which is amore just society—one that locks its citizens intosecure niches determined by a purportedly benevo-lent state, or one that allows citizens to competewith one another for a variety of rewards andopportunities not under direct state control, but alsoallows them to fail and fall into destitution? In thiscontext we can raise a number of concrete questionsabout the current views and preferences of ordinarypeople in China.What sort of society do they thinkis most desirable and fair, and how much do theythink that China at present departs from those pref-erences and standards? Do they think that China hastoo much inequality these days, or that suchinequality is necessary for China’s development? Towhat extent are they nostalgic for the security of theMao era, or do they prefer the competitive but inse-cure environment they face today? To what degreedo Chinese citizens feel that the benefits of thereforms have been monopolized by the rich andpowerful, or do they feel that they are being widelyshared? Do they think the government should be

doing more to limit inequalities and redistributefrom the rich to the poor, or that those who haveprospered deserve their advantages? If we cananswer questions such as these we may be able tomake our analyses of China’s social tensions lessspeculative.

THE CHINESE PERCEPTIONS OF INEQUALITY

In the remainder of this brief essay I want to presentsome preliminary results of a survey project inChina that I have been directing for the last threeyears.Working with a number of colleagues both inthe United States and in China, we hope to carryout surveys of representative samples of urban resi-dents, urban migrants from rural areas, and peasantsin eight locations in different regions of China. Ourplanned surveys will focus on the kinds of issuesabout popular perceptions of inequality and socialjustice values that I have been discussing. In order totest the waters and see if this kind of survey work isfeasible in China currently, my colleagues and I car-ried out a pilot survey in Beijing at the end of 2000which contained a module of questions focusing onthese issues.2 We successfully completed interviewswith a probability sample of 757 registered residentsof Beijing.3

We are still in the early stages of analyzing datafrom the Beijing survey. Here I will present a smallsampling of some of our results from this survey andthen try to draw some possible implications for con-sidering whether China will continue to experiencerough stability or may be headed for chaos. OurBeijing questionnaire contained questions designedto tap a variety of sentiments, including perceptionsof the current system of rewards and distribution inChina, level of optimism regarding personal chancesto get ahead, and views about what system of distri-bution is most fair.

To start this discussion I want to draw attentionto patterns of responses in our Beijing survey thatmight be interpreted as lending support to the chaosscenario. For example, 95% of Beijing residentsinterviewed thought that current income gaps inChina were too large, and the same percentageagreed with statements that it was the responsibilityof the government to provide jobs to everyonewanting to work and that the government shouldguarantee a minimum standard of living for every-

one. On related themes, 85% of Beijing residents feltthat “system failure” was at least somewhat responsi-ble for families living in poverty, while 91% said thathaving connections had at least some influence ondetermining who became rich.About two thirds ofour Beijing sample disagreed with a statement that itwas fair for people with power to enjoy specialtreatment and privileges, while 60% disagreed witha statement that it was fair to lay off large numbersof workers in order to reform state enterprises.More respondents agreed than disagreed with twoother statements: that “in the current situation it ishard to know what is just or unjust anymore”(44%versus 38%) and that “officials do not care whatordinary people like me think”(45% versus 34%).There were responses to other questions we askedthat seem to fit the same pattern, suggesting a per-ception that the current system of distribution inChina is too unequal and unfair, and that the patternof winners and losers is unjust rather than equitable.

However, there were responses to other questionsin the Beijing survey that yielded a quite differentpicture. About 69% of Beijing respondents said thattheir families were doing better economically thanthey were five years earlier; almost the same propor-tion (68%) expected to be doing better economical-ly five years after our survey; and only a minority ofrespondents (24%) took exception to a statementthat in China as a whole, ordinary people have agood chance to improve their standards of living. Inresponse to questions about the background factorsthat are important for career success, education andhard work were ranked as significantly more impor-tant than having connections to high officials orpersonal guanxi networks. In questions related tosupport for market distribution, 64% of Beijingrespondents agreed with a statement that the freemarket is vital to China’s economic development;58% agreed with a statement that society as a wholebenefits if each individual pursues his own immedi-ate interests; and 74% agreed that mental labor ismore valuable than manual labor. In a similar vein,only 17% of our respondents thought that the fairestsystem of distribution would be to give everyone anequal share; 68% agreed that it was fair to alloweveryone to keep what they had earned even if thisfostered inequality; and by large margins they agreedthat it was fair for rich people to obtain better edu-cation for their children (82%) and obtain better

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housing than ordinary people (74%). It is also worthnoting that while the great majority of respondentssaid that the income gaps in China were too large,by a small margin more thought that the incomegaps in their own work unit were about right or toosmall (51%) than thought they were too large (49%).Responses to these and other questions we asked donot seem to indicate much overall condemnation ofthe current distributive system. Rather, they lendsupport instead to the stability scenario, with sub-stantial acceptance and optimism despite the evidentlack of equal opportunity.

How can we reconcile these apparently contra-dictory findings? Our questions were based substan-tially, although not entirely, on surveys dealing withinequality and social justice issues that had been car-ried out in other countries during the precedingdecade. Many of our specific questions were replica-tions of questions employed in the InternationalSocial Justice Project or in surveys of theInternational Social Survey Program, which sur-veyed countries in Eastern and Western Europe, theUnited States, Japan, and a number of other coun-tries. For some enlightenment about how to inter-pret our Beijing survey results, we can turn to thefindings of this broader literature.4

The findings of this general “social justice” litera-ture are complex, with substantial variation acrosscountries and some changes over time. However, inmost of the other countries surveyed, the majorityof respondents support neither a pure market nor aradical egalitarian system of distribution. Insteadthere tends to be most support for a sort of welfaremarket society, in which the government acts toprovide certain basic guarantees of jobs and liveli-hoods and to promote equality of opportunity, butwhich allows individual and family competition,with the winners entitled to enjoy and pass on theirrewards. In other words, Beijing residents are notunusual in voicing support for a combination ofredistributive/egalitarian and market/meritocraticprinciples of distribution.

Saying that our Beijing results are in the samegeneral ballpark as those from many other countriesis not very satisfying, however, in terms of our effortto judge the level of satisfaction or dissatisfactionwith the current set of disparities and opportunities.Let me conclude by presenting a few results basedupon a more precise comparison—of our Beijing

results with those obtained from a probability sam-ple survey conducted in 2001 in Warsaw, Poland.5

The Warsaw survey incorporated many of the samequestions that we had asked in Beijing, and we arejust beginning to compare the results. Both are cap-ital cities of societies that have embarked on thetransition away from centrally planned socialism.However, it is obvious that the two societies andtheir capitals differ in many important ways. Forexample, Poland has made a political transition todemocracy while China has not; China has general-ly been more successful in sustaining high econom-ic growth (although Poland has recovered muchbetter from the shock of transition than most otherEast European states), and inequalities have widenedmore in China than in Poland. Putting such differ-ences aside for the moment, what can we learnabout the pattern of attitudes toward inequalityissues in Warsaw and Beijing?

I will try to give some sense of the pattern ofresponses in these two capital cities by analyzingresponses to a few of the questions asked in bothplaces. When asked how they would judge theincome differences in their societies, large majoritiesof both Warsaw and Beijing residents judged the dif-ferences were too large, with this sentiment strongeramong those in the Chinese capital (94% versus87%). On the other hand, substantial majorities inboth cities said that the free market was vital to theirsociety’s development, with stronger support for thisstatement in Warsaw than in Beijing (75% versus64%). Poles seemed in general more pessimisticabout their country’s economic prospects. Forexample, many more Warsaw than Beijing residents(78% versus 38%) expected the proportion of poorpeople in the country to increase over the next fiveyears. Poles and Chinese surveyed had similar viewson the great importance of factors such as ability,effort, and education in avoiding poverty. For exam-ple, about half of the respondents in both citiesthought that lack of effort was a great or very greatinfluence on whether an individual was poor or not.However, many more Poles than Chinese blamedthe system itself for the plight of the poor. Forexample, 74% of Warsaw residents saw system failureas a very great or great influence on whether peoplewere in poverty, whereas that was the case for only34% of the Beijing residents. Similarly,Warsaw resi-dents saw personal connections and contacts with

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the powerful as even more important than didBeijing residents in explaining why some peoplebecame rich, and they were also much more likelyto stress dishonesty as the explanation for currentwealth.6

Beijing residents were more optimistic than theirWarsaw counterparts not only about the prospectsfor the country, but also about their own prospects,while also being somewhat more approving ofallowing “winners” to enjoy their gains. Specifically,Beijing residents were somewhat more in favor thantheir Warsaw counterparts of allowing the wealthyto enjoy and pass on their advantages in realms suchas schooling for their children, medical care, andhousing.7 Many fewer Warsaw than Beijing residentsexpected to be doing better in five years than theywere at that time (28% versus 68%), and many moreBeijingers than Warsaw residents agreed with thestatement that in the current situation people likethe respondent had good chances to improve theirstandard of living (45% versus 14%). Finally, manymore Warsaw than Beijing residents agreed with thestatement that public officials did not care whatpeople like the respondent thought (78% versus45%).

Although these are only a few of the compar-isons possible, in general they suggest a pattern.While Beijing residents have critical views aboutmany aspects of the current structure of inequality,in general they seem markedly less critical, and moreoptimistic, than their counterparts in Warsaw. If any-thing they have more faith than Warsaw residentsthat education and hard work will be rewarded, andthey are somewhat less likely to see the deck asstacked in favor of the rich and powerful. In otherwords, once we put the Beijing data in a compara-tive framework, it is not clear that they displayunusually high levels of dissatisfaction with the statusquo or anger at the injustices of the current systemof distribution. On balance, these Beijing surveydata seem to provide more support for the stabilitythan for the chaos scenario.

Of course, the utility of this kind of data, and ofthe Beijing-Warsaw comparison in particular, mightbe questioned on a number of grounds. For the pur-poses of the present discussion, perhaps the mostimportant objection is that I only have Chinese datafrom Beijing. It might be argued that Beijing is avery peculiar and special place, with living condi-

tions and opportunities there much better than inmany other parts of the country. As noted earlier, Iam trying to obtain funding for a larger survey studythat would ask the same and similar kinds of ques-tions in widely contrasting locales in China, in orderto find out whether the Beijing results are typical ormisleading. For the moment, however, it seems tome that the survey results I have presented, limitedas they are to one special place, suggest that thegrand strategy of China’s reform-era leaders contin-ues to work.These leaders are betting that by keep-ing the economy growing and new opportunitiesmultiplying, they can prevent their citizens frombecoming too angry at the wrenching changes inthe rules of the distributive game and the glaringinequities that are part of the status quo. To theextent that they can do this they hope they canavoid serious challenges to their continued rule. Ifthe Beijing data are at all relevant to the situation inthe rest of the country, they suggest that this strategyis still providing dividends by reinforcing the statusquo.

ENDNOTES

1. In a recent publication I summarized some of theissues raised in these debates. See my chapter“Chinese Social Trends: Stability or Chaos?” inDavid Shambaugh, ed., Is China Unstable? (Armonk,New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

2. My primary U.S. collaborators are Wang Feng(University of California at Irvine), Jieming Chen(Texas A&M University at Kingsville), and AlbertPark (University of Michigan), with assistance andsupport from David Featherman, the director of theInstitute for Social Research at the University ofMichigan.We are working particularly with ShenMingming, professor of political science and direc-tor of the Research Center on ContemporaryChina at Beijing University. Since 1995 ProfessorShen has been carrying out an annual Beijing AreaStudy, and our module of inequality questions wasincluded in the 2000 version of that survey enter-prise.

3. We also conducted a “pilot within a pilot” byinterviewing 128 rural migrants who resided in five

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of the fifty neighborhoods included in the 2000Beijing survey. However, migrant responses to ourquestions will not be discussed here.

4. See, in particular, James R. Kluegel, et. al, eds.,Social Justice and Political Change (New York: Aldinede Gruyter, 1995); David S. Mason and James R.Kluegel, eds., Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinionabout Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

5.The Warsaw study was a survey of 1003 represen-tative adult residents of that city conducted by

Bogdan Cichomski and other scholars at theInstitute for Social Studies at Warsaw University.

6. Specifically, 61% of Warsaw residents said thatconnections had a “very great” influence on whobecame rich, while 44% said that dishonesty had avery great influence. The comparable figures forBeijing residents were only 21% and 5%.

7. For example, 82% of Beijing residents said itwas fair for those who could afford it to obtain bet-ter education for their children, while only 55% ofWarsaw residents voiced this view.

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Popular support for a political regime,especial-ly support from sizable segments of a society,is critical for the functioning and mainte-

nance of any form of government. In democratic sys-tems, it is quite obvious that the level of popular sup-port significantly influences both the functioning andthe stability of governments (especially in crises), sincedemocratic governments can exist and operate onlywith the consent of the people. In non-democraticsystems, such as China and the former Soviet Union,while order is usually maintained by coercion and/ormonolithic ideologies, prolonged absence of politicalsupport may also eventually bring about politicalinstabilities and even “revolutionary alteration of thepolitical and social system.”1 Such political instabilitiesand revolutions, for example, had been already wit-nessed in the former Soviet Union and EasternEuropean countries in the late 1980s and the early1990s. In general, therefore,“societies with legitimateauthority systems (i.e., ones enjoying popular support)are more likely to survive than those without.”2

Thus, I assume that whether or not the currentChinese authoritarian government can maintainsociopolitical stability depends, in large part, uponthe level of popular support for the political regime,especially after the original official ideology—Maoism—was much shattered in the reform era.How much support does the current Chinese polit-ical regime enjoy from Chinese citizens? And whydo or do not Chinese citizens support the politicalregime? In this analysis, I attempt to answer thesetwo fundamental questions, based on data collectedfrom three longitudinal surveys conducted inBeijing from 1995 to 1999.

HOW MUCH SUPPORT DOES THE CURRENT

REGIME ENJOY?

A. Measurement of popular support for thepolitical regimePopular support for a political regime, or “regimelegitimacy,” is defined as the “diffuse or generalized

attachments” members of a polity have for the gov-ernment and political system in general. Unlike thepublic’s evaluation of specific government policies,which is formed in a relatively short period of timeand is subject to spontaneous responses to specificpolicies, support for a political regime represents anentrenched emotional attachment, taking years toform. Once shaped, such a generalized emotionalattachment establishes a firm foundation for the sta-bility and viability of a given political regime.

Drawing upon theoretical arguments and empir-ical findings from previous studies, I measured pop-ular support for the political regime in China with-in our respondents by asking them to assess six state-ments, as follows:

1. I am proud to live under the current (socialist)political system;

2. I have an obligation to support the currentpolitical system;

3. I respect political institutions in China today;

Jie Chen is associate professor of political science, Old Dominion University, and Woodrow Wilson Center/GeorgeWashington University Asian Policy Studies fellow.

Popular Support for the Political Regimein China: Intensity and Sources

JIE CHEN

4. I feel that the basic rights of citizens are pro-tected;

5. I believe that the courts in China guarantee fairtrials;

6. I feel that my personal values are the same asthose advocated by the government.

Specifically, items 1 and 6 were designed todetect the popular affection for the values/norms ofthe regime. Items 2 and 3 were intended to tap intoaffection derived from a respondent’s generalizedfeeling about political institutions and the currentpolitical system as whole. Items 4 and 5 related to aperson’s evaluations of political authorities in termsof whether the authorities had functioned andwielded their power in accordance with that per-son’s sense of fairness and basic interests.These itemswere all pre-tested for their validity in Beijingbefore the first actual survey. In each survey, respon-dents were asked to rate each of the six items on a 4-point scale where “1” indicates respondents’ strongdisagreement with a statement, and “4” indicatestheir strong agreement with the statement.These sixitems were then combined to form an additiveindex to capture a collective profile of a respondent’sevaluation of regime legitimacy. This index wasused in the multivariate analysis that follows.

B.The intensity of popular support for thepolitical regimeBefore 1989 most Western China observers werequite optimistic about the prospects of the post-Mao reform and popular political support in thePeople’s Republic of China (PRC). After theTiananmen crackdown, however, most China schol-ars believed that the Chinese political regime led bythe Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had eversince lost its popular support and legitimacy, andhence had become nonviable. One China scholarhas summarized such a predominant, pessimisticmood among most China scholars about theprospects of the Chinese political regime, as follows:

Prior to the late 1980s, scholars documentedtrends and changes, but did not question thecontinued existence of the communistregime.The events of 1989 in China and else-where shattered this assumption and analystsembraced the task of diagnosing the conditionof what most came to view as moribund sys-

tem. This sea change raised questions aboutthe fate of the country’s communist politicalelite and institutions . . . Although scholarscontinue to disagree about the probable life-span of the current regime, the disagreementnow is usually about when, not whether, fun-damental political change will occur and whatit will look like.3

Along this line of thinking, some China scholarshave also identified at least two major areas in whichthe regime has lost its support from the population.First, and foremost, some of them point out that theregime has lost its ideological appeals to the popula-tion, especially the intellectuals and the youngergeneration. For example, these analysts often cite theso-called “crisis of faith” as evidence to illustratehow much moral support the regime has lost.Secondly, some China analysts argue that the regimehas lost its moral appeals to the population. Due torampant official corruption and misconduct in thepost-Mao era, they argue, ordinary people in Chinahave become more and more skeptical of basicmoral standards and motivations of the Party andgovernment leaders, and hence doubtful about theirrights to lead.

But our findings from the three surveys conduct-ed in Beijing between 1995 and 1999 by and largecontradict those predominant views mentionedabove. Specifically, two important findings emergefrom these surveys.The first important finding wasthat a clear majority of our respondents apparentlysupported the current political regime. Mostrespondents in all three surveys either agreed orstrongly agreed with each of the six statements listedabove, which were designed to collectively measuresupport for the political regime.This finding seemsto be consistent with the findings from other twoempirical studies of Chinese public opinion: onewas based on a nation-wide survey conducted in1994,4 and the other was based on a six-city surveycarried out in 1999.5 Similar to ours, those twostudies also found that a majority of the Chinese cit-izens were still supportive of the current politicalregime. The second important finding from ourthree surveys was that, although a majority of ourrespondents still remained supportive of the politicalregime from 1995 to 1999, the level of their supporthad gradually declined during that time period.

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In short, the two findings described above indi-cate that the absolute level of regime legitimacyamong the respondents remained moderately high;but such support gradually declined during the sec-ond half of the 1990s. I suspect that this downwardtrend has continued since 1999 when our last surveywas conducted.

WHY DO OR DO NOT CHINESE CITIZENS

SUPPORT THE POLITICAL REGIME?

Now let me turn to the second question raised inthe beginning of this essay: “Why do or do notChinese citizens support the current politicalregime?”To answer this question, in this analysis Ifocus on five attitudinal orientations of our respon-dents, which I believe, among other factors, are veryimportant subjective sources for regime legitimacyin contemporary China.These attitudinal orienta-tions include respondents’ (A) evaluation of the gov-ernment’s policy performance, (B) nationalist senti-ment, (C) preference for stability, (D) democraticvalues, and (E) belief in the need for reform of thecurrent political system. I will first explain thehypothesized relationship between each of the atti-tudinal orientations and regime legitimacy, and thentest each relationship against the data from the threeBeijing surveys.

A. Evaluation of the government’s policy performanceMany China scholars have linked the government’spolicy performance with the level of regime legiti-macy. They argue that in addition to the govern-ment-promoted ideology, public assessment of gov-ernment policies in such areas as socioeconomicequality, job security, and basic economic conditionshas played an important role in strengthening oreroding the communist regime’s legitimacy. As oneprominent China scholar has argued, popular per-ception of the negative socioeconomic conse-quences of government policies was significantly“eroding the legitimacy of the regime.”6 Therefore, Ihypothesize that those who give the government’spolicy performance low evaluations are more likelyto register low levels of support for the politicalregime.

To measure our respondents’ evaluations of thegovernment’s policy performance, we asked our

respondents to assess government policies in dealingwith nine major socioeconomic issues: inflation, jobsecurity, official corruption, the gap between therich and the poor, housing, order in society, medicalcare, welfare to the needy, and environmental pollu-tion. It is worth noting that, of these nine issues, ourrespondents gave the lowest scores for governmentpolicies in dealing with official corruption and thegap between the rich and the poor.These results areconsistent with some observations at the macro levelthat the Chinese people have constantly complainedabout inequality since the onset of the post-Maoreform, as “income distribution has undergone aqualitative transformation from being one of themost equal among the developing Asian countries tobeing one of more unequal;”7and that people havebeen very much dissatisfied with the incumbentleadership, as official corruption has just becomemore and more rampant during the reform era.

B. Nationalist sentimentBeliefs in and expectations of a greater role Chinashould play in regional and world affairs are “part ofa generic Chinese nationalism rooted in a sense ofChinese national identity that developed historicallyover a very long period, and that acquired its currentcharacteristics in the course of the past century anda half.”8 In today’s China, this kind of nationalistsentiment has been growing within the population.Such a strong sentiment was evident in our Beijingsurveys: over 80% of the respondents believed thatChina should play a more important role in Asia andthe world, and should be a stronger world power inthe next century.

More importantly, nationalism in today’s Chinanot only explicitly stresses loyalty and obligation tothe national government, but accords with the val-ues and norms promoted by the government. Sincethe early 1990s, the national government has mademore efforts in its education campaign to promotewhat some China scholars call the “state-led”nationalism. In this kind of campaign, the govern-ment not only equates the “nation” (guo) to “state”(zhenfu), but emphasizes the government-defined“Chinese characteristics” that encompass such corenorms of the regime as the imperativeness of theone-party rule, the absolute priority ofstability/order over individual freedom, and thenecessity of “gradual” (if any at all) democratization

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in China.As a result, many Chinese, including intel-lectuals and college students, have “accepted thethemes of the patriotic education campaign.”9 Oneevidence of the acceptance of such governmentnorms, at least among intellectuals, is the emergenceor revival of conservative schools of thought such as“neo-authoritarianism” (xin quanwei zhuyi) and“neo-conservatism,” which advocate principles verysimilar to those by the government, such as a strong,centralized state and political stability (instead ofdemocratization) as prerequisites for a strongerChina.Therefore, I expect that, in the three Beijingsurveys, those who have strong nationalist sentimenttend to be more supportive of the current politicalregime.

C. Preference for stabilityIn today’s China, most people have strong prefer-ence for sociopolitical stability. For instance, in ourthree samples, over 80% of the respondents preferreda stable and orderly society to a freer society thatcould be prone to social disruption. Even moreimportant, the government propaganda and the tra-ditional culture also make people believe that only astrong, centralized authority can provide neededsociopolitical tranquility.This connection between astrong authority and stability has been manifestedbest in a popular political thought in China, “neo-authoritarianism,”which revived and gained curren-cy in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.This school of thought blatantly advocates that onlya centralized state led by a strong leadership can fitChinese society, maintain political stability, and pro-mote economic development.The strong “authori-ty” is, by default, the current CCP regime. In short,as a China scholar has argued, the current regimemay acquire the so-called “Hobbesian” legitimacywithin the population “for delivering civil peace andcivil order.”10 Thus, I expect that those who strong-ly prefer stability should be more supportive of thecurrent political regime.

D. Democratic valuesIn this analysis, I focus on three specific democraticbeliefs that I believe are, among others, critical to apotential democratization of the political system inChina.These three beliefs are: (1) competitive elec-tions of government officials with multiple candi-dates, (2) equal protection and rights for all, regard-

less of political views, and (3) an independent mediawith freedom to expose and criticize the govern-ment’s wrongdoings.

Based on field observations and extant studies ofcontemporary Chinese politics, one can easily seethat the current Chinese regime’s norms and prac-tices have thus far worked against all these threedemocratic beliefs.While some democratic terms,such as “equal protection,”“freedom of speech” and“freedom of association” appear in the PRC’s con-stitution, these terms do not mean what they aresupposed to mean in a democratic society. Eventhough government control over citizens’ privatelives has been drastically reduced since the onset ofthe post-Mao reform, the current regime has by nomeans given up one-party rule and has never ceasedits harsh oppression against political dissidents,whether they be individuals or organizations.Therefore, in this study I expect that those whostrongly believe in democratic values tend to be lesssupportive of the current authoritarian regime.

E. Belief in the need for reform of the currentpolitical systemIt is erroneous to say that China has never engagedin any kind of political reform during the post-Maoera. Rather, limited political reform in China, withits ebbs and flows, has lasted for more than twodecades since the 1970s.Yet, this limited reform hasthus far aimed at the improvement of administrativeefficiency rather than at the establishment of a truedemocratic system. Therefore, any deepening ofsuch limited reform will naturally require changes inthe current regime’s ideological norms and funda-mental structures (e.g., the one-party rule).Consequently, I expect that people who perceivethe need for further political reform should be morelikely to challenge the current political regime forits norms and structures.

To test these hypothesized relationships betweenthe five attitudinal orientations and support for thepolitical regime, I have conducted a multiple regres-sion analysis. In order to assess whether these attitu-dinal orientations independently affect regime legit-imacy, I include in this analysis such key demo-graphic attributes as age, sex, education and incomeas control variables. Overall, the results of this analy-sis confirm the earlier-expected effects of the fiveattitudinal orientations on the level of regime legiti-

15


macy. That is, those who have high evaluations ofthe incumbent policy performance, who stronglyprefer stability, and who have strong nationalist sen-timent tend to support the current regime; but thosewho strongly believe in democratic values and theneed for a further political reform are more likely tochallenge the current authoritarian regime. Moreimportant, the results from all three surveys have alsoindicated that, among all these five orientations,nationalist sentiment and preference for stability arethe most powerful factors to influence the level ofregime legitimacy.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION

While the three Beijing samples used in this analysisare not necessarily representative of all China, I dobelieve that the above-mentioned findings areheuristic for our understanding of the legitimacy ofthe current authoritarian regime in that country.These findings are especially relevant to our study ofmass political support in the urban areas. Thus, Iwould like to conclude my analysis here with twoimportant political implications from the findingspresented above.

First, the findings about the intensity of popularsupport for the current political regime bringChina’s incumbent leadership both good and badnews for its effort to maintain sociopolitical stability.The good news from these findings is that the lead-ership can still keep the stability at least in the shortrun (say, within 8-10 years), since the current levelof regime legitimacy is moderately high. But thebad news for the ruling elite is that social stabilitymay not be maintained in the long run, because theregime legitimacy has gradually yet steadilydeclined. Unless the incumbent leadership takesextraordinary measures to deal with some seriousconcerns within the population, such a downwardtrend of regime legitimacy is very likely to continue.

Second, the findings presented above have alsoindicated both success and failure of the incumbentleadership in strengthening regime legitimacy.Thesuccess seems to come from the government’srelentless propaganda to portray the current politicalregime as the only guarantor for sociopolitical sta-bility and defender of national interests.This kind ofpropaganda has apparently convinced those whohad strong patriotic or nationalist feelings and a

strong preference for stability to support the currentregime. (Please note: about 80% of our respondentshad such feelings and a preference!) But the failureof the incumbent leadership is its almost completealienation from those who believe in democracy andsupport for political reform. These people havenever been convinced that the current regime isconsistent with what they strongly believe in.Failure to boost regime legitimacy also comes fromthe government’s inability to combat rampant cor-ruption and to minimize the gap between rich andpoor.

Finally, I believe that the incoming post–JiangZemin leadership will face the same downwardtrend of regime legitimacy.And this new leadershipwill inherit both success and failure of its predeces-sor in strengthening regime legitimacy. However,whether regime legitimacy can be strengthened inthe long run depends largely on whether the newleadership can take more substantive and decisivemeasures to push political reform and to addresssuch serious and touchy issues as official corruptionand social inequality.

ENDNOTES

1. Arthur H. Miller, “Rejoinder to ‘Comment’ byJack Citrin: Political Discontent or Ritualism,”American Political Science Review, No. 68, 1974, 951.

2. Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmoderni-zation: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1997), 15.

3.Avery Goldstein,“Trends in the Study of PoliticalElites and Institutions in the PRC,” The ChinaQuarterly, No. 139, September 1994, 727.

4.Tianjian Shi,“Cultural Values and Political Trust:AComparison of the People’s Republic of China andTaiwan,” Comparative Politics, July 2001, 401-419.

5.Wenfang Tang,“Political and Social Trends in thePost-Deng Urban China: Crisis or Stability,” TheChina Quarterly, No.168, December 2001, 890-909.

6. Lucian W. Pye, China: An Introduction, 4th ed.(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991).

7.Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, Inequalityand Poverty in China in the Age of Globalization (NewYork: Oxford University Press. 2001), 121.

8. Steven I. Levine, “Perception and Ideology inChinese Foreign Policy,” in Thomas W. Robinsonand David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy:Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991), 43.

9. Suisheng Zhao, “Chinese Nationalism and ItsInternational Orientations,” Political ScienceQuarterly, Spring 2000, 21.

10. Edward Friedman, “Globalization, Legiti-macy,and Post-Communism in China: A NationalistPotential for Democracy, Prosperity, and Peace,” inHung-mao Tien and Yun-han Chu, eds.,China underJiang Zemin (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 237.

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BEHIND PUBLIC OPINION

Survey is a social scientific approach to understandpublic opinion. But people surveyed in politicizedauthoritarian societies tend to live on at least twolevels, the official level and the unofficial level, asJames C. Scott has detailed.1

At the official level, or the public transcript level,people surveyed have imbibed an official story.Should a question touch on politically sensitiveissues, the respondent’s tendency is to give the “cor-rect” answer. In a Leninist system where the statestill controls not only much of the economy but alsoaccess to a great deal of housing, jobs, passports, edu-cation and administrative service, people are struc-turally compelled to collaborate with the regime inorder to protect themselves as well as their familymembers.Therefore, it is not obvious what it meanswhen surveys find Chinese supportive of the regimeand conclude that China is stable.2

At the unofficial level, people bound by ties oftrust and local notions of justice express (in graffiti,jokes, popular songs, gossip, and critical rhymes) aless censored view of the world, one that revealsother political potentials than scripted in the officialdiscourse. Analysts of political culture, hoping tocapture an alternative meaning of public opinion,must decipher and decode what is encrypted inboth the official and unofficial discourse. Surveys ofChinese public opinion, therefore, require a greatdeal of interpretation to understand the forces thatinform public opinion, assuming one can capturethe unofficial story.

American observers often conclude that the largenumber of collective protests in China since the1990s is a proof of a rise in “rights consciousness” inthat country.What I find when asking protesters ifthey are acting because of a belief in human rights,however, is an emphatic rejection of that explana-tion. I am told that the human rights issue is anAmerican plot to weaken and conquer China, and

that Chinese are warm and caring people whoseproper behavior is shaped by traditional social rela-tions and not by some abstract, individualistic, andamoral calculus that could bring anarchy to China.

That is, Chinese people respond to foreigners interms of an official story that frames public dis-course.They then go on to justify their collectiveprotest because some particular officials are treatingthem unreasonably. Explaining purported opinionin China is not an easy matter. It is not obvious thatwhat interviewees say is what they really think.

In nations with ruling Leninist political parties,opinion moves and divides. It lacks grounding andhas no staying power.This is largely due to the prob-lems of cautionary complicity and the framingpower of the official story. Consider the Ukraine.Ayear before the Soviet Union imploded, an anony-mous survey of the Ukraine found that 80% of therespondents affirmed that, if given a free choice, theywould choose to stay in the Soviet Union.But as the

17

How to Understand Public Opinion inChina

EDWARD FRIEDMAN

Edward Friedman is professor of political science, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Soviet Union imploded, when the people of theUkraine could actually freely opt for independence,90% voted to leave the Russian empire.

In general, studies in Russia show that the discur-sive post-Leninist discourses are so different fromthose of the Leninist era that opinion shifts rapidlyand by huge amounts. This finding should beapplied to comprehending publicly expressed atti-tudes in China. People’s opinion on the CulturalRevolution changed in an instant from regarding itas a way of saving China to describing it as a nation-al catastrophe; Lin Biao was transformed from heroto villain in a flash.

Given the obvious volatility of attitudes innations with ruling Leninist political parties, itmight be useful to think of people’s political inclina-tion, no matter how firmly expressed, more as senti-ment than as opinion. If foreign policy could bedebated, some could ask if the People’s Republic ofChina (PRC) was on the side of international crim-inals in backing Milosovic in Serbia, or for that mat-ter, what does it signify that Beijing propped up themost repressive regimes in Asia, those of Kim IlSong, Pol Pot and the Burmese military tyrants? Myhunch is that the Chinese government is far superi-or to that of the former Soviet Union in making itsnarrative persuasive. Hence, the results of publicopinion survey in China could be more misleadingbecause they tend to be more changeable than thatin the former Soviet Union.

PUBLIC OPINION AND REGIONAL DISPARITY

Studies of public opinion in China should first askhow different groups comprehend China’s policypossibilities in different ways. Chinese are not allalike. For myself, I often feel there are no Chinese atall in China. What I see when I visit China areyoung and old, men and women, officials and non-officials, educated and non-educated, migrants andresidents, military and non-military, richer andpoorer, coastal and hinterland, retired and workingand so on ad infinitum.When people in the UnitedStates ask me what I think of Chinese, I respond,“which one?” I know very different Chinese—someof them are prejudiced and conservative, and othersare tolerant and liberal.

Popular Chinese doggerel verse (shunkouliu) canbe of help in capturing regional diversity in China.

Consider a verse from the late 1980s, whichdeclared, “Beijing is full of patriots, while Shanghaipeople are trying to go abroad, and Cantonese aretraitors.” Interestingly, such a characterization ofChina’s diverse people had changed by the end ofthe 1990s. Beijing people’s patriotism no longerseemed unambiguously wonderful. Shanghai peoplehad risen as an ideal model. Also, with the govern-ment declaring that incorporating Taiwan into thePRC was a life-or-death matter (as eastern Polandor the Ukraine once was to Russian patriots in theSoviet Union) Xiamen, a port city across fromTaiwan, richly benefiting form large Taiwaneseinvestment, replaced Canton in the rhyme.The verseclaimed this time, “Beijing is the source of war;Shanghai is the source of peace; and Xiamen is thesource of surrender.” The rhyme finds that time wason China’s side in dealing with Taiwan and that thewar threats emanating from Beijing were counter-productive, whereas Shanghai’s policy of serving as ahome to hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese busi-nesspeople was a better choice for maintainingpeace with prosperity, and thereby benefiting thenation. Understanding opinion requires gettingregional divisions correct.

In fact, any understanding of politics requiresattention to regional diversity. Just look at a presi-dential electoral map of the United States. It willshow the Democrats in 2000 winning the twocoasts and the belt of industrial states across thenorth-center of the nation, a division almost indis-tinguishable from a century before. There arenumerous scientific approaches to Chinese regional-ism.3 My observation on the contestation of politi-cal opinion in China finds four regions with greatdisparity:• a super patriotic north around the capital city

region, committed to reform through more cen-tralization;

• a south and east coastal region more open toglobalization and decentralization;

• a center region, running from the rust belt in thenortheast down through the long-marginalizedsouthwest, whose people, suspicious of thereform project, see themselves as not benefitingfrom reform and tend to be super-centralizers;

• a vast west region running from north to south, ahome to ethnic minorities who are imagined byself-styled Han Chinese in all other regions as a

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problem, a potential source of division and weak-ness, and a region whose voice is not legitimatein the patriotic debate over China’s destiny.The two verses quoted above on Beijing,

Shanghai and Canton (or Xiamen) allow no voicefor the center or the west. It is the center region thatis most understudied. Studies of collective protest incontemporary China find that the provinces thatexperienced the most turmoil were mostly interiorprovinces in central China, including Sichuan,Hunan, Shaanxi and Henan. These provinces have ahigh concentration of strategic and heavy indus-tries.4 Religious sectarianism, a standard indicator ofsocial discontent, concentrates in this region.Thedemonstrations of late July 1999 by the Falun Gongin response to a crackdown on Li Hongzhi’s group,which began in his hometown of Changchun in thenortheast, were strongest in central China, includingHubei,Anhui, Hunan and Guizhou.Also, accordingto Chinese Public Security reports, reactionary reli-gious sects figured “most prominently in theprovinces of Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Yunnan.”5

When I look at public opinion polls that try tocharacterize Chinese opinion, they tend to ignorethis regional diversity, and privilege Beijing but omitits recent immigrants.6 This misconstrues the diver-sity of attitudes in China. Obviously Beijing is notChina. Indeed, it is quite distinct from much of therest of China. Studies on the Soviet Union tend toshow that Moscow, the capital, absorbed far more ofthe national propaganda story, the public transcript,than did other sites. This is only natural sinceLeninist command economy distribution is preju-diced on behalf of the political center and discrimi-nates against the periphery, with Pyongyang beingthe extreme within the Leninist world in suchskewing.While the center is also the home of moreliberal and cosmopolitan attitudes, the attitudes inperipheries—as in the Ukraine—tend to be farmore volatile, shallow and conflicted.7 Beijing resi-dents, excluding the huge number of recent andtemporary migrants, are far more likely to treat theofficial story as their genuine opinion.

The dominant tendency in the north in Beijingis to imagine a happy swing in opinion from the1980s when people romanticized the West to the1990s when Chinese lost their illusions about theWest and became realistic. Liberal Zhu Xueqin andneo-conservative Xiao Gongqin in Shanghai in the

coastal south, on the other hand, warn that the pres-ent conjuncture of forces in China has facilitated therise of a potentially anti-reform and destabilizingradicalism that combines nationalist, super-conser-vative and new left tendencies. This ideologicaldebate is reflective of regional disparity in China.

People do not, in the northern or southern nar-rative, imagine villagers as proving—in making theadministrative and electoral reform of village self-governance work—that China’s better off urbanitescould benefit from democratization. Nor do theyimagine hard-working but low paid rural migrantsas the builders of the urban modern infrastructureand the providers of higher quality food now afford-able for urban-dwellers.The center is imagined aswithout virtues while the center imagines itself asthe heartland of Chinese culture.A goal for compar-ative politics is to comprehend diversity of opinionas related to divisions within political culture.Thisrequires sensitive interpretation of regional divi-sions. One should be wary of claims made about theopinions of “the Chinese.”

POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND SOCIAL

POLARIZATION

Chinese society is less stable than some of the publicopinion surveys suggest.According to Dali Yang,mostpeople and rulers in China agree that the Party’s posi-tion actually is precarious.There is “trepidation aboutthe ability of the CCP (the Chinese CommunistParty) to maintain national integrity.”8 Both rulersand the ruled share a sense of insecurity.A consequentobsession with control and order produces a powerfulHobbesian legitimacy in which no one wants to door say anything that would destabilize the country.The out-of-control forces un-leashed by China’sincomplete effort to reform its way out of Leninisttrammels leave behind much explosive social dyna-mite and “fertile soil for widespread social unrest thatcould threaten the stability of the communistregime.”9 This is vividly captured in doggerel versethat rural analyst Cao Jinqing found in central Chinaon the people’s relationship to the Communist Party:

During the revolution, it was fish and water.When reform began, it was oil and water.Now it’s fire and water.[Next it will be fire and oil.]

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That is, a big conflagration may happen sooner orlater. Such unofficial opinion is at odds with thepublic transcript (as a team of opinion surveyors inBeijing led by Martin Whyte has found) that peopleaccept the official story that the regime guaranteesstability.

Other doggerel verse, despite the recognition ofthe Hobbesian legitimacy, captures likewise thechasm between rulers and the ruled which leavesthe ruled feeling exploited and impoverished evenas China’s general national product (GNP) soars.

Furloughed women don’t cry.Into the barrooms they fly.Drinking, singing, shaking their asses,Screwing for free the top four classes.Screwing for free all the top men,Women’s wages soar by a factor of ten.Paying their share of the state tax bill,Who says women are lacking in skill?

Another rhyme captures the fraud of limitinglocal tax rip-offs by distributing cards to people withthe maximum amount of tax specified, since officialsactually are believed to grab, in the unofficial story,whatever they want in order to enjoy a corruptgood life.

First you’re given a card.Still your money is taken anyway.Everything’s said to be O.K.It’s what’s meant by karaoke.

How then does one interpret the result of theabove-mentioned Beijing survey that ordinary peo-ple believe that the rich get ahead by hard work andskill, in light of the widespread unofficial opinionabout the rich gaining their wealth by connectionsand corruption? The point is that for Beijing resi-dents the impoverished people are suffering difficul-ties because of laziness and backwardness. Beijingpeople in the north imagine themselves as the topquality people in China. For the post-modernknowledge economy, it is talent that matters. If oth-ers score higher on the national college entranceexam than Beijingers, they are dismissed as justnerds. Consequently, the poor in Beijing or else-where, including villagers, rural migrants and thosethrown out of work, seem to have only themselves

to blame for their plight. People doing well tell eachother exemplary stories of how the lazy do notknow how to turn free rickshaws into good cash butcollege students do.

This hard-heartedness reflects the dog-eat-dogcynicism of post-socialism, which assumes that allhave learned what it takes to climb the greasy polesuch that, should you fall, you have but yourself toblame. To me, the attitude is similar to Americanwhites in the U.S. south ignoring the deep structureof racism so that they could believe that African-Americans had only themselves to blame for theirproblems.Those who were ahead had earned theirgood fortune.There was no common bond betweengroups in the polarizing society to impel the better-off to empathize with, learn from or aid those aban-doned and injured by the system. It is a public opin-ion reflective of a political culture not actually com-mitted to equality no matter what is found by thesurvey results that capture only the public tran-script.10

Already in the 1980s Chinese intellectuals beganto discredit the egalitarian project.They, like post-Leninist reformers in Europe, found wisdom inneo-liberal attacks on the wasteful socialist state thathad long mired the Chinese people in stagnant mis-ery. In both Europe and China, reformers acceptedthe neo-liberal view that the quest for equality actu-ally undermined economic efficiency. Growththerefore became the master legitimator of eco-nomic policy. In the east and central Europeandemocracies, however, the neo-liberals could bevoted out of power in the next round of electionsand replaced by the former Communists, nowSocialists, who promised to stop layoffs and restorethe social safety net. Chinese inequality intensifiedbecause China lacked the accountability institution-alized in democracy.

In addition, elitism seemed in China to be reasonincarnate. What were the alternatives? Ignorantmasses would ruin things, or old-line Stalinistswould keep running things into the ground.Embracing economist Joseph Schumpeter’s thesis ofthe creative destruction of entrepreneurship andeconomist Milton Friedman’s criticism of the coun-terproductive program of social welfare, reformeconomists in China did not merely de-emphasizedelivering social equity, they felt disdain for the egal-itarian project.

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That is, contrary to the claim reflected in thepublic transcript that the Marxist heritage makesChinese egalitarians, many people in powerful andrising urban centers actually are part of a politicalculture that does not at all privilege social equality.This has great significance for China’s future.Thesocial Darwin style elitism of north and south con-trasts to a commitment to charitableness and sharedsacrifice spreading in central China and legitimatedby a revived Confucianism’s notion that it is moralbehavior “to suffer before the whole world does andto enjoy life the last of all people.”

CONCLUSION

It is misleading to analyze public opinion in a unidi-mensional and single directional way, ignoringthereby social polarization, regional disparity, andthe volatility in public opinion.The major thrust ofthis essay is that the monism of the public transcript,no matter how momentarily monolithic, misleadsby obscuring the alternatives.These are manifest inthe non-official story.Whether there is groundedpublic opinion in China or not, it is important tounderstand the force of public sentiment, the powerof the unofficial discourse, and the alternativefutures pregnant within the Chinese body politic.

ENDNOTES

1. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1990).

2.Wenfang Tang,“Political and Social Trends in thePost-Deng Urban China: Crisis or Stability,” TheChina Quarterly, No. 168, December 2001, 890-909.

3. For example, see Kenneth C.W. Keng, “China’sFuture Economic Regionalization,” Journal ofContemporary China, No. 29, 2001, 587-611; CarolynCartier, “Origins and Evolution of a GeographicalIdea: The Macroregion in China,” Modern China,No.1, 2002, 79-142.

4. Ching Kwan Lee, “Pathways of Labor Insur-gency,” in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, eds.,Chinese Society, (London: Routledge, 2000), 155.

5. Stephen Feuchtwang,“Religion as Resistance,” inChinese Society, 169.

6.Martin Whyte,“Chinese Social Trends: Stability orChaos,” in David Shambaugh, ed., Is ChinaUnstable?(Armonk, New York: Sharpe, 2000).

7. Richard D.Anderson, Jr.,“The Discursive Originsof Russian Democratic Politics,” in Richard D.Anderson, Jr., et al., eds., Postcommunism and theTheory of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press 2001), 96-125.

8. Geremie Barme,“The Revolution of Resistance,”in Chinese Society, 206.

9. David Zweig, “The ‘Externalities of Develop-ment’,” in Chinese Society, 191.

10. Zhang Yimou’s movie Not One Less usesAesopian techniques to expose rural-urban polar-ization as a result of government policy combinedwith urban selfishness and hypocrisy. See ZhangXiaoling, “A Film Director’s Criticism of ReformChina,” China Information, No. 2, 2001, 131-139.

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On January 18, 2002, two China-relatedarticles called readers’ attention to twomajor western media outlets. One was a

commentary by Nicholas Kristof in the New YorkTimes, discussing how Chinese internet chat partici-pants reacted unsympathetically toward theSeptember 11 terrorist attacks in New York City,and attributing the rise of Chinese nationalism tothe “result in particular of ‘patriotic’ campaignsplanned by President Jiang since 1990 as a way ofknitting together the country, of providing a new‘glue’ to replace the discredited ideology of com-munism.” Later the same day, the online version ofthe Financial Times reported that “more than 20 bug-ging devices have been discovered by Chinese intel-ligence officers in a Boeing 767 delivered from theU.S. and due to serve as the official aircraft of JiangZemin, China’s president, according to Chineseofficials.”

While following the story through the Westernmedia, I simultaneously logged on the QiangguoForum (Strengthening China Forum) of the People’sDaily Online to see the Chinese responses. I foundthere was little being said about the bugged plane.This was not because the members of the forumhad not heard about the incident and did not wantto talk about it, but because they were forbiddenfrom doing so.To the dismay of Chinese authorities,however, Chinese web surfers have many places toget news from the outside world. Many individuallyrun websites discussed the issue openly.The initialresponse was disbelief and shock; as one chattercommented, “who could have done such a stupidthing?”After the authenticity of the news was con-firmed, online messages became more emotionallycharged against the United States.

The above description of the Chinese responseto the plane bugging incident shows a complex pic-ture of online politics in China that contradicts sev-eral sweeping claims we often hear these days. First,the blocking of Western media websites by the

Chinese authorities has not been able to preventChinese citizens from getting news from outside,thanks largely to the rapid development of theInternet which the government has helped to pro-mote. Second, the Chinese government has notalways been an unambiguous promoter of Chinesenationalism. In fact, it sometimes is more eager toput a brake on nationalism, because the latter is adouble-edged sword and could be used against thegovernment. Third, while many commentatorsassume that the free flow of information will havepositive influences on Chinese minds and enhanceChina’s quest for democracy, they have been disap-pointed by the fact that Chinese cyberspace hasbecome a place to vent the strongest nationalisticsentiment against the West. The rise of Chinesenationalism thus does not have much to do with thelack of exposure to Western values or with themanipulation by the hidden hands of Communists,but rather with the way in which the Chinese inter-pret the information and look at the outside world.

Information and Interpretation:Understanding Chinese Nationalismwithin a New Paradigm

YONGMING ZHOU

Yongming Zhou is assistant professor of anthropology, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Woodrow WilsonCenter fellow.

A general weakness of recent discussion ofChinese nationalism is that too much attention hasbeen given to the nationalism per se, thus missing abroader picture.This essay tries to tackle the issue ofcontemporary Chinese nationalism from a differentperspective by addressing the formation of a newparadigm by which the Chinese have come to per-ceive their position in the world since the late1980s. The new paradigm has not appearedovernight, nor is it the product of a single sponsor.Rather, it has evolved from a long process of think-ing and rethinking on the part of Chinese, withadditional conceptual input from the West. Theconvergence of intellectuals and the state on theissue of nationalism is based on this shared new par-adigm, which is interpreted by the state, intellectu-als and the general public with different emphases.Thus the so-called Chinese nationalism is in fact an“over-interpretation” of the paradigm. Even thoughnationalistic thinking is an integrated part of thisparadigm, compared to the previous conceptualframeworks that harbored waves of Chinese nation-alism, this new paradigm is more elastic, rational,engaging and has the possibility of being directed toachieve goals that are beneficial to China and theworld.

THE KEY CONCEPTS OF A NEW PARADIGM

It is worth emphasizing from the start that because ofthe fluidity and complexity of the new paradigm, it isa virtually impossible task to present a complete pic-ture.What this article intends to do is to examineseveral key concepts which comprise this paradigm,trying to reveal how these widely accepted conceptshave given relatively coherent analytical tools to theChinese people. Among numerous concepts theChinese often use, comprehensive national strength,national interests, and the rules of the game are thethree phrases that we often encounter in Chinesemass media, intellectual writings, and messages inInternet chat rooms.These are the three key con-cepts that are the backbone of the new paradigm thatChinese use to perceive their position in the currentworld. Understanding these key concepts will helpus make sense of seemingly often-contradictorypositions and discourse of Chinese nationalists.

Before exploring details of these three key con-cepts, a brief account of previous paradigms

employed by Chinese nationalists is necessary. Atleast two paradigms exerted widespread influencesprior to the 1980s. One was social Darwinism,which appeared at the turn of the twentieth centuryand emphasized the imminent danger of the demiseof the Chinese nation. Both the Nationalists andCommunists were propelled by this “salvation”urgency in their revolutionary mobilizations.

Another was proletarian internationalism. TheChinese Communists followed an ambivalent policyin relation to nationalism.While they were national-ists in essence, the Communists avoided using theconcept because nationalism was in conflict withMarxist internationalism. Thus, after 1949, eventhough the Chinese leadership never formallyendorsed nationalism, policies were pursued under aframework of anti-imperialism and proletarianinternationalism. After its split with the SovietUnion in the early 1960s, China faced virtual isola-tion from the rest of the world. Keeping self-reliantbecame the main means of warding off foreign pres-sure at that time, while a large amount of foreign aidwas provided to the third world countries in thename of internationalism, an action that triggeredthe endless contemporary discussion of how “irra-tional” China’s foreign policy was in the 1960s and1970s.

COMPREHENSIVE NATIONAL POWER

The concept of comprehensive national power(CNP) was introduced into Chinese academic anddiscourse in the mid-1980s. Hang Shoufeng, astrategic studies scholar for the Chinese military, wasprobably the first one to use this concept. He wasinspired by strategic studies by Western political sci-entists, such as Ray Cline and Joseph Nye, in whichthe phrase “national power” was a well establishedconcept. Huang coined the term “comprehensivenational power” in 1984, most likely under theinfluence of system theory, which was a hot topicthroughout Chinese academia at that time. In a veryshort period, this concept became widely acceptedand used, not only by academia and mass media, butalso by the Chinese leadership.

Why was this concept taken up so quickly inChinese thinking? The concept of CNP satisfied, toa certain degree, the Chinese dream of seekingnational wealth and power, a “big country com-

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plex.” No matter how CNP is defined, it generallytakes into account, to China’s advantage, a country’spopulation, territory, and natural resources. In otherwords, China may still lag behind the West in manyareas, but it is catching up and, by the standard ofCNP, everybody should pay due respect to thecountry.

The concept of CNP therefore was widely usedin the 1990s, and more serious studies were con-ducted. The collapse of the Soviet Union furtherprompted the Chinese to realize that the essentialcompetition among nations was not limited to dis-tinct areas such as the military, economy and polity,but was based on the CNP of each country.Correspondingly, a broadened concept of nationalsecurity emerged, which emphasized the protectionof multiple aspects of national security, includingpolitical, economic, military, environmental, andfinancial safety.

NATIONAL INTEREST

Even though national interest is a key concept inmodern geopolitical theories and nationalist argu-ments, its use has been short in the history of thePeople’s Republic of China (PRC), starting fromthe early 1980s. Its pervasive use today has made LiShenzhi, a famous Chinese liberal, feel uneasy.Because of the Marxist doctrine of proletarianinternationalism that denounces nationalism andsees the interest of international revolution as ulti-mate, the phrase “national interest” was discarded asa bourgeois concept in the Chinese CommunistParty (CCP)’s political discourse for a long period. Itwas not until 1985, however, that through subtle andsometimes undercover efforts, Li and his colleaguesreintroduced the concept of national interest backinto Chinese academic and media circles.Thus, tothe surprise of today’s nationalists, it was in factChinese liberals who played an instrumental role inreviving this key concept.

As it had done with the concept of CNP, theCCP leadership, while continuing to hold national-ism to be undesirable, quickly adopted nationalinterest as a valid concept, as did Chinese intellectu-als. Strategy and Management, a journal that focuseson strategic studies of contemporary China issuesand which is widely read by the intelligentsia, haspublished numerous articles employing this concept

since its inception in 1993.The journal’s third issueof 2001 included a translation of an article byCondoleezza Rice, national security advisor to theU.S. president, carrying the title “Promoting U.S.National Interests.” Not surprisingly, the concept ofnational interest has been picked up by the national-ists and has become one of the most frequently usedconcepts in their arguments. The idea of nationalinterest has thus become deeply rooted in Chinesethinking in just a decade.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Compared to the concepts of CNP and nationalinterest, the concept of the “rules of the game” isrelatively new.The concept gained popularity dur-ing China’s long negotiating process to join theWorld Trade Organization (WTO), which sets rulesgoverning international trade. Gaining WTO mem-bership requires China to conduct internationaltrade according to these rules, while simultaneouslybenefiting from the rights to which it is entitled.Asits economy became increasingly connected to theworld, joining the WTO was a key goal of theChinese government, the challenging questionbeing under what conditions China should join.

By conceiving political, economic, and strategicinteractions among different world players as gameplaying, the concept of the “rules of the game” hassymbolized the total de-ideologization by theChinese in their perception of world affairs.WhileWesterners have emphasized “rules” in dealing withChinese, Chinese have focused on the aspect of“game playing,” with the prize of national interest asthe ultimate goal.The concept’s rapid gain in popu-larity, both in elite and mass discourse, also reflects ashifting perception of the Chinese people of theirposition in the world and, correspondently, how toact within it. If “opening-up”reflected the urgencyof redressing Mao’s isolationism, the increasing useof the “rules of the game” has reflected a more con-fident China that is not satisfied with opening itsdoor to the rest of the world, but is also eager to bean active player in world affairs.

More importantly, Chinese use of the “rules ofthe game” does not imply that they will obey theextant rules; rather they are aware of the prejudiceand unfairness the extant rules pose to latecomers inthe world political and economic system. China has

25


found itself in the pitiful position of applying foradmission to the game, rather than in the position ofreferee and rule setter.The wide acceptance of thisconcept reflects the mainstream opinion emergingin recent years that China has no other choice but toaccept the existing world system, although Chinamay increase its status through CNP and become a“rule-setter”over time (thereby helping to revise thecurrent inequities).

DIFFERENT INTERPRETERS OF THE NEW

PARADIGM

CNP provides both an emotional boost and a quan-titative criterion to the Chinese to re-assess theirworld position, and has been accepted by all groups.The concept of national interest has been subject tomore contested interpretations.To the Chinese state,China’s internal stability has been presented as oneof the most important areas of national interest.While it is not difficult to note that the state’s mainpurpose has been to hold a monopoly on powerafter the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the disinte-gration of the Soviet Union has provided a conven-ient and convincing example for the Chinese stateto make its case. The subsequent economic crisesRussia endured have severely dampened the beliefthat liberal political change would bring about eco-nomic and social progress, as often argued byChinese intellectuals in the pre-Tiananmen era.Theappeal of political reforms has thus been severelymuted by the government’s appeal for stability onthe one hand and its delivery of high-speed eco-nomic development on the other.Thus stability anddevelopment have become the two pillars of officialnational policies and the legitimization of thesepolicies is often done in the name of national inter-ests.

However, for Chinese in general, and for nation-alists in particular, the focus point has been Taiwan’sreunification with the mainland, which is perceivedas the most crucial area of national interest.Frustrated by the growing pro-independence trendin Taiwan’s internal politics, and angered by theUnited States’ real or perceived hostility towardChina, the Chinese have become more receptive tothe nationalist interpretation of the U.S. threat toChina. In addition, based on their understanding ofa broadened concept of national security, Chinese

nationalists call for vigilance against a Western con-spiracy of economic and financial warfare againstChina, often using the examples of the East Asianand Russian financial crises to support their argu-ment.

Since the United States is perceived to be a realobstacle to China’s reunification and a threat toChina’s ascension as a major power, the ideologies itrepresents and promotes, such as democracy andhuman rights, have lost a great deal of appeal tomany Chinese nationalists, at least at face value.Though democracy remains an ultimate goal tomany Chinese, concern for immediate nationalinterests such as Taiwan outweighs everything else.Given the dominance of a de-ideologized discourseof national interests, democracy advocates seem tohave attracted few new followers, especially amongyoung Chinese.

How to play the rules of the game has dividedthe Chinese state and intellectuals. On the issue ofthe WTO, there were furious disputes among statebureaucrats on China’s entry conditions and timing.Intellectuals, while using the concept of the rules ofthe game, held more theoretically sophisticated dis-cussions on the issue of globalization.To the liberalssuch as Li Shenzhi, globalization represents the trendof “mainstream civilization in the world” and is aninevitable historical process in which China, will-ingly or not, has to participate.Thus the best way toserve China’s national interest is by immersingChina into a Western-dominated political and eco-nomic system. Conservatives instead focus on howiniquitous and self-serving the current system is,thus seeking alternative ways of globalization. Of theconservatives, the so-called New Leftists have criti-cized capitalism and globalization mainly from theperspective of contemporary Western critical theo-ries and neo-Marxism, while others who emphasizethe protection of national interests and the breakingdown of international inequity are often labeled asnationalists.

CONCLUSION

In summary, there are three key concepts in a newChinese paradigm of the world. The concept ofCNP provides Chinese with a much-sought emo-tional boost and a quantitative criterion to expresstheir pride in China as a rising country in the world.

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The concept of national interest has been empha-sized as the ultimate goal of all national undertak-ings, and it legitimizes the new paradigm by givingit the basis of “rational thinking.”The third concept,the rules of the game, is a practical strategy, aimingto promote Chinese interests by joining “interna-tional games” and further modifying the existingrules to China’s advantage. The formation of thisparadigm is the result of convergence of reflectionsof old paradigms and observations of current inter-national situations by different sections of Chinesesociety, with conceptual input from the West.Compared to old paradigms, this interest-driven-game-playing paradigm is less emotionally charged,less ideologically biased, and more rationally driven.Because of these characteristics, it has become root-ed in everyday Chinese thinking and has gained alasting and encompassing power in forming aChinese cognitive framework of the world.

Though nationalism is rising in China, the so-called nationalists are a fluid and constantly chang-ing group. Since the new paradigm is open to broadinterpretation, nationalism occupies only theextreme end of the spectrum, and high-runningemotion is often a reaction to external stimulationas in the events of the U.S. bombing of the Chineseembassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the spy plan colli-sion incident in April 2001. Such emotion can come

and go at a fast pace. Constrained by both the liber-als and the state, nationalists in China do not occupythe political or intellectual mainstream.There is thusno need to exaggerate nationalism’s pervasiveness inChina.

The fundamental difference between Chinesenationalists in the 1960s and those in the 1990s isthat the latter are well informed.An informed pub-lic is less receptive to manipulation.The success ofthe state-led patriotism campaign should not beover-estimated, especially in the post–CulturalRevolution context where the effectiveness of suchpolitical campaigns has been severely weakened.Theseeming convergence of nationalist thinking amongdifferent sectors within Chinese society is more dueto the interpretive power provided by this new par-adigm than to deliberate political manipulation bythe government.As long as highly charged emotionis constantly attached to interpretation, it may proveto be the case that accessibility to Western media,satellite TV and the Internet may even furtherenhance the anti-foreign sentiment in China. It isthus not the lack of access to, but rather the inter-pretation of the available information that is crucial.In the foreseeable future, Chinese nationalism willcontinue to be driven by this interest-driven-game-playing paradigm.

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