Demystifying confidence in different levels of the police: evidence from Shanghai, China

ABSTRACT

Extending Fei's ‘differential mode of association’ (1992) and Cao et al.'s argument that Chinese trust is layered and hierarchical (2015), this study explores the differential confidence in the different levels of police agencies and brings various forms of trust into the study of confidence in the police. Results from a household random sample reveal that Shanghainese make a distinction between hierarchical levels of the police. Their confidence level toward their municipality police department is similar to that toward the Ministry of Public Security while their confidence levels toward the police at stations and Paichusuo are more alike. In addition, the multi-variate regression analyses indicate that institutional trust is the dominant factor for explaining confidence in both local and upper-level police. Media trust, sense of safety, financial satisfaction and collectivism are significant predictors in both models. Obeying the law, gender and class influence confidence in the local police but not the upper-level police while intermediate trust and education have a significant effect only on confidence in the upper-level police. It is concluded that assessment of local police is central to the understanding of public confidence in China.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• collectivism
• confidence in the police
• institutional trust. media trust

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lei Yang (in Chinese: 雷洋) was a Chinese environmentalist who died on May 7th, 2016, following an altercation with the police in Beijing. Lei, a healthy young father aged 29, was detained on suspicion of soliciting prostitution at a foot parlour. The unclear circumstances surrounding his death led to accusations of police brutality. The family, however, accepted a settlement offer on December 21, 2016. Later, officials announced their decision not to prosecute five policemen implicated in the death of Lei Yang, sparking online protests that have gone viral.

2 Yu's sentencing to life in prison in March 2017 attracted little attention until an explosive report on the case by a leading weekly newspaper – The Southern Week. The murder happened on April 14, 2016 after a group of debt collectors was alleged to have detained and tormented 22-year-old Yu Huan and his mother, an ordeal which Yu responded to by stabbing one of them to death. Police were called to the scene, but surveillance video shows them leaving the room after just four minutes. Netizens bombarded the Weibo account of Liaocheng Court crying injustice. https://www.ft.com/content/fa93cda0-cd84-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

3 In this article, we used the police as a general term to refer to ‘public security force’ in Chinese. These two terms are used interchangeably nowadays in China.

4 We also have a measure of city institutional trust, which includes the Supreme Court of Shanghai, the Supreme Procuratorate of Shanghai, and the Congress of Shanghai and the Municipal Government of Shanghai. The average score for this measure is significantly lower than that of state institutional trust. As this measure is highly correlated with the national institutional trust (.87), we did not include it in our models.

5 We have examined some additional control variables, such as administrative/legal mobilization, political power and influence, legal consciousness, knowledge of law, religious affiliations, authoritarian orientation, political parties, private entrepreneurs, and employment status etc. These variables have been found to be significant correlates in the literature (Wu and Sun 2009, Sun, Hu et al. 2012, Li 2013 Sun, Wu et al. 2013, Wu, 2016). However, none of them are significant in predicting confidence in the police in our final models and thus we have dropped them in analyses.