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Opinion | How will China’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy affect public support for the government? It’s complicated
- Chinese people have generally given the central and provincial governments high marks for their handling of the pandemic, but that is starting to shift
- Frustration over persisting with the ‘zero-Covid’ policy is starting to show through, threatening to erode hard-earned public trust
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Has China’s handling of Covid-19 increased the government’s popularity or decreased it? I find the question fascinating and confusing.
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When the authorities first placed Wuhan under lockdown in their effort to contain the outbreak of the virus, people in the West watched the stringent measures with a mixture of amazement and disgust. In China, however, the pandemic has actually boosted the government’s popularity, or at least that was the case until recently.
Cary Wu, an assistant professor of sociology from York University, and his team conducted a large-scale online survey in April 2020. It found that trust in all levels of government had increased, rising to 98 per cent in the national government and 91 per cent in township-level governments.
In some ways, the result wasn’t that surprising. The 2018 World Values Survey found that 95 per cent of Chinese citizens trusted their national government and 69 per cent their local government. In contrast, only around 20 per cent of Americans trusted their national government in the same year.
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Panic buying in Chengdu as China locks down another megacity to contain Covid-19 spread
Panic buying in Chengdu as China locks down another megacity to contain Covid-19 spread
So, why is Chinese support so high? “First of all, China’s remarkable economic achievements convinced the citizens that their government is competent,” Wu told me in a recent Zoom interview. “Rising nationalism has also fuelled the trust. And of course, there’s propaganda or some may say the Chinese are being brainwashed.”
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