Ripples of Resistance? Chinese Public Opinion toward COVID Control in 2022

• In Event: Public Opinion and Experimental Methods in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The Chinese government managed to sustain exceptionally strict measures against COVID-19 -- officially named the "Zero-COVID strategy" -- for over two years without meeting public challenges. But the eruption of rare protests in November 2022 indicates people's growing frustration with authoritarian control. We employ two online surveys on Chinese citizens in June and December 2022 to track changes in public preferences during this period with conjoint experiments featuring key elements of China's Zero-COVID strategy. We find Chinese respondents became significantly less supportive of the Zero-COVID strategy in 6 months. Compared to Taiwanese citizens in a parallel survey in June 2022, we also find quick convergence in preferences for loosening restrictions between the two Chinese societies under divergent types of governance. To explain the shift in public preference, we design a vignette-based experiment and find that, among a range of different information, positive information about the US’ economic renormalization increased respondents' support for re-opening.

Authors

• Jay Chieh Kao, Loyola University, Chicago

• Jiahua Yue

• Yuchen Cao, Princeton University