What We Know About Public Opinion in China, and Why It Matters for Policymakers
Survey research in China has long suffered from two core problems—difficulties in obtaining reliable representative samples and difficulties in finding respondents to express their authentic beliefs. Despite these issues, the field has made advances in studying how Chinese citizens think about their government. Overall, we observe that Chinese citizens express extremely high levels of regime support, though given the sensitivities of the issue, levels of support are probably exaggerated. There is evidence that Chinese citizens are critical of economic and political conditions under Xi Jinping, and a substantial number of citizens appear to be in favor of a more open system, though probably not a Western multi-party democracy. Opinions about Taiwan are similarly divided, with only a small majority of citizens supportive of military intervention.
“Do Chinese citizens support their government?”
“Do they long for Western multi-party democracy?”
“What are the political divisions within Chinese society?”
“Do Chinese citizens support war over Taiwan?”
For decades now, scholars, both Western and Chinese, have sought to answer these questions with survey research. It is sometimes surprising, and even perplexing, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would allow survey research on political attitudes to persist under its watch, but the field has been operating effectively and continuously in its modern form since the 1980s, and such projects continue to be fielded despite the tightening of the research climate under Xi Jinping.[1]
Surveys are not the only way to gauge public opinion in China. Interviews and other forms of qualitative research may be more effective to obtain a richer sense of peoples’ feelings,[2] with social media data emerging as a vibrant barometer of the political pulse on specific issues.[3] Given space constraints, this article will focus on some of the key survey insights that are most relevant to policymakers, paying special attention to the limitations of this approach and the challenges we face as survey researchers.
The Promise and Problems of Survey Research in China
The goal of survey research is to generate inferences about a population of interest through the process of sampling. Ideally, respondents are randomly selected for participation from a larger sampling frame, and in turn they answer a large number of questions about themselves and their attitudes. Often this process involves a degree of quantification—people are asked to rate their agreement with statements on a Likert scale of 1 to 5, their support for policies on a scale of 1 to 10, and so forth. Although surveys and polling are commonplace in Western societies, for some respondents in other cultural contexts they can be a foreign, strange exercise.
Question Sensitivity
Put yourself for a moment in the position of a Chinese survey respondent. Someone knocks on your door and proceeds to ask you questions about yourself, your income, your family, and your attitudes toward the government. “Do you trust the Chinese Communist Party?” the person administering the survey asks. “What is your degree of satisfaction with the central government?” The person writes down your answers or inputs them into a tablet. You have no idea who the person conducting the survey is, or what they are going to do with that information, and you will likely never see him/her again.
In the more modern version of the enterprise, you receive a link on your phone or computer, probably through a social media application. You click in, see a short disclaimer about your rights, and proceed to answer the same sorts of social and political questions as your answers seemingly vanish into the ether. You never know who the researchers are, or whether your answers are visible to the government.
In studies of public opinion in China, there is always a lingering, uncomfortable question of whether we can trust the method. Do Chinese citizens reliably voice their opinions on political issues? Can we trust what we find from survey data?
Two additional points about the Chinese context are especially relevant here. First, there is concern that some Chinese citizens might view surveys more as a test—where there is a right and wrong answer— than as an elicitation of their personal views. The fact that students are tested on CCP ideology in school does not help the matter nor does the political tradition of “right thinking” in Chinese society. In his classic rebuttal to Eric X. Li, Yasheng Huang writes, “In a country without free speech, asking people to directly evaluate the performance of leaders is like asking people to take a single-choice exam.” Huang goes on to outline the “test- taking” concern:
Let me also offer a cautionary footnote on how and how not to use Chinese survey data. I have done a lot of survey research in China, and I am always humbled by how tricky it is to interpret the survey findings. Apart from the political pressures that tend to channel answers in a particular direction, another problem is that Chinese respondents sometimes view taking a survey as similar to taking an exam. Chinese exams have standard answers, and sometimes Chinese respondents fill out surveys by trying to guess what the “standard” answer is rather than expressing their own views. I would caution against any naïve uses of Chinese survey data.[4]
The second issue is that the CCP is a highly repressive authoritarian regime that closely monitors the population through both digital and in-person surveillance. Although I have never personally heard of an instance in which Chinese citizens have gotten in trouble for something they said on a survey, respondents may not feel completely safe when providing answers. They may self-censor, inflate their responses, or simply entirely refuse to participate. Much of our field has been focused on trying to size the effect of these possible biases.[5]
Existing research provides reason to believe that certain question formats, for certain people in China, are indeed sensitive and elicit a defensive response. One way to assess sensitivity is to look at item non-response rates -- “Don't Know” and “No Answer” types of responses. I have done some work on this with my Ph.D. student, Xiaoxiao Shen. We have found that, in general, citizens in many authoritarian countries do not refuse to answer political attitude questions at higher rates, but China is a notable exception. We estimate that roughly 10 percent of Chinese citizens do not feel comfortable revealing on surveys their attitudes about the regime.[6] This is consistent with work by Kerry Ratigan and Leah Rabin, who also find high nonresponse rates across several China surveys.[7]
We also found that nonresponse is higher among individuals who are marginalized in contemporary Chinese society: women, members of the lower social classes, the less educated, citizens with rural household registrations, and non-Party members. Older respondents are also more likely to self-censor. Among younger respondents—those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s—the “Don't Know / No Answer” rates on sensitive questions are comparable to what we observe in the advanced Western democracies. These findings are in concert with other work, and these relationships seem to hold over the duration of the modern survey enterprise in China. In analyzing data from the 1980s, Jian-Hua Zhu also points to social marginalization as a predictive factor, noting that respondents who are female, less-educated, older, or who are farmers are more likely to respond, “I don't know."[8]
Samples and Sample Quality
The goal of survey research most often is to generate good descriptive inferences about a population of interest. We are interested in understanding how the Chinese population thinks about politics, and we aim to obtain a representative sample of citizens.
This is actually quite difficult to do. China is geographically large and has a large migrant population, a large rural population, and a large minority population. It is possible to make good inferences about a large population with a small sample, but, because of the complexity, it is particularly difficult to study China in this way.
The gold standard for survey research is a nationally representative face-to-face survey using some probability-based sampling frame. In the 2000s there were notable advances in sampling design, pioneered by Pierre Landry and Mingming Shen, which utilized GPS-assisted methods to target difficult-to-reach populations.[9] That period of time is probably considered the golden age of survey research in China. The projects often involved extensive collaboration among researchers at Chinese and Western universities, the questionnaires required substantial buy-in from the Chinese government, and the survey projects were expensive.
Survey research in China has changed considerably during the past ten years. International collaboration on large-scale face-to-face surveys has proven to be more challenging, and increasingly scholars are turning to smaller projects that rely on internet-based non-probability samples.[10] Links to surveys are sent out to an opt-in panel of respondents, who usually participate in the surveys for money or for some other form of compensation. Some of these individuals effectively are professional survey takers, and they may rush through the survey without taking it seriously. Bots are also increasingly an issue, and researchers using these sorts of data often construct filters to eliminate low-quality responses. There is a concern among some in the field that data are becoming so unreliable that such projects are no longer worth conducting. I was at an event a few years ago where a senior China scholar said at such. At a minimum, online samples have serious issues with representativeness. They tend to skew those who are urban, younger, and more educated, and they often include larger numbers of CCP members.
When samples are not perfect, the typical approach is to weight the data such that it ties to known population characteristics, usually a census. This has the effect of down-weighting certain types of people and upweighting others. Such an approach can work well in some settings, but it runs into problems when whole groups of people are not represented at all. For example, I have never seen a survey project in which the opinions of Tibetans or Uyghurs are adequately sampled and represented, and no amount of weighting will be able to give us a good sense about these groups given the types of samples and access we currently have. When we see a project that has a “sample of Chinese citizens,” we should be conscious of what types of citizens are and are not represented.
In summary, analysis of survey data to understand public opinion in China is an enterprise that should be taken with a healthy degree of skepticism. There are serious concerns about the quality of the samples and of the authenticity of the responses. Nevertheless, we can learn something about Chinese politics from surveys, and below I highlight some of the core findings in this field that are of relevance to policymakers.
Core Findings
Political Trust, Regime Support, and Preference Falsification
Every single survey or paper I have seen that uses standard direct-question techniques shows that Chinese citizens express high levels of regime support. Researchers use questions that tap into different aspects of regime support, like trust in central, provincial, and county leaders, and trust in the CCP itself,[11] or broader questions like whether people are proud of the political system and whether the CCP and the government represent their interests.[12] The precise levels of support can vary by sample, time period, and question battery used, but the broader narrative remains the same. Expressed support for the CCP regime is high to very high.
China scholars have differing explanations for the basis of this support. One school of thought centers around the CCP’s extraordinary economic performance.[13] Regime support is indeed associated with pocketbook measures of various sorts. A citizen's personal economic well-being—specifically his/her own income growth—is a particularly important driver of support. Strong public-goods provision can also improve trust in local government.[14] A second school of thought attributes regime support to aspects of traditional Chinese culture, notably Confucian traditions that emphasize obedience, acceptance of hierarchy, and alternative conceptions of democracy.[15]
Another notable feature of public opinion in China is that support for the central government is generally higher than that for the local government.[16] This reflects the strategy of the Center to paint itself as virtuous and clean, with its policies being distorted and corrupted by venal local officials. Emerging research suggests this gap in trust may be exaggerated and possibly closing slightly,[17] but the broader notion of this hierarchical trust in China appears valid.
Public opinion in China is not immutable, and indicators of regime support can and do move in response to changes in the policy environment. For example, Manion shows that the introduction of village elections in China increased trust in the lowest levels of government, but this effect was only really present when the elections actually presented villagers with a meaningful choice.[18] Wang and Dickson investigate the effects of Xi's anti-corruption campaign on public opinion, and they find investigations are a double-edged sword—they signal the regime's commitment to clean governance, but in the process they also reveal the magnitude of malfeasance.[19]
When we discuss these findings, we should be careful to describe what we observe as expressed support for the CCP. When prompted on surveys, Chinese citizens express support for the CCP, which may or may not be how they truly feel in their heart of hearts. Expressed support matters in and of itself—Chinese citizens operate in an environment where most people affirm the regime in public settings, which is part of the reason the CCP dominates. But there is always a lingering question about whether expressed support matches the citizens’ true beliefs, or whether these survey findings are somehow masking broader discontent.
There is emerging evidence to suggest that expressed support for the CCP regime in surveys is indeed exaggerated. China scholars have recently turned toward a range of sensitive question techniques that better protect the respondents and allow them some cover to express their political ideas. One prominent study by Robinson and Tannenberg suggests that self-censorship is indeed quite high—affecting about 24.5–26.5 percent of respondents in an online survey. In a similar setup, Carter, Carter, and Schick show that support for Xi Jinping is about 95 percent using a direct question technique, but only 65–70 percent when using a list experiment (a sensitive question technique).[20] There are other studies that use sensitive question techniques that do not reveal this discrepancy or, if they do, it is much smaller.[21]
It is worth noting that most of this research is being done on online samples, involving all the aforementioned issues. My own sense is that support for the CCP on surveys almost certainly is inflated. No leader, not even Xi Jinping, enjoys an approval rating of 95 percent. The issue is one of degree, and we have yet to have a good, nationally representative sample that employs a valid sensitive question technique. Overall, evidence suggests that the CCP still enjoys broad support, but not the near-unanimous support it often claims.
Political Cleavages and Divisions
There is an upper bound to how much we can really learn about regime support from direct or indirect questions. The scholarly debates ultimately end up being about whether the CCP has extremely high levels of underlying support or just pretty high levels of support.
The field is moving beyond those questions, and increasingly scholars are looking to understand how Chinese citizens really view the system and what the political cleavages are in Chinese society. The most notable study in this vein is by Pan and Xu, which utilizes over 460,532 responses to the popular “political compass” to try to gauge ideology. The survey uses a 50-question ideology battery, allowing us to obtain a sense of how Chinese citizens view the market, the state, and society.
Pan and Xu find that Chinese citizens can be arrayed across three distinct ideological dimensions: 1.) preference for authoritarianism and conservative political values; 2.) preference for state intervention in the economy and traditional social values; and 3.) preference for nationalism. These dimensions are distinct but correlated with one another, and they can be easily predicted by variables related to social status. The authors summarize their findings as follows:
China’s ideological spectrum appears linked to the outcomes of market reforms enacted by the Chinese Communist Party. Those who are relatively better off in China’s era of market reform tend to welcome additional market liberalization as well as political reform toward democratic institutions and tend not to endorse traditional social norms. Those who are relatively worse off tend to support a return to political redistribution, authoritarian rule, and traditional and social values.[22]
The study also shows a striking relationship between age and political values, with older respondents being significantly less in favor of political liberalism and market forces in the economy but significantly less nationalistic as well.
It is difficult to assess how Chinese citizens view democracy, given the contested nature of the term and the Party’s efforts to coopt the concept. A recent paper by Jee and Zhang suggests that within the block of Chinese citizens who are opposed to the CCP, there are actually two distinct types—those in favor of democracy and those “non-democratic critics” (NDCs), or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy.[23] The paper utilizes in-depth interviews with 62 Chinese citizens in addition to a standard online survey that elicits preferences for democracy and authoritarianism with a sensitive question technique.
The findings are striking and challenge existing conventions about the depth of authoritarianism and regime support in China. They find that about 42 percent of citizens report opposing the status-quo authoritarian system, and within that group, about half also reject the idea of multi-party democracy. In line with the findings of Pan and Xu, these regime critics tend to be of high economic status. But what makes these individuals distinct is that their status is more directly tied to the Party-state, and they view democracy with skepticism and concern about how their status would be preserved in that sort of political system.
Overall, the findings that emerge from this new line of work is that there is indeed a non-trivial group of Chinese citizens who find the current authoritarian system stifling. They tend to prefer more open and inclusive political institutions, though not necessarily multi-party democracy. These individuals tend to have higher levels of income and education, and this set of critics with high social status is an important constituency that the CCP regime must manage.
Militarism and Taiwan
As a field, we have a very limited understanding of how Chinese citizens view conflict over Taiwan, though new research is shedding light on this important question. Using a survey of over 2,000 Chinese citizens, Liu and Li assess the degree of militarism in Chinese society and the level of support for armed unification, along with other feasible policy options for Beijing (military coercion, economic sanctions, preserving the status quo, or separation).[24] They find that only a narrow majority—about 55 percent of respondents—believe that armed unification is acceptable. Interestingly, 55 percent view preserving the status quo as acceptable as well, and only 22 percent believe that de facto separation is acceptable. They argue that the Chinese population can be roughly divided into three groups—those only in favor of bellicose options (31.4 percent), those only in favor of pacifist options (17.1 percent), and those who are ambivalent and endorse a range of options (51.5 percent). Notably, younger respondents are more likely to fall into the pacifist camp.
The same caveats about survey research apply to this study. The sample is an online panel and should not be considered representative of the population. The authors also note there are likely some peer pressure/social desirability biases at work, which may lead respondents to inflate their support for military intervention. But overall, the picture that emerges is that the Chinese population is not quite as militaristic and bellicose as we might imagine. The majority of citizens appear to be fine with some version of the cross-strait status quo, and any military intervention on the part of Beijing would likely induce some degree of popular backlash (though public opinion in wartime might also be fluid).
Policy Implications
How can all this data inform policymakers? What are the implications for CCP regime stability, cross-strait relations, and strategic competition between the U.S. and China? Below I highlight three “bigger picture” takeaways that can inform China discourse.
The first is that this body of survey work would suggest that the CCP regime is probably not on the brink of collapse. The CCP appears to enjoy a broad reservoir of support, and though that reservoir may be exaggerated on surveys, it does give the regime some leeway in times of political and economic crisis. There is a line of thinking in contemporary American analysis that suggests that the CCP regime is inherently unstable and that regime change should be a plausible goal of U.S. policymakers. I would caution against this view.
The second is that that while general support for the political system is robust, support for Xi Jinping’s policies may not be. There is growing economic dissatisfaction and concern about fairness.[25] The data suggest that a good number of high-status Chinese citizens favor a more open version of China, with a lighter hand of the state in the market and daily life. After Xi Jinping leaves power, there may be a political opening for an entrepreneurial leader to capitalize on such sentiment and to steer China toward moderate political and economic reforms.
The third is that given the broader political stability of the system and the general reservations about military conflict among the population, there is nothing from a regime-survival perspective that would push Xi Jinping in the direction of invading Taiwan. Some policymakers often cite a “diversionary war” logic in thinking about an invasion scenario—that is, Xi Jinping is vulnerable at home, so he will invade Taiwan to distract the population. As a scholar of public opinion in China, I have never found that argument remotely convincing. Xi may choose to invade Taiwan, but such a decision would be taken primarily because of his own ambitions, not because of a regime survival imperative.
About the Contributor
Rory Truex is associate professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on Chinese politics and authoritarianism. His research focuses on China’s legislative system and policymaking process; repression and human rights; public opinion and political psychology; and U.S.-China relations. He is the author of Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China which explores the nature and limitations of representation in the National People’s Congress. He has served on the Board of Trustees for Princeton in Asia and Princeton in Beijing. In 2021 he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching honor at Princeton. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2014.
Notes
[1] See Melanie Manion, "Survey Research in the Study of Contemporary China: Learning from Local Samples," The China Quarterly, no. 139 (1994), 741–765 and Melanie Manion, "A Survey of Survey Research on Chinese Politics: What Have We Learned?" Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies, ed. Allen Carlson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181–199. These pieces provide richer reviews and contain more on the history of the field.
[2] See Kevin J. O'Brien, "Rightful Resistance," World Politics 49, no. 1 (1996), 31–55 as an example of the benefits of this approach.
[3] See, for example, Xuehua Han, Juanle Wang, Min Zhang and Xiaojie Wang, "Using Social Media to Mine and Analyze Public Opinion Related to COVID-19 in China,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public health 17, no. 8 (2020), 2788, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17082788.
[4] Yasheng Huang, "Why Democracy Still Wins: A Critique of Eric X. Li’s ‘A Tale of Two Political Systems,’” TED Blog, July 1, 2023, at https://blog.ted.com/why-democracy-still-wins-a-critique-of-eric-x-lis-a-tale-of-two-political-systems/, accessed January 23, 2025.
[5] For recent examples, see Darrel Robinson and Marcus Tannenberg, "Self-censorship of Regime Support in Authoritarian States: Evidence from List Experiments in China," Research & Politics 6, no. 3 (2019), 2053168019856449, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019856449; Erin Baggott Carter, Brett L. Carter and Stephen Schick, "Do Chinese Citizens Conceal Opposition to the CCP in Surveys? Evidence from Two Experiments," The China Quarterly, no. 259 (2024), 804–813.
[6] Xiaoxiao Shen and Rory Truex, "In Search of Self-censorship," British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 4 (2021), 1672–1684.
[7] Kerry Ratigan and Leah Rabin, "Re-evaluating Political Trust: The Impact of Survey Nonresponse in Rural China," The China Quarterly, no. 243 (2020), 823–838.
[8] Jian-Hua Zhu, “‘I Don’t Know’ in Public Opinion Surveys in China: Individual and Contextual Causes of Item Non-response,” Journal of Contemporary China 5, no. 12 (1996), 223–244.
[9] Pierre F. Landry and Mingming Shen. "Reaching Migrants in Survey Research: The Use of the Global Positioning System to Reduce Coverage Bias in China," Political Analysis 13, no. 1 (2005), 1–22.
[10] Xiaojun Li, Weiyi Shi. and Boliang Zhu, “The Face of Internet Recruitment: Evaluating the Labor Markets of Online Crowdsourcing Platforms in China,” Research & Politics 5, no. 1 (2017), 1–8. DOI:10.1177/2053168018759127.
[11] See Jie Chen, Yang Zhong, and Jan William Hillard, “The Level and Sources of Popular Support for China’s Current Political Regime,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 30, no. 1 (1997), 45–64; Bruce Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival (London: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lianjiang Li, “Political Trust in Rural China,” Modern China 30, no. 2 (2004), 228–258; Lianjiang Li, “The Magnitude and Resilience of Trust in the Center: Evidence From Interviews with Petitioners in Beijing and a Local Survey in Rural China,” Modern China 39, no. 1 (2013), 3–36; Lianjiang Li, “Reassessing Trust in the Central Government: Evidence from Five National Surveys,” The China Quarterly, no. 225 (2016), 100–121. Wenfang Tang, Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (London: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[12] Jie Chen, Popular Political Support in Urban China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).
[13] Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma; Bruce J. Dickson, Mingming Shen, and Jie Yan, “Generating Regime Support in Contemporary China: Legitimation and the Local Legitimacy Deficit,” Modern China 43, no. 2 (2017), 123–155; Hongxing Yang and Dingxin Zhao, “Performance Legitimacy, State Autonomy and China’s Economic Miracle,” Journal of Contemporary China 24, no. 91 (2015), 64–82.
[14] Bruce J. Dickson, Pierre F. Landry, Mingming Shen, and Jie Yan, “Public Goods and Regime Support in Urban China,” The China Quarterly, no. 228 (2016), 859–880.
[15] Tianjian Shi, “Cultural Values and Democracy in the People’s Republic of China,” The China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000), 540–559.
[16] Li, “The Magnitude and Resilience of Trust in the Center,” 3–36; Li, “Reassessing Trust in the Central Government,” 100–121.
[17] Neil Munro, “Does Refusal Bias Influence the Measurement of Chinese Political Trust?” Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 111 (2018), 457–471; Ratigan and Rabin, “Re-evaluating Political Trust,” 823–838.
[18] Melanie Manion, “Democracy, Community, Trust: The Impact of Elections in Rural China,” Comparative Political Studies 39, no. 3 (2006), 301–324.
[19] Yuhua Wang and Bruce J Dickson, “How Corruption Investigations Undermine Regime Support: Evidence from China,” Political Science Research and Methods 10, no. 1 (2022), 33–48.
[20] Robinson and Tannenberg, "Self-censorship of Regime Support in Authoritarian States,” 2053168019856449; Carter, Carter, and Schick, "Do Chinese Citizens Conceal Opposition to the CCP in Surveys?” This is the only survey that I know of that elicits public opinion toward Xi Jinping himself.
[21] Tang, Populist Authoritarianism; Stephen P. Nicholson and Haifeng Huang, “Making the List: Reevaluating Political Trust and Social Desirability in China,” American Political Science Review 117, no. 3 (2023), 1158–1165.
[22] Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu, "China’s Ideological Spectrum," The Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018), 254–273.
[23] Haemin Jee and Tongtong Zhang, “Oppose Autocracy without Support for Democracy: A Study of Non-Democratic Critics in China,” Perspectives on Politics. Published online January 28, 2025,1–20. doi:10.1017/S1537592724001798
[24] Adam Y. Liu and Xiaojun Li, "Assessing Public Support for (Non) Peaceful Unification with Taiwan: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey in China," Journal of Contemporary China 33, no. 145 (2024), 1–13.
[25] Ilaria Mazzocco and Scott Kennedy, “Is It Me or the Economic System? Changing Evaluations of Inequality in China,” BIG DATA CHINA, July 9, 2024, at https://bigdatachina.csis.org/is-it-me-or-the-economic-system-changing-evaluations-of-inequality-in-china/, accessed January 18, 2025.
Photo credit: User:Dzb0715~commonswiki, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons
