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The Critical Masses
The Economist, Aril 11, 2015
The Economist, Aril 11, 2015
習近平主政下，北京信心增加。政府擴大民調範圍，以了解人民想法。這在以前是禁忌。
美國哈佛大學所做民調顯示，中國大陸人民對中央政府滿意度高於地方政府。
美國哈佛大學所做民調顯示，中國大陸人民對中央政府滿意度高於地方政府。
林中斌 2015年4月13日
Since the party seized power in 1949 it has repeatedly unleashed public opinion only to suppress it with force, from the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” in 1956, when it briefly tolerated critical voices, to the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. For the past two decades, the party has effectively bought people’s obedience by promising—and delivering—a better, richer future. This will be tougher in the years ahead as the economy slows. Members of a huge new middle class are demanding more from their government in areas ranging from the environment to the protection of property rights. So the party must respond to concerns in order to retain its legitimacy.
Xi Jinping, who took over as China’s leader in 2012, has shown even less inclination than his predecessors to let citizens express their preferences through the ballot box. Yet the public has become ever more vocal on a wide variety of issues—online, through protests, and increasingly via responses to opinion polls and government-arranged consultations over the introduction of some new laws. The party monitors this clamour to detect possible flashpoints, and it frequently censors dissent. But the government is also consulting people, through opinion polls that try to establish their views on some of the big issues of the day as well as on specific policies. Its main aim is to devise ways to keep citizens as happy as possible in their daily lives. It avoids stickier subjects such as political reform or human rights. But people are undoubtedly gaining a stronger voice.
Chinese whispers
In the late 1980s officials began turning to universities to conduct polls to gauge popular responses to market reforms. The government’s agency for environmental protection undertook its first survey in the late 1990s—when environmental concerns were rarely discussed in public—about people’s attitudes towards pollution. It invited people to weigh economic growth against conservation (money won). Around the same time party officials organised polls on religious belief.
But for years the use of such methods remained limited, whether by government or others. Yuan Yue pioneered commercial polling in China when he set up Horizon Research, a private company, in 1992. He says reports circulated by his previous employer, the Ministry of Justice, used to state that “the people all agree”—even though no one was asked what they thought. Today, most provincial governments have a social-opinion research centre, while official news agencies run opinion-monitoring units and many university departments conduct surveys, as do commercial pollsters. Governments have opened a plethora of websites, partly to solicit feedback (see story).
Opinion polls today cover a vast range of subjects. The biggest growth in demand for them is driven by the Chinese government itself, says Mr Yuan (who is a party member). The top rung of leaders rarely commissions polls, but what Mr Yuan describes as “customer satisfaction surveys” by local governments are used “very extensively”, he says. These evaluate government performance on issues such as social security, public health, employment and the environment. They even assess the popularity of local leaders, although the party insists that public approval on its own is not enough to guarantee a leader’s promotion.
Another type of poll has also emerged, to sample attitudes towards particular issues such as raising subway fares or increasing the price of petrol or water. Weightier matters are tested this way too, such as various aspects of China’s labour laws, or whether the death penalty should be applied for corruption (73% say yes).
Greater public involvement, including through polling, has had some effect on policy. Anthony Saich of Harvard University notes that in successive polls, conducted on his behalf by Horizon since 2003, the government’s failure to tackle corruption effectively has consistently featured among respondents’ main concerns. Mr Xi’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign appears, at least partly, to be a response to such anxieties. Last year’s declaration of a “war on pollution” by Li Keqiang similarly had public opinion in mind.
Opinion polls particularly affect policy at a local level, Mr Saich reckons. His surveys show that public satisfaction with local government is often lower than it is with the performance of central government—not surprisingly, perhaps, since local authorities provide the overwhelming bulk of public services. Approval ratings of the central government, which are (suspiciously) high by the standards of many other governments around the world, barely shifted between 2011 and 2014 (see chart). But Mr Xi still has reason to worry, as China enters what he calls the “deep water” of economic reform.
In a country so vast, populous and diverse, it is often hard to sample representatively. Internet penetration is higher in cities and among rich people, which biases online polls, while rural respondents more often refuse face-to-face interviews. National surveys sometimes exclude Tibet and Xinjiang. The opinions of the country’s 300m internal migrants are hard to assess because they are on the move, often work in the grey economy and are suspicious of people they regard as government snoops. As in other countries, many people simply will not talk.
Horizon’s Mr Yuan says he can ask almost anything these days, but he avoids the most politically sensitive subjects such as Falun Gong, a once widely popular quasi-Buddhist sect that the government banned in 1999, or the Tiananmen Square protests. Last year he conducted polls on attitudes toward pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and even about the country’s most senior leaders—but he is guarded about who commissioned him and what he found. Most polls for the government are not made public. That makes it harder to call the party to account, and means academics and experts sometimes cannot use the findings to advise on policy.
Still, the government’s interpretation of opinion-poll data is becoming more sophisticated. A survey in Beijing in 1995 found that 90% of people were satisfied with the city government’s performance, for example—yet some in the government, steeped in the party’s traditional view that it enjoys universal public support, worried that as many as 10%, or over 1m people, were dissatisfied. The understanding of opinion-survey results has considerably improved since then, says Shen Mingming, an American-trained polling expert at Peking University who conducted the survey.
The use of polling points to a persistent feature of party rule since Deng Xiaoping launched the country’s economic reforms in the late 1970s: marginal improvements in the current system are preferred over substantive political reform. However extensive the surveys, they stop well short of providing officials with the kind of feedback they need—rising numbers of protests in recent years are an indication of that. Nor does the increasing use of polls mean that the party is ready to allow a more open airing of dissent. Mr Xi has presided over increasing constraints on the press and on freedom of expression in other areas. Hundreds of activists have been rounded up. They include five women arrested last month merely, it appears, for campaigning against sexual harassment.
Such repression, along with an eagerness to canvass public sentiment, may be motivated by the same strategy: to monitor opinion so as better to control it. The party sees limited interaction between government and citizens as a way of blunting demands for a freer choice of who rules over them. The party is still afraid of the people, (the blanket security it imposes on sensitive political occasions is a sign of this). But even to report a poll, as state-run media do almost daily, gives weight to the notion that public opinion matters. It is a message that is sinking in among citizens and fuelling demands for more responsive government. “People are more and more clear about their rights and about what they can express,” says Mr Shen. That is a trend the party would ignore at its peril.
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