|
|
|
|
China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
written with Tianjian Shi
In the 1980s, the first decade of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, Chinese society became wealthier and more complex, and state control of ideology weakened. As public attitudes diversified, new ideological alignments took shape. This essay explores the ideological landscape in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations. It uses data from a 1990 national sample survey that interviewed 2,896 adults throughout the country, except for Tibet, to provide a statistically accurate picture of mass attitudes. The technical details of the survey are described in the appendix.
Chinese society in 1990 was split along ideological lines into two large, loose groups, each with distinctive sociological characteristics. One group had more liberal attitudes toward public issues, the other more conservative attitudes. In Western terms, both Chinese issue constituencies stood on the left, in the sense that both demanded big government and egalitarianism: the liberals wanted government to fight against special privilege and economic inequality, and the conservatives wanted government to take responsibility for citizens' welfare.
The difference between the groups centered on attitudes toward reform and its consequences. Chinese liberals, who were concerned with the effects of reform on the moral state of society and on good government, thought the way out of China's difficulties was to push forward with economic and political reform. Chinese conservatives for their part worried more about the negative impact of reforms on their personal welfare and thought reform should be slowed or reversed.
We explore the extent to which the dynamics that divided the Chinese population resemble the dynamics of ideological polarization in the West. We choose the West as the case for comparison because that area has been the focus of most of the research and theory on mass ideology and its determinants. We find that in China, as in the West, class, as measured by education, income, and occupation, has a strong effect on issue priorities and democratic values. The urban-rural cleavage is also important, although for reasons that differ somewhat from those that operate in the West. In China one finds some influential social divisions that are not found in the West: that between party members and non-party members and that between employees of state and nonstate units. Nonetheless, the ways in which these attributes affect the individual's ideological standpoint can be understood in terms of the same logic that explains the impact of sociological attributes on attitudes in the West.
In short, the Chinese ideological spectrum is distinctive in substance but universal in the dynamics that shape it. In light of the cultural and institutional differences between China and the West, that is, by the logic of a most-different-case comparison, this finding supports theories of mass ideology hitherto grounded chiefly in studies of the United States and Europe.
Ideological Polarization in the West
Two issues have dominated the ideological space of the West: the role of the state and the conflicting norms of equality and achievement in the distribution of goods. The left generally favors more government intervention in the economy and more egalitarian income distribution; the right typically stands for relative freedom of private enterprise from state intervention and toleration of higher levels of income inequality. But left and right have accumulated additional meanings as well. According to Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan, the political cleavages embodied in European party systems crystallized the results of four major historical struggles: between center and periphery, church and state, town and country, and owners and workers. 1 Arend Lijphart suggests seven dimensions of ideology: socioeconomic, religious, cultural-ethnic, urban-rural, regime support, foreign policy, and postmaterialism. 2
The polarity of left and right emerged from a synthesis of these different cleavages, taking different form in each country. Each country varied in whether issue preferences and party loyalties were dominated by class alignments, or by religious, regional, ethnic, or other ones, or by distinctive combinations of several. 3 There was no tight relationship among positions on all these issues. Yet people usually thought of themselves as liberal or conservative because they leaned one way or another on a series of value dilemmas that characterized their nation's political culture. In the postwar era there emerged a new cleavage dimension--called materialism-postmaterialism by Ronald Inglehart--that generated the "new politics" of the environment, women's issues, and the peace movement. Even though older parties and issues tended to be more closely aligned with the left-right scale than the parties and issues of the new politics, citizens still thought of the new issues roughly in terms of a left-right dimension. 4
Different people may combine these value choices in different patterns. 5 Left-right self-placement may reflect a mix of abstract thinking about issues and favorable and unfavorable feelings toward groups and issues. 6 Yet, according to John Zaller, "[A]lthough there are numerous 'value dimensions' between which there is no obvious logical connection, many people nonetheless respond to different value dimensions as if they were organized by a common left-right dimension." 7 Thus, in the "political action" study of four European countries and the United States done in the early 1970s, respondents were able to locate themselves on the left-right dimension in numbers ranging from a high of 92 percent of the respondents in Germany to a low of 68 percent of those in the United States. 8
Ideas of left and right remain broad and vague in the minds of most Western citizens. Depending on the country, only 11 percent to 30 percent of the political action respondents were able to say what the terms meant. "A sizable proportion . . . either could not give any meaning of the terms or else completely reversed their meaning." 9 In America, the country where mass attitudes have been most intensively studied, few citizens are able to relate their overall ideological self-identification to their opinions on particular issues. 10 Still, no matter how vaguely comprehended, many citizens use these general categories to help orient their ideas about politics.
Western respondents align along the liberal-conservative dimension chiefly in response to the combined operation of two forces, social position and cognitive sophistication. Members of different social groups have different economic and other interests, which partly determine their positions on the ideological spectrum. Attitudes on the left tend to be preferred by the working class, urban residents, young people, and members of minority ethnic and religious groups, because they are dissatisfied with their share of benefits in society and think they would be better off if the state intervened to redistribute resources. People who are more satisfied (or less dissatisfied) with the status quo tend to take a more conservative stance toward government activism, social change, and redistribution. In Western societies these groups usually include white-collar workers, suburbanites, middle-aged people, and members of dominant ethnic and religious groups. 11
While cognitive sophistication is affected by many factors, including education, media exposure, political campaigns, and government propaganda efforts, it is usually measured by education. 12 Cognitive sophistication has mixed effects on left-right self-placement. Greater knowledge is associated with higher socioeconomic status, which makes people more conservative. But education also increases openness to change and thus helps to move people toward the liberal end of the spectrum. Education may have different effects on people's left-right positions on different issues in different countries: in the United States, for example, liberal social values are promoted in schools and better-educated citizens tend to be more liberal than those who are less-educated. 13
Whatever the ideological direction of its impact, however, greater cognitive capacity allows citizens to approach issues in a more abstract, generalized, and interrelated way. 14 Without necessarily making citizens less self-interested, political knowledge enables them to see how " 'roundabout' routes . . . will better secure ultimate gratification." 15 As a result, educated and knowledgeable sections of Western publics are more likely than are less educated groups to think about political issues in terms of an explicit ideology or broad policy choices as distinct from immediate self-interest. While the ideological position of a less sophisticated constituency tends to be a direct reflection of its social position, that of a more cognitively sophisticated constituency reflects the combined influence of social interest and an abstract conception of the issues.
Left and Right in Communist China
Under Mao, the meaning of the liberal-conservative dimension was decreed from above. Mao accepted Stalin's scheme that history moved from primitive communism to feudalism to capitalism to communism and that whatever pushed things in that direction was "progressive" and hence leftist. Class became a question of one's stance toward historical change rather than a matter of objective economic interest. And class was a label formally assigned to each citizen by the party authorities, rather than a self-chosen identity. 16
Mao labeled as "left" those who stood on the side of what he considered progress. Those who went too far in advance of history he designated ultraleft deviationists or adventurists. Those who failed to push historical progress at the appropriate speed were right deviationists guilty of class compromise. The position Mao occupied at any moment defined the magic place that constituted the authentic left between the ultraleft and the right. 17
After 1949 Mao moved this point of reference steadily in a radical direction, speeding the pace of change toward an egalitarian, state-dominated society. In a series of mass campaigns the Communist Party targeted as enemies all those defined as occupying positions on the right--landlords, counterrevolutionaries, "bureaucrats," and "sectarians." In the mid-1950s Mao accelerated agricultural collectivization and launched the Great Leap Forward. He accused party colleagues who failed to keep up of "tottering along like a woman with bound feet." 18 An estimated three-quarters of a million people fell victim to charges of rightism. In the 1960s Mao carried out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to make sure the revolution continued uninterrupted.
With Mao so impatient for historical progress, hardly any space remained to the left of him on the spectrum. The rare exceptions were certain allegedly ultraleft organizations that arose during the Cultural Revolution, organizations like the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Association (Shengwulian ), which called for virtual anarchy, or an alleged anti-Mao conspiracy called the "May 16th Group," which supposedly was prepared to challenge Mao's dominance.
China was like a ship whose passengers all rush to port. During the Cultural Revolution every organization proclaimed its progressiveness with names like "Red Guards" and "Revolutionary Rebels." Street names (Anti-Revisionism Street), markets (East Wind Market), and personal names ("Defend-the-East" Zhang) crowded the left side of the symbolic space. For a time the Beijing Red Guards even forced cars to drive on the left side of the street and to stop on green and go on red. 19 In effect, the ideological spectrum collapsed, and ideology ceased to be a meaningful concept because all views came cloaked in nearly identical terminology. When Mao's chosen successor, Lin Biao, fell from power, the Party announced that Lin, who had always been praised as the leftest of the left, was really "left in form but right in essence." In the bankrupt terminology of the day, this meant that Lin had pretended to be a good man but was not. Left and right had become devoid of substance. 20
A multidimensional ideological landscape reemerged after Mao's death. The official debate over the speed and content of reform continued to orient itself to the presumed direction of the march of history and to speak partly in terms of left and right. But Deng Xiaoping's regime was no longer able to monopolize public debate. In addition, two unofficial ideological dimensions emerged, one focusing on mass grievances toward a variety of targets and the other on ideas of democracy. Attitudes to reform, attitudes of grievance, and attitudes toward democracy constituted the three dimensions of ideology in Deng's China.
The ideas of left and right were used in the official reform debate more in attack than defense. Each side claimed to be on the left in a good sense and accused the other of being in some sense conservative. Advocates of reform tried to deny critics access to the progressive and socialist side of the rhetorical spectrum by presenting reform as the self-perfecting mechanism of socialism. Deng claimed to be "building socialism with Chinese characteristics" and to be guiding reform with the "four basic principles" of socialism, proletarian dictatorship, Communist Party leadership, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Critics of reform labeled the reformists "bourgeois liberals" and accused them of fomenting "spiritual pollution," which by implication located them on the right. 21 Reform advocates labeled conservative values ultra-left or "left" in quotation marks. 22
A second ideological dimension was discernible in the unofficial media and in the liberalized official press. We call it the grievance dimension, but it consisted of many elements: a mix of economic grievances, nostalgia for the past, moral condemnation of social and political corruption, opposition to change, traditionalism, and antiforeignism. Deng Xiaoping had allowed the weakening of Party control over ideology and the rise of a partial civil society. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers eluded tight oversight by the propaganda departments. 23 Public opinion polling appeared, providing leaders and to some extent the public itself with information about mass attitudes, even though polls conducted by Chinese organizations fell short of international methodological standards. 24 Unofficial and private channels of communication came into existence--open letters, underground publications, foreign and Hong Kong-based books and magazines that made their way into China, and a vast realm of private conversation and rumor.
Dissatisfaction focused on a seemingly contradictory mix of targets: the ruling clans, the party and state bureaucracies, nouveaux riches entrepreneurs, dissident intellectuals, and foreigners. Despite their suffering under Mao, many Chinese remembered that era as a time when they could leave their front doors and bicycles unlocked, when prices were stable, when everyone had a job, when officials were honest, and when China was not afraid of war with the West. The new phenomena of inflation, economic inequality, corruption, personal insecurity, and cosmopolitanism seemed part of a general decline of values. Ordinary people were liable to complain about the rise of a new Mercedes-riding class of "bureaucratic capitalists" and "compradores" (maiban , an old term for Chinese who served as agents for foreign firms). The bustle of downtown construction prompted complaints that officials were "selling out the country like Li Hongzhang," the nineteenth-century negotiator who ceded Chinese territories to Japan. Dissidents and foreigners were perceived as collaborating with, rather than opposing, corrupt bureaucrats and party ideologues, all undermining what was native and true to China. 25 People complained that even guanxi --personal connections, the cement of human relations in Chinese society--no longer carried its overtones of friendship and moral obligation but had become instead cynical instruments in a marketized but lawless system. 26 The popular mood was essentially "anti."
The third ideological dimension was shaped by a broad group of pro-democratic intellectuals. They ranged from Wei Jingsheng, the self-taught dissident, to Wang Meng, a Communist Party member and government-supported writer of fiction and essays who had once served as minister of culture. They included world-class scientists like Fang Lizhi and Xu Liangying and teachers in provincial party schools; academic philosophers and senior party thinkers; private-venture entrepreneurs and poets. Despite its diversity, this group agreed on a central point: that China had a historic obligation to learn from the tragedies of the past in order to prevent the reemergence of a Maoist-style dictatorship. Their prescriptions varied from immediate democratization (Wei Jingsheng) to an interlude of authoritarianism (the "new authoritarians"); from civil service reform to Western-style democratization; from "rule by law" to human rights. The core issue across this band of debate was "preventing another cultural revolution." 27
Although Chinese ideas of democracy are shaped by the heritages of Confucius and Marx, they also bear an essential similarity to Western concepts. The parallel is partly due to the direct influence of Western ideas, but more importantly it stems from the universality of the problem of making government accountable. 28 The Party tried to deal with the lessons of the past in its resolution on the Mao years: it acknowledged that Mao had made ideological errors but asserted that the Party had now corrected them. 29 This failed to satisfy many Chinese intellectuals, however. By the late 1980s the influence of the liberal intellectuals had gone so far on the subject of democracy that some observers argued their ideas enjoyed a hegemony in unofficial discourse. 30 Pro-democratic ideas were also widespread among the general population. 31
Issue Priorities and Agendas
Our survey data enable us to analyze how attitudes toward these three issue dimensions were distributed among the population in 1990. They also help us probe beneath the surface similarity of Chinese ideological issues to liberal-conservative ideas in the West, to see whether the two sets of ideological dimensions reflect the operation of the same social and cognitive forces. 32 We draw our evidence about the reform and grievance dimensions from a question about citizens' concerns with public issues. Another question, on which we report below, included items relevant to the democracy dimension.
The public-issues question asked, "Nowadays, our government is facing many problems, and to solve these problems is not easy. For each of the following problems that I mention, please tell me on which problems you think the government has spent too much effort, on which problems it has spent the appropriate effort, and on which problems it has spent not enough effort." The results are displayed in Table 12.1.
The question was not designed to uncover issues of public concern that we did not already know about. Rather, it assesses the relative degree of priority the public places on a predetermined list of issues. 33 The first column displays the issues in the order in which the public ranked them as getting "not enough" government effort (this was not the order in which they were listed in the questionnaire).
Not surprisingly, the two top issues--inflation and corruption--were the same concerns that dominated the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. The next four items--crime, bureaucratism, inequitable income distribution, and inadequate government investment in education--were also prominent among the complaints of the 1989 demonstrators. The rank of these six items at the top of the table is consistent with our sense that the public felt beleaguered by the collapse of public and official morality and the rise of self-seeking materialism. It turns out therefore that the concerns of the urban, student demonstrators were widespread across the national sample, which included urban and rural residents, young and old, educated and uneducated. Remarkably high
percentages of respondents of all kinds said that the government was not doing enough to solve the same problems that had motivated the demonstrators in Beijing. 34
The table goes on to reveal how much priority the public placed on greater government effort on other issues. From one-quarter to two-fifths of the respondents wanted the government to do more to solve problems of daily life, including those related to jobs, housing, shoddy goods, environmental pollution, subsidies, and population pressures. These represent a variety of demands that the government was expected to satisfy in the former socialist society. Now that the socialist system was giving way to a market-based system, a substantial portion of the public seemed to deplore the weakening of government effort in these areas of traditional state responsibility.
The next four items relate to reform. Fewer than one-fifth of the respondents indicated a positive attitude toward reform, by stating that the government should do more to promote economic and political reform. A slightly larger percentage expressed a negative view of reform through their concern that the government needed to do more to stop bourgeois liberalization, a term used by critics of reform to refer to its negative ideological and cultural effects.
Finally, foreign policy ranked at the bottom of the public's list of priorities, as it does in most countries. Among foreign policy issues, the heavily propagandized, nationalistic issue of Taiwan stood above the rest.
The public may assign a low priority to an issue for either of two reasons: because it does not have much interest in the issue 35 or because it feels that the government is already handling the issue adequately. The second and fourth columns in Table 12.1 help clarify which of these two attitudes applies to each issue. "No interest" is the label we have assigned to the summed percentage of "don't know" and "no answer" responses. Lack of interest generally increases as one moves down the list of issues. It strongly marks the foreign policy domain and also characterizes public attitudes to reform and to certain economic welfare issues like subsidies and consumer protection. Thus, the fact that the public did not demand more government action in these areas does not represent a vote of confidence in policy. But for issues higher on the list, such as price control, corruption, bureaucratism, and income distribution, dissatisfaction seems to be a better explanation than low interest for the public demand for greater government effort. "Just right" responses, which show the proportion of the public that was satisfied with the government's handling of the issue, are generally lower than both "not enough effort" and "no interest" responses.
"Too much effort" plays a substantial role in the public pattern of response only toward population control. This was the issue on which the fewest respondents felt no interest, the issue on which the largest number of respondents thought the government was already doing enough, and also the issue on which the highest percentage thought the government was doing too much. The pattern suggests that many people were concerned about population pressure and approved the government's strong policy to limit population growth, yet many were unhappy with the impact of population control policies on their own lives.
The main message of the table is that Chinese citizens were dissatisfied or uninterested in the government's handling of most issues. Only in the area of foreign policy was there a satisfied plurality, and its size was small.
The rank ordering of public concern about the issues given in Table 12.1 is not a test of how the public perceived the links among them. A factor analysis, which we display in Table 12.2, provides such a test. This procedure sorts the issues into groups according to the frequency with which respondents who answer "not enough" with respect to a particular set of issues will also answer "not enough" with respect to another given issue. In other words, factor analysis identifies clusters of issues (we label them agendas) that are related to one another in the response patterns of our respondents. 36
Table 12.2 shows that the issues were associated in the public mind in much the way our analysis of three issue dimensions would lead us to expect. 37 Following the usual standard in interpreting factor analyses, we concentrate on items with loading scores above 0.5. Items that fall below this level are not closely linked to other sets of issues in the public mind. For example, "opening to the world" was of roughly equal (and as Table 12.1 suggests, relatively low) concern to everyone, regardless of respondents' patterns of concern with other sets of issues.
Corruption, crime, bureaucratism, and price control cohere in factor 1 to constitute what we can call the Tiananmen Agenda . They represent an interrelated set of issues that implies a critical view of regime performance. The second factor identifies a Reform Agenda, which includes economic and political components. People who wanted the government to pay more attention to economic reform also wanted it to pay more attention to political reform, and vice versa. Although the factor loadings of "encouraging private enterprise" and "opening to the world" are too low to justify a strong statement of their relationship to the factor, they also make sense as reform-related issues.
The third factor separates economic and quality-of-life issues as a distinct agenda, which we label Economic Welfare . 38 The fourth factor constitutes a Foreign Policy Agenda . As we saw in Table 12.1, only a small number of people assigned high priority to this last set of issues. The factor analysis shows that there was no strong tendency to link foreign policy issues with any of the other three issue agendas.
These findings deepen our understanding of two of our three
suggested ideological dimensions. The Tiananmen and Economic Welfare Agendas both reflect elements of what we called grievance. The Reform Agenda corresponds to our reform dimension. Foreign Policy emerges as a separate agenda that is not important enough to generate a major ideological cleavage in the population.
All the agendas call for government action, since that was the subject of this question. But the agendas differ in the type of government role they envision. The Tiananmen Agenda calls for government moral leadership as well as a degree of economic intervention to control inflation. The Reform Agenda calls for government leadership to change the system. The Foreign Policy Agenda calls for government attention to foreign policy issues.
The Economic Welfare Agenda alone calls for direct government intervention in the distribution of goods in order to solve the problems that individual citizens confront with jobs, housing, wages, and subsidies. This is the only one of the four agendas that seems on the face of it to resemble the classical Western left-right dimension. To say in Deng's China that the government should do more about jobs, housing, and income distribution was to say that it should create more jobs in the tens of thousands of enterprises that it owned, build state-owned housing to rent at subsidized rates, and raise the salaries it paid to tens of millions of officials, teachers, technicians, factory workers, and other state employees. It is in this sense that the Economic Welfare Agenda resembled the agenda of the Western "left." It was also "left" in the Chinese context--or "conservative" according to the label reversal common in postsocialist and reforming socialist countries--in the sense that it ran counter to the reform effort to reduce direct government participation in the economy and to create more autonomous enterprises operating under market conditions.
Issue Constituencies
Face comparisons of the left in the West and China take us only partway toward knowing whether they reflect similar or different ideological structures and mechanisms. Deeper insight can be gained by identifying which kinds of citizens are most concerned with which agendas. We cannot expect to find the same constituencies as in the West any more than we find the same issues, since neither China's issue space nor its sociological structure is a copy of the West's. The deeper question is whether the issue constituencies in China reflect patterns of social interest in interaction with cognitive sophistication that are intelligible in terms of the theories that explain ideological alignments in the Western case.
Table 12.3 presents correlations of selected respondent attributes with the tendency of respondents to give high priority to each issue agenda. Some of the attributes we look at are the same as those found in the West, such as sex, education, income, and age. Others, though different from the West, have a sociological logic similar to that of attributes studied elsewhere. For example, being a party member is a measure of elite status. Membership in a state unit is an indicator of economic privilege and high social status. Urban household registration signals the right to live in the cities, where conditions are better and most residents have access to social services not available in the countryside. 39
For each attribute, the size of the correlation coefficient is a measure
of how strongly the attribute influences a respondent's tendency to be concerned with the items that make up each agenda. The stronger the correlation, the more intense the social cleavage around that issue agenda, that is, the more sharply persons who differ along the particular social dimension differ in the priority they assign to the issue agenda.
All the correlations are statistically significant, and several are strong. Education is the most powerful predictor of issue priorities. Type of work unit is the second strongest correlate. Household registration, sex, and the other variables also have moderate effects on the choice of issue concerns.
However, there is a tendency for many of these factors to reinforce one another. For example, a person with more education is more likely to be young, male, and have more income. A multiple regression analysis, shown in Table 12.4, distinguishes how each attribute functions separately. The standardized regression coefficients (betas) measure the relative strength of each variable in affecting respondents' choice of issue agendas. Education is the attribute that most strongly influences the choice of issue agenda, and it does so consistently across all four agendas. This suggests that differences in cognitive sophistication play a major role in determining the ideological alignments of Chinese citizens, even after taking account of the privileged social position of many educated citizens.
The next three most influential variables reflect the importance of social interest. Different variables more strongly affect different agendas. Sex is the second strongest factor affecting adherence to both the Tiananmen and Reform Agendas; men are more concerned with these sets of issues than are women. Household registration and age are the second and third strongest factors influencing adherence to the Economic Welfare Agenda; rural residents and older people place relatively high priority on this agenda.
When the four variables mentioned so far are controlled, the effects of the remaining variables are nearly all statistically significant. Some of them are quite strong, in particular, the tendency (1) of party members to be more concerned about all four agendas, (2) of persons in more prestigious occupations to be strongly concerned with the Reform Agenda, and (3) of employees of state units to be concerned with the Economic Welfare Agenda.
The most important feature of Tables 12.3 and 12.4 is the sign of the coefficients. A positive sign indicates that those concerned with the given agenda tend to measure one way on that attribute; a negative sign indicates that they measure the other. Thus, a positive sign on household registration indicates urban registration, a negative sign rural; a positive sign on sex indicates male, a negative sign female; a positive sign on age indicates an older group, a negative sign a younger group; and so on. For each variable in both tables (except for age and sex in Table 12.3 and the statistically insignificant relationship between foreign policy and household registration in Table 12.4), 40 the sign for the Economic Welfare Agenda is the opposite of that for the other three agendas. This means that with respect to the four agendas, the Chinese public divides into two constituencies with opposite characteristics.
One of the constituencies is predominantly urban, male, young, and well educated; it has above-average family incomes, contains more party members than the other constituency, tends to work in white-collar occupations and to be employed in state units. This group is disproportionately concerned with the Tiananmen Agenda and the Reform Agenda. It wants more government leadership in attacking the problems of corruption, crime, bureaucratism, and inflation, and it favors more attention to economic and political reform. This constituency is critical of government performance yet supportive of reform. In the Chinese context, it is relatively liberal. (It is also interested in the Foreign Policy Agenda. But we know from Table 12.1 that interest in the Foreign Policy Agenda is not strong, and Table 12.3 shows that this agenda divides the two constituencies more weakly than the other two. We therefore drop it from the rest of the analysis.)
The second constituency has relatively more members with the opposite characteristics: rural, female, older, less educated, with lower incomes, without party membership, and working in nonstate units. This group is most concerned with the Economic Welfare Agenda. It is uneasy about the impact of reform on jobs, housing, incomes, and subsidies, and it does not support accelerated reform. In the Chinese context, it is relatively conservative.
The attributes that divide the two constituencies are partly the same as and partly different from those that divide left and right in the West. But more importantly, the divisions make sense in terms of the same theory that explains ideological alignments in the West.
First, socioeconomic interest explains why the constituency for the Tiananmen and Reform Agendas consists of the relative winners from reform, while backers of the Economic Welfare Agenda are those who have been most vulnerable to the costs of reform. 41 Although inflation, corruption, and the decline of government services have affected everyone (as Table 12.1 shows), they hit hardest those of lower social and economic status, who perceive themselves as more in need of the kind of government protection characteristic of the old system and who are less equipped to take advantage of the market economy that is emerging under the reforms.
Reform dissolved the rural commune system and left village residents to fend for themselves in the market, while urban residents continue to have access to social benefits denied rural residents. Women lost some of the protection they had enjoyed under the old system, in which the government supported relative equality of the sexes; they are now openly discriminated against, especially in the growing private and collective enterprise sector. Older people have seen their guarantees of lifetime employment threatened and their pensions eroded; many lack the energy and skills to take advantage of the new opportunities that reform offers.
Persons with lower educational levels lack the training and connections to get ahead in the new order. Those with lower incomes lack the capital to get started in business. Party members have the connections to get ahead, and some can use their positions to benefit from the corruption that reform has generated. Members of state units, with their privileged employment status, have less need to worry about jobs, subsidies, housing, and the like. The fact that those without privileged access to state benefits show greater concern with the Economic Welfare Agenda reflects the fact that reform has subjected them to risk and deprivation. In short, those social groups who have been relative gainers in the reform process are more concerned with the general public agendas of Tiananmen and Reform. Those who have been relative losers because of the reform process have been more concerned with the personal damage they have suffered.
As sometimes happens in the West, cognitive sophistication reinforces the operation of economic interest by making those who are likely to be liberal even more likely to be liberal. While both constituencies are critical of the present state of affairs, the better educated tend to look at the problems generated by reform in a way that goes beyond immediate personal interest and to see them in terms of broad public issues. They are more likely to understand how indirect measures like further reform can over the long run solve immediate problems like housing, jobs, income distribution, and satisfaction of consumer needs more effectively than
can state intervention aimed directly at these issues. The better educated--more advantaged by reform and so more liberal--are also more willing to trade material benefits for ideological values and to trade immediate benefits for long-term benefits.
In short, there were two distinct issue constituencies in the Chinese mass public in 1990. Although they were not replicas of the classic Western left-right constituencies, they resembled them in certain ways. To the extent that they differed from Western constituencies, they did so in ways that can be explained by the same logic of interest and cognition that explains ideological alignments in the West.
Democratic Values
We turn finally to our third ideological dimension, attitudes toward democracy. Does the pattern of cleavage over democratic values fall along the same ideological spectrum just identified or crosscut it? Our data permit us to answer this question by looking at democratic attitudes and also at two related sets of attitudes, social liberalism and procedural liberalism. 42
Using an agree-disagree format, we posed six statements about attitudes toward democracy. 43 The pattern of responses is displayed in Table 12.5. We also asked six questions about attitudes toward women (social liberalism) and two about criminal procedure (procedural liberalism),
some of them in agree-disagree format. 44 The pattern of responses is shown in Tables 12.6 and 12.7.
The responses to these questions contain several points of interest. On democracy, the public's responses would be unexpected in the West but make sense in China. Democracy is understood by most Chinese not as a system of competition and participation, but as a term for the good polity, one that is fair, egalitarian, stable, and honest. What legitimizes government is not pluralism and participation but moral rectitude and administrative performance. 45 The majorities who want "more democracy" want government that is more honest and responsive. They would like top city officials to be elected instead of appointed, because current mayors are often viewed as remote and corrupt. But at the same time substantial minorities fear that too much pluralism will give rise to ideological and social disorder. And only a tiny number are willing to dispense with CCP leadership. 46
Social attitudes show a consensus on liberal values that is surprisingly
strong in light of the poor social and economic status of Chinese women. 47 Most people say they are willing to have a female supervisor and to allow their son to marry a divorced woman. Few say that they think a wife's income or education should be lower than her husband's. Since the Chinese population is still largely rural and has relatively low average educational levels, we suspect they have expressed politically correct responses rather than deeply rooted beliefs. 48
By contrast, procedural liberalism is relatively weak. Faced with what they see as a crime wave, Chinese are not immune from the tendency found in mass publics elsewhere to be less liberal when they think about the rights of suspected criminals than when they think about other issues. 49 This fits with Chinese attitudes of intolerance toward proponents of unpopular political attitudes, which we have discussed elsewhere. 50 In short, liberalism in China is no more consistent a belief system than it is in the West.
In order to discover which sections of the public hold democratic and liberal values, we scaled respondents according to the number of democratic or liberal answers they gave for each set of issues 51 and then correlated the strength of pro-democratic attitudes with the same respondent attributes used in Table 12.3. The results are displayed in Table 12.8.
Table 12.8 displays the same pattern of correlations as the Tiananmen and Reform Agendas in Table 12.3. All three kinds of democratic/liberal attitudes are powerfully affected by education. Urbanites, males, and younger people tend to be more liberal on all three dimensions. Income, party membership, occupation, and unemployment in a state unit also contribute. The cleavage patterns on political democracy and social and procedural liberalism are thus isomorphic with those on the reform issue dimension: the same kinds of people tend to array themselves in the same way along both dimensions. A pro-reform, pro-democratic constituency of the relatively privileged finds its complement in a relatively disadvantaged constituency that wants a return to state responsibility for economic welfare and withholds support from democratic values.
The multiple regression presented in Table 12.9 shows that all the variables have distinguishable effects but that education is by far the strongest, with sex, age, household registration, and party membership following. As in the United States, cognitive sophistication appears to play an even more important role in the choice of democratic/liberal attitudes than it does in the choice of issue agendas, with social interests having correspondingly less influence. 52 Respondents who are better educated, male, younger, more urban, and members of the Party tend to be at once more knowledgeable about politics, better trained in official norms, and more tolerant and less authoritarian in their values. Even though most members of this group are relatively privileged under the current political system, they probably expect Chinese-style democracy to open the system to even greater influence by people like themselves.
Conclusion: An Emerging Cleavage Structure
Both constituencies we have identified were nostalgic for some aspects of the Maoist past, but the first group wished for the era of honest government and stable prices, the second for the time when government provided jobs, housing, and incomes. Liberals tended to blame the government for corruption and inflation; were eager to see more progress on reform; and held relatively tolerant, pro-democratic political, social, and procedural attitudes. Conservatives were dissatisfied with the shrinking role of government in solving citizens' individual economic and social problems; did not place a high priority on reform; and held relatively nondemocratic and nonliberal attitudes.
Socioeconomic interest and cognitive sophistication explain how citizens aligned themselves on the issues that confronted them. The predictor variables do not work exactly as they do in the West. The impact of education on issue priorities and values is so powerful that it should be understood as not just a surrogate variable for class and cognitive sophistication, as in the West, but as additionally marking a status and role gap between the mass of people and the educated minority that the Chinese call "intellectuals." People in this category, conventionally including anyone who went to college, consider themselves collectively responsible for the fate of the nation. Their sense of a special role probably shapes their response to questions about issues facing the nation.
The urban-rural gap is also especially important in China, defining a wider range of differences than it does in the West. Mao's regime created a castelike division between rural and urban residents to make possible the accumulation of capital from the rural sector for industrial development. Rural residents remain radically disadvantaged today. The role of work-unit type and party membership also reflect distinctive Chinese institutional dynamics--the tradition of lifetime employment in state units with cradle-to-grave benefits, and the small size and total political dominance of the Chinese Communist Party. But however distinctive they are, the impact of all the predictor variables can be deciphered with social-interest and cognitive logics that are as valid in China as in the West.
We found no parallel for Lipset and Rokkan's center-periphery cleavage when we coded respondents on a coastal-inland dimension. Since regional identities are important in China, this deserves further research; different coding might produce stronger results. Nor are religious cleavages important in shaping the distribution of political attitudes across the population as a whole. Although religious issues animate political movements in Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and there are sizable Catholic and Protestant communities at odds with the state, 92 percent of our respondents described themselves as not religious.
The attitudinal and sociological structure of the Chinese mass public today provides the context within which future political change will take place. As in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as in Russia and Eastern Europe in the twentieth, so in China in the twenty-first, the social cleavages of the past are likely to shape the political system of the future. The cleavages we have described are statistical tendencies rather than structured groups. As China moves toward more openness, the issue agendas are likely to become contested issues and the issue constituencies are likely to become interest groups. When and if a multiparty system forms, the constituencies may form party coalitions. With appropriate adjustments, the issue agendas may become their platforms. Deng Xiaoping's reform may thus have bequeathed to China not only a soft transition to the market but also the beginnings of relatively clear, institutionalized, interest-based cleavages that can either shape a post-Deng authoritarian-corporatist structure or undergird a democratic party system if one should emerge.
Appendix
The analyses in Chapters 11 and 12 are based on a survey conducted in December 1990, in cooperation with the Social Survey Research Center of People's University of China (SSRC). The sample was designed to be representative of the adult population over eighteen years old residing in family households at the time of the survey, excluding those living in the Tibet Autonomous Region. 53 A stratified multistage area sampling procedure with probabilities proportional to size measures (PPS) was employed to select the sample.
Since the political structure in the rural areas is different from that in urban areas, political culture and behavior in the countryside were expected to be different from those in cities and towns. In order to obtain separate estimates for rural and urban areas, we divided the whole population into two domains: the rural domain and the urban domain. Because only about 20 percent of the population hold urban household registrations, they were oversampled, and rural residents were undersampled. Poststratification weighting technique was used to correct for household registration, age, and sex, while preserving the original sample N. This created a valid national sample consistent with the 1990 census 10 percent sample. 54
The primary sampling units (PSUs) employed were xian (counties) for the rural domain and shi (cities) for the urban domain. Before selection, counties were stratified by region and geographical characteristics and cities by region and size. The secondary sampling units (SSUs) were xiang (townships) in rural areas and qu (districts) or jiedao (streets) in urban areas. The third stage of selection was villages in the rural domain and juweihui (residents' committees) in the urban domain. For both domains, households were used at the fourth stage of sampling.
In the selection of PSUs, national population data for 1986 acquired from the Ministry of Public Security were used as the database to construct the sampling frame. 55 The number of family households for each county or city was taken as the measure of size (MOS) in the PPS selection process.
For the subsequent stages of sampling, population data were obtained from local public security bureaus or governments. At the village and residents' committee levels, lists of hukou (household registrations) were obtained from police stations. In places without household registration, lists were obtained by field count.
The project interviewed 3,200 people, and 2,896 questionnaires were collected, which represents a response rate of 90.5 percent.
The survey instrument was constructed in the United States and pretested in Beijing in December 1988. After thorough analysis of the pretest, we revised the questionnaire. College students of sociology and statistics were employed as field interviewers. Before the fieldwork, project members went to China to train the interviewers in field interviewing techniques.
Note *: The authors acknowledge the support of National Science Foundation grant INT-88-14199, a grant from the United Daily News Cultural Foundation, and the assistance of the Opinion Research Center of China, Social and Economic Research Institute of Beijing, under the directors Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Conference on Left, Right, and Center: Party and Ideology after the Cold War, sponsored by the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy, at Michigan State University, April 21-24, 1994. That paper is to be published in different form in a book edited by Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. For comments we are grateful to conference participants and to Michael R. Chambers, Margot E. Landman, Dong Li, Kenneth Lieberthal, James D. Seymour, Robert Y. Shapiro, Lawrence R. Sullivan, Kellee S. Tsai, and Lynn T. White III. Back.
Note 1: Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967). Back.
Note 2: Arend Lijphart, "Political Parties: Ideologies and Programs," in David Butler, Howard R. Penniman, and Austin Ranney, eds., Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981). Back.
Note 3: For example, see Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Arend Lijphart, "Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting," American Political Science Review 73 (June 1979); and Sidney Verba, Norman H. Nie, and Jae-on Kim, Participation and Political Equality: A Seven Nation Comparison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Back.
Note 4: Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 73-78. Back.
Note 5: Pamela Johnston Conover and Stanley Feldman, "The Origins and Meaning of Liberal/Conservative Self-Identifications," American Political Science Review 25 (November 1981); and Stanley Feldman and John Zaller, "The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State," American Journal of Political Science 36 (February 1992). Back.
Note 6: Shawn Rosenberg, "The Structure of Political Thinking," American Journal of Political Science 32 (August 1988); and Paul M. Sniderman et al., Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 7: John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 6. Back.
Note 8: Hans D. Klingemann, "Measuring Ideological Conceptualizations," in Samuel H. Barnes et al., Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 29. Back.
Note 10: Philip E. Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964). But see Christopher H. Achen, "Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response," American Political Science Review 69 (December 1975); and Inglehart, Culture Shift , ch. 3. Back.
Note 11: Robert Axelrod, "Where the Votes Come From: An Analysis of Electoral Coalitions, 1952-1968," American Political Science Review 66 (March 1972); Douglas A. Hibbs Jr., "Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics , rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 30-300; and Herbert McCloskey and Alida Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe about Civil Liberties (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983), pp. 70-414. Back.
Note 12: Cognitive sophistication is also referred to as cognitive mobilization, cognitive ability, cognitive competence, and political sophistication, among other terms. Philip E. Converse, "Public Opinion and Voting Behavior," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science , vol. 4 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975); Ronald Inglehart, "Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity," Comparative Politics 3 (October 1970); Robert C. Luskin, "Measuring Political Sophistication," American Journal of Political Science 31 (November 1987); Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter , rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 48-55; and Sniderman et al., Reasoning and Choice . Back.
Note 13: Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 15. Back.
Note 14: Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (1960; reprint, New York: John Wiley, 1980), chaps. 9-10; Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1958); Rosenberg, "Structure,"; Sniderman et al., Reasoning and Choice; and James A. Stimson, "Belief Systems: Constraint, Complexity, and the 1972 Election," American Journal of Political Science 19 (August 1975). Back.
Note 15: Campbell et al., American Voter , p. 204. Back.
Note 16: Richard Curt Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 17: See, for example, Mao Zedong, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung , vol. 3 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965). Back.
Note 18: [Mao Zedong], Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 4:184. Back.
Note 19: Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Wenhua dageming shinianshi (History of the ten-year cultural revolution), rev. ed., 2 vols. (Taipei: Yuanliu chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 1990), pp. 90-108. Back.
Note 20: Ibid., pp. 646-48; cf. William A. Joseph, The Critique of Ultra-Leftism in China, 1958-1981 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). Back.
Note 21: Ruan Ming, Deng Xiaoping diguo (The empire of Deng Xiaoping) (Taipei: Shibao wenhua chuban shiye youxian gongsi, 1992). Back.
Note 22: As seen in the book title, Lü Wen (pseud.), Zhongguo "zuo" huo (China's "left" disasters) (Beijing: Chaohua chubanshe, 1993). Back.
Note 23: Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (New York: Norton, 1992); Ching-chang Hsiao and Mei-rong Yang, "'Don't Force Us to Lie': The Case of the World Economic Herald," in Chin-Chuan Lee, ed., Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 1990); and Judy Polumbaum, "The Tribulations of China's Journalists after a Decade of Reform," in Chin-Chuan Lee. Back.
Note 24: Dong Li, "Public Opinion Polls and Political Attitudes in China, 1979-89" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993), chap. 3. Back.
Note 25: Cf. ibid., chap. 4. Back.
Note 26: Marlowe Hood, "Reflections on Civil Society, 'Black Society,' and Corruption in Contemporary China" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, March 25-27, 1994); Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 27: X. L. Ding, The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Link, Evening Chats. Back.
Note 28: Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1985). Back.
Note 29: "On Questions of Party History: Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," Beijing Review 24, no. 27 (July 6, 1981), pp. 10-39. Back.
Note 30: Baogang He, "Three Models of Democracy: Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Liberal Democracy and Preconditions for Its Establishment in Contemporary China" (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1993), p. 257. Back.
Note 31: Li, "Public Opinion Polls," ch. 6. Back.
Note 32: Because of our expectation that left-right concepts would not be meaningful to respondents, our 1990 survey did not include a measure of left-right self-placement. Our 1993 surveys in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong included not only the issue priority battery reported here, but also a Chinese-traditionalism battery; a left-right placement battery for self, CCP, father, and KMT; and a number of other relevant questions (speed of reform and of social change, liberalism, civil liberties, democracy). We plan to use these questions to compare the dimensionality of Chinese political issues across the three Chinese political systems. Back.
Note 33: As with similar questions commonly used in surveys in the West (e.g., Nie, Verba, and Petrocik, Changing American Voter ; Page and Shapiro, Rational Public), we asked about issues we knew were on the public's mind. A technique used by researchers at National Taiwan University is to derive the issues they ask about from the platforms of candidates in election campaigns; see, e.g., Fu Hu, "The Electoral Mechanism and Political Change in Taiwan," in Steve Tsang, ed., In the Shadow of China: Political Developments in Taiwan since 1949 (London: Hurst, 1993), pp. 54-59. This reduces the risk that issues will be arbitrarily left off the list. Because of the lack of competitive elections in China, that option was not available to us. It should also be noted that this item was not designed to be used as we use it here, to test hypotheses about ideological dimensions. Nonetheless, it proved usable in this way. Back.
Note 34: Besides Beijing, there were demonstrations in at least thirty other cities, but few are known to have occurred outside cities. Back.
Note 35: Low expressed interest, in turn, may reflect an issue's lack of perceived salience to the respondent or the respondent's lack of information about the issue, or both. The difference between these two causes is not germane to the analysis here. Alternatively, one might hypothesize that "don't know" answers are given when an issue is politically too sensitive or dangerous to talk about honestly. In another article, however, one of us has demonstrated that this is not the case. "Don't know" responses are correlated with measures of respondents' cognitive deficiency rather than with measures of their political vulnerability. Tianjian Shi, "Survey Research in China," in Michael X. Delli Carpini, Leoni Huddy, and Robert Y. Shapiro, eds., Research in Micropolitics, vol. 5, New Directions in Political Psychology (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1996). Back.
Note 36: Factor analysis is best used to confirm the existence of dimensions that were theorized in advance. Otherwise, the risk is that almost any factor structure can be given a forced interpretation. As noted earlier, we did not have a theory of issue dimensions in mind when we constructed the list of issue items. But since the individual items have the kinds of face relationships that are described in the text, we feel justified in proceeding to factor analysis. The validity of the factor analysis gains further credibility when the factor results prove to be meaningful with respect to other variables in the study, as in Table 12.3. Back.
Note 37: There is no reason to expect all the items to cluster tightly around a given number of factors, since the list of items presented to respondents was not drawn up to test a theory of issue dimensions. Back.
Note 38: The weak loading of "environment" and "consumer rights" on this factor may support Inglehart's suggestion that materialist and postmaterialist issues are distinct in the public mind. But a separate factor analysis of these six items alone produced loadings on only one factor, not two. Six items may be too few to reveal the materialist-postmaterialist cleavage. Back.
Note 39: Type of household registration is not a measure of actual place of residence. However, those registered in the cities tend to live in cities, while those registered in rural areas either live in rural areas or are in the cities temporarily, without access to the privileges accorded urban residents. Sulamith Heins Potter and Jack M. Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 15. Back.
Note 40: Table 12.4 is a better guide than Table 12.3 to the impact of age and sex on selection of agendas, because it shows their effects when other variables are controlled. Back.
Note 41: For similar arguments about the former USSR, see Ada W. Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change," American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992); and Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli, and William M. Reisinger, "Reassessing Mass Support for Political and Economic Change in the Former USSR," in American Political Science Review 88 (June 1994). Back.
Note 42: These sets of questions touch on what Flanagan calls the "authoritarian-liberal" dimension. Our questions are not the same as his because we designed the questionnaire to collect information on public attitudes to certain specific issues of concern to us. Our 1993 questionnaire includes a "traditionalism" battery that includes some of Flanagan's items and others analogous to his. Scott Flanagan, "Value Change in Industrial Societies," American Political Science Review 81 (December 1987). Back.
Note 43: The statements were :
If there are too many political parties in a country, it will lead to political chaos.
If people's ideas are not united, there will be chaos in society.
Broadening the scope of democracy in our country now would affect stability.
It is now very necessary to broaden the scope of democracy in our country.
The realization of democracy in our country depends upon the leadership of the party.
Some people believe heads of cities (counties) should be elected by the people, others believe they should be appointed by the higher authorities. What do you think?
Note 44: The questions were
Do you care if you do not have a son?
A couple has been married many years, but their feelings all along were incompatible, and the wife has fallen in love with another man. Some people think that under this type of situation, it should be permitted for the couple to divorce; some people think it should not be permitted for them to divorce. What is your opinion?
If your unmarried son wanted to marry a divorced woman, would you approve?
If your immediate supervisor were a woman, would you feel annoyed?
The educational level of a wife should not be higher than her husband's.
The salary of a wife should not be more than her husband's.
Ruthless criminals should be punished immediately, without having to follow complicated legal procedures.
When trying a major case, the judge should solicit the opinions of the local government.
Note 45: Nathan, Chinese Democracy ; this interpretation gains support from the fact that the same constituency supports pro-democratic attitudes and the Tiananmen Agenda, as we are about to show. Back.
Note 46: We acknowledge the possibility that respondents were afraid to withhold agreement from this proposition, since CCP leadership is one of Deng Xiaoping's "four basic principles," which every Chinese citizen is supposed to support. This analysis should not be taken to imply that Chinese political culture is inhospitable to democratization; cf. Andrew J. Nathan and Tianjian Shi, "Cultural Requisites for Democracy in China: Findings from a Survey," Daedalus 122 (Spring 1993) (chapter 11 in the present volume); and Andrew J. Nathan, "Is Chinese Culture Distinctive?" Journal of Asian Studies 52 (November 1993) (chapter 10 in the present volume). Back.
Note 47: For example, Elisabeth J. Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-Perception in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995); Xiaoxian Gao, "China's Modernization and Changes in the Social Status of Rural Women," trans. S. Katherine Campbell, in Christina K. Gilmartin et al., eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 48: We asked more questions about gender attitudes in our 1993 survey, which will enable us to test this hypothesis. Back.
Note 49: McCloskey and Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance , ch. 4; James W. Prothro and Charles M. Grigg, "Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement," Journal of Politics 22 (May 1960). Back.
Note 50: Nathan and Shi, "Cultural Requisites." Back.
Note 51: Factor analysis confirmed that the three sets of questions concern three different issue-areas, each of which emerged as a distinct factor. Thus, scaling is an appropriate technique here. The democracy and social liberalism scales ran from 1 to 6, and procedural liberalism from 1 to 2. Back.
Note 52: McCloskey and Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance ; and Page and Shapiro, Rational Public . Back.
Note 53: We decided to exclude Tibet from this study for a number of reasons. Transportation there is difficult since there is no railroad and the highway system is not well developed. Many Tibetans do not speak Chinese. And it is difficult to find qualified interviewers to work there. Back.
Note 54: Guowuyuan renkou pucha bangongshi (State Council, Population Census Office), Zhongguo 1990 nian renkou pucha 10% chouyang ziliao (Ten percent sample data of China's 1990 census), electronic data edition, ed. Guojia tongjiju renkou tongjisi (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau Office of Population Statistics, 1990). Back.
Note 55: Ministry of Public Security of the PRC, ed., Quanguo fenxianshi renkou tongji ziliao , 1986 (Population statistics by city and county of the People's Republic of China, 1986) (Beijing: Ditu chubanshe, 1987). Back.
Email this citation