The Chinese people’s trust in their government

The Chinese people’s trust in their government

25 July 2011

Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, EAF

The radical changes that have taken place in both China’s economy and society have also produced a significant measure of political reform.

But political reform has lagged, and governments in China appear very different from the various forms of representative government that characterise industrial countries in the OECD group. The Chinese leadership appears very aware of the problems that confront it and has responded with intensification of thinking about how to construct better and more transparent government, including for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to monitor itself and the actions of government more effectively. Under the surface, of course, the issue of ‘democratisation’ is a major interest in theoretical discussion of the effectiveness of government, as well as in thinking about how to prosecute the practical political reform. One aspect is ‘democratisation’ of the Party; another is ‘grassroots democratisation’ through experimentation with township and village elections. These issues are analysed in our latest East Asia Forum Quarterly.

‘Democratisation’ of the higher levels of government seems a very long way off, despite the lip-service the notion gets in the West by no less an authority than Premier Wen Jiabao himself.

China now has to deal with a new and challenging range of issues as it progresses towards a middle-income-status country (a stated government goal and one that it is likely to achieve by 2020). Maintaining the legitimacy of the Chinese Government, and more pertinently, the Party, may prove far trickier and even more demanding than simply pumping out good economic growth rates and, and requires getting more complex issues right.  More and more, it seems looking from the outside, the future leadership of China will need to show the same kind of strong vision of political reform that their predecessors showed on the economy, back in the late 1970s.

But are there any widespread signs in China of a corrosion of trust in Chinese governments, central, provincial or local?
Not many, if the surveys undertaken by Tony Saich are a basis on which to go. Saich notes that one important question is what the Chinese people think of the nation’s capacity to govern. If citizens are more satisfied with government performance and the provision of public goods and services, it can be presumed, the administration will have a greater capacity for policy experimentation and enjoy a trust that will help government survive policy errors. Saich surveyed some 4,000 respondents on their attitude towards government in China and his findings seem important to judging the resilience of the current systems of government in China, at least in the near term.

How satisfied are citizens with their government?

Quite satisfied, especially with the central government though less with provincial and local governments, Saich’s survey suggests. Two clear trends are visible. ‘Citizens ‘disaggregate’ the state and, while they express high levels of satisfaction with the central government, satisfaction declines with each lower level of government’. While in 2009, an overwhelming 95.9 per cent were either relatively or extremely satisfied with the central government, this fell away to 61.5 per cent at the local level.

As Saich points out, ‘in China, local governments provide almost all public services and the fact that satisfaction levels decline as one gets closer to the people is a worrying sign’. Satisfaction with lower levels of government has risen steadily since Hu and Wen took over leadership, rising from 43.6 per cent in 2003 to 61.5 per cent in 2009. ‘In the villages, the highest and the lowest income earners are the most satisfied’.

The wealthy have done well under the current system, while the poorest are clearly responding to such Hu-Wen policy initiatives as the abolition of the agricultural tax or the extension of medical insurance and basic welfare guarantees. These results are very different from what one observes in many (though not all) developed economies, where satisfaction levels tend to rise as government gets closer to the people, indicating that people in other countries feel that they may have greater control over the decisions of local government than Chinese citizens do.

Drilling down further into Saich’s survey, there are some important signs to watch. ‘In 2009, 30 per cent of respondents thought that their officials were incompetent, and 40 per cent thought that they just looked after their own interests. Corruption is always ranked as the biggest problem’. These low levels of trust could foreshadow social instability (reflected in the rapidly growing number of civil incidents). But the concerns about the quality of local governance do not appear to be mirrored at the central government level. ‘The survey suggests that citizens do not see the problem as lying with the central government but rather with poor implementation at the local level or the incompetence or venality of local officials’.

This circumstance is not static and, as with all aspects of Chinese economic, politics and society, it is the dynamics that need to be watched, an admonition of which the Chinese leadership is clearly most acutely aware.

And on the ASEAN talks

There’s some encouraging news out of the ASEAN talks in Bali where North and South Korea met on the sidelines to address issues that need to be sorted for resumption of the Six Party talks and where China and her ASEAN partners agreed on behavioural guidelines over engagement to ease tensions in the South China Sea. While the agreement does not address underlying territorial issues, it is a sensible step forward. We’ll have more on both later.