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Left and Right With Chinese Characteristics: Issues and Alignments in Deng Xiaoping's China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Andrew J. Nathan  and
Tianjian Shi
Tianjian Shi
Affiliation:
Columbia University Duke University
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Abstract

A 1990 national sample survey shows that the Chinese population was concerned with issues relating to reform, economic and social grievances, and democracy. Although neither political issues nor social cleavages were the same as in the West, the same dynamics affected the process of ideological alignment. Social position and cognitive sophistication help explain why members of the population hold liberal or conservative attitudes.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , July 1996 , pp. 522 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1996

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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 ma inland 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.

33 As with similar questions commonly used in surveys in the West (e.g., Nie, Verba, and Petrocik [fn. 12]; Page and Shapiro [fn. 13]), 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., Hu, Fu, “The Electoral Mechanism and Political Change in Taiwan,” in Tsang, Steve, ed., In the Shadow of China: Political Developments in Taiwan s ince 1949 (London: Hurst, 1993), 154–59Google Scholar. 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.

34 Besides Beijing, there were demonstrations in at least thirty other cities, but few are known to have occurred outside cities.

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. Shi, Tianjian, “Survey Research in China,” in ini, Michael X. Delli Carp, Huddy, Leoni, and Shapiro, Robert Y., eds., Research in Micropolitics, vol. 5, New Directions in Political Psychology (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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 we feel justified in proceeding to factor analysis. The validity of the factor analysis ga ins further credibility when the factor results prove to be meaningful with respect to other variables in the study, as in Table 3.

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.

38 The weak loading of “environment” and “consumer rights” on this factor may support Inglehart's suggestion that materialist and postmaterialist issues are dist inct 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. “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. Potter, Sulamith He ins and Potter, Jack M., China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 15.

40 And except for the statistically insignificant relationship between foreign policy and household registration in Table 4, Table 4 is a better guide than Table 3 to the impact of age and sex on selection of agendas, because it shows their effects when other variables are controlled.

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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 certa in specific issues of concern to us. Our 1993 questionnaire includes a “traditionalism” battery that incorporates some of Flanagan's items and others analogous to his. Flanagan, Scott, “Value Change in Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review 81 (December 1987)Google Scholar.

45 Nathan (fn. 28); this interpretation ga ins support from the fact that the same constituency supports pro-democratic attitudes and the Tiananmen Agenda, as we are about to show.

46 We acknowledge the possibility that respondents were afraid to withhold agreement from this proposition, s ince CCP leadership is one of Deng Xiaoping's “four basic pr inciples,” 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. Nathan, Andrew J. and Shi, Tianjian, “Cultural Requisites for Democracy in China: F indings from a Survey,” Daedalus 122 (Spring 1993)Google Scholar; and Nathan, Andrew J., “Is Chinese Culture Dist inctive?” Journal of Asian Studies 52 (November 1993)Google Scholar.

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48 We asked more questions about gender attitudes in our 1993 survey, which will enable us to test this hypothesis.

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50 Nathan and Shi (fn. 46).

51 Factor analysis confirmed that the three sets of questions concern three different issue-areas, each of which emerged as a dist inct 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.

52 McCloskey and Brill (fn. 11); and Page and Shapiro (fn. 13).

53 We decided to exclude Tibet from this study for a number of reasons. Transportation there is difficult s ince there is no railroad and the highway system is not well developed. Many Tibetans do not speak Chinese. And it is difficult to f ind qualified interviewers to work there.

54 Guowuyuan renkou pucha bangongshi (State Council, Population Census Office), Zhongguo 1990 nian renkoupucha 10% chouyang ziliao (Ten percent sample data of China's 1990 census), elecronic data edition, ed. Guojia tongjiju renkou tongjisi (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau Office of Population Statistics, 1990)Google Scholar.

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