Trust in authority grew amid pandemic

Survey polled 20,000 people across mainland in April 2020 to gauge attitude to government

Chinese people became more trusting of the government several months into the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by researchers from China, Canada and Sweden.

Nearly 20,000 people were polled across 31 provinces or administrative regions in mainland China from April 22 to 28 last year.

The survey was conducted weeks after the city of Wuhan in Hubei – where the first cases of the coronavirus were reported – emerged from a strict and unprecedented lockdown that lasted more than two months.

Some 49.2 per cent of respondents said they trusted the national government more since the outbreak, while just 3.3 per cent trusted the government less.

For 47.6 per cent, the trust level remained the same.

But the survey also found that there was less trust in the lower levels of government.

“The authors find that Chinese citizens have an overall high level of satisfaction, but that this satisfaction drops with each lower level of government,” the researchers said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

They found 30 per cent of respondents said they had more trust in the local government, while 63 per cent said their trust level was the same, and 6.3 per cent had less trust.

Led by Cary Wu, assistant professor of sociology at York University in Canada, and funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the researchers recruited more than 600 students from 53 universities in China to conduct anonymous online interviews.

In Wuhan, 52.8 per cent of respondents said they trusted the national government more than they did before the pandemic, and only 3.5 per cent trusted it less. But 8.9 per cent of respondents in the city were less trusting of the local government.

Respondents were asked about satisfaction with information dissemination during the pandemic and the delivery of essentials to people’s homes when they were unable to leave during lockdowns.

For information dissemination, 89 per cent said they were satisfied with the national government, but that dropped to 77 per cent for the provincial authorities, 74 per cent for city governments, 70 per cent at the county level, and 67 per cent for community or village authorities.

That pattern was also seen for delivery of essentials, with 81 per cent satisfied with the national government but only 58 per cent satisfied with their community or village authorities.

The researchers also looked at how factors such as state propaganda, Communist Party membership and the Confucius culture that puts collective interests above those of individuals affected the results. They found party members or people who got most of their information from state media were more satisfied with the government, as were those who believed in collectivism.