I’m not suggesting study bias, but I am suggesting that Chinese citizens’ social media and internet use is now so closely monitored by the CPP that it has a chilling effect on free speech, and this may have influenced the results even if they were told the study was anonymous.
Secondly, since Xi took power, according to that same report, he has “effectively sidelined functional and professional institutions of party and state”, in addition to removing term limits. These are all classic authoritarian strongman moves. The study goes on to point out that having an effective authoritarian as leader - one who has helped improve the lives of many Chinese citizens - is of course going to be popular. The old saying goes that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government, and that may be true in some regards, right up until the point it isn’t benevolent anymore. Which is more or less inevitable imo.
While I cite that source for its wide ranging polls of Chinese citizen opinion, I think that a lot of the analysis is bunk because they start from the assumption that Xi is a dictator and base all of their conclusions off of that without first proving it. If you ask the Chinese people whether or not their system is democratic, the overwhelming majority say that it is.
When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People’s Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.
Now, this isn’t a great poll to base an entire political viewpoint on, because it’s actually pretty hard to define what a democracy is and what it needs to do to be considered a democracy. I think that the gold standard would be some kind of long term survey to see if government policy consistently reflects the opinions and desires of the electorate, like was done in this study of the US Government (I’m not aware of an equivalent to this study being performed in China).
I’m not suggesting study bias, but I am suggesting that Chinese citizens’ social media and internet use is now so closely monitored by the CPP that it has a chilling effect on free speech, and this may have influenced the results even if they were told the study was anonymous.
Secondly, since Xi took power, according to that same report, he has “effectively sidelined functional and professional institutions of party and state”, in addition to removing term limits. These are all classic authoritarian strongman moves. The study goes on to point out that having an effective authoritarian as leader - one who has helped improve the lives of many Chinese citizens - is of course going to be popular. The old saying goes that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government, and that may be true in some regards, right up until the point it isn’t benevolent anymore. Which is more or less inevitable imo.
While I cite that source for its wide ranging polls of Chinese citizen opinion, I think that a lot of the analysis is bunk because they start from the assumption that Xi is a dictator and base all of their conclusions off of that without first proving it. If you ask the Chinese people whether or not their system is democratic, the overwhelming majority say that it is.
Now, this isn’t a great poll to base an entire political viewpoint on, because it’s actually pretty hard to define what a democracy is and what it needs to do to be considered a democracy. I think that the gold standard would be some kind of long term survey to see if government policy consistently reflects the opinions and desires of the electorate, like was done in this study of the US Government (I’m not aware of an equivalent to this study being performed in China).