Political Values and Political Trust in the Digital Era: How Media Engagement Divides Chinese Netizens

Abstract

China’s rapid modernization has generated a vibrant online community over the past 20 years. While there is an established body of work on the impact of traditional media on political opinion in China, the patterns and political impact of media engagement among tens of millions of Chinese ‘netizens’ remain under-researched. Using data from the 2015 Chinese Netizens Attitudes Survey, this paper attempts to ameliorate this issue. The results of latent class analysis suggested that most Chinese netizens tend to be active followers of social media and to display low levels of interest in state media. We found that respondents in the online survey were overall much more critical of political institutions on different levels comparing to existing findings based on offline surveys. Those netizens who were strongly attached to social media appeared to be significantly less likely to advocate authoritarian, collectivist, and nationalistic values and to display much lower levels of political trust, whereas the opposite was true of those who were strongly attached to state media. These findings suggest that social media serves as an incubator for critical political reviews and liberal values in China’s online communities, challenging the influence of traditional state-sanctioned media.

Keywords:

• China
• social media
• state media
• political trust
• value orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the Chinese National Survey Data Archive. Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study. Data are available from http://cnsda.ruc.edu.cn/, with the permission of Chinese National Survey Data Archive.

Notes

1 In 2016, 53% of the Chinese population were Internet users, as compared to 3% in 2001 (World Bank, 2018). In the same year, the number of smartphone users in China reached 626 million, which means that one in three smartphone users globally were Chinese.

2 This pattern is clear in many prominent social surveys such as the Chinese General Social Survey, the Chinese Labour Dynamics Survey, the World Values Survey and Asian Barometer.

3 This survey was led by Professor Ma Deyong of Nan Kai University in Tianjin, China. Data is accessible via the Chinese National Survey Data Archive (CNSDA) (http://cnsda.ruc.edu.cn/).

4 The parental and respondent’s class in the data was converted from occupational titles and employment status via the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO 1988) and the EGP schema. The classification has been validated in previous research on occupational attainment and social mobility in China (e.g. Li et al., 2015).

5 The question for social trust was: ‘Do you agree that, in our society, most people can be trusted?’ Response items followed a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. The question for happiness was: ‘Overall, do you feel that you are happy?’ Response items followed a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from ‘very unhappy’ to ‘very happy’. The question for interest in politics was: ‘How often do you discuss domestic and international political/economic/social issues with other people?’ Response items followed a 4-point Likert scale, ranging from ‘almost never’ to ‘regularly’.

6 For example, based on a scale of 1 (extremely distrusting) to 10 (extremely trusting), Chinese respondents in the 2006 and 2010 Asian Barometer displayed an average score of 8.7 on trusting national-level institutions and an average score of 6.7 on trusting local-level institutions (Wu and Wilkes, 2018). Similarly, according to 2012 CGSS data, 77% of respondents said that they trusted central government leaders ‘very much’ or ‘fairly’, while the proportion was 55% in the case of local government leaders.

7 It is worth mentioning that the response items for the question a mixture of time measurements (e.g. ‘more than one hour a day’ and ‘almost daily’) and subjective estimates (e.g. ‘occasionally’ and ‘sometimes’). As such, the scale appears to move from counting days and/or hours to subjective judgements. A similar issue is also discernible in the options ‘more than one hour a day’ and ‘almost daily’, which are ambiguous and somehow overlap in the context of Mandarin language. Combined, these items are likely to introduce significant measurement errors. While we attempt to resolve the problem by dichotomizing the answers, this deficiency in the design of the questionnaire needs to be addressed.

8 As mentioned earlier, political news reports on Web 1.0 media such as Sina and Sohu are highly likely to echo reports in official state media as their political information is sourced directly from state media or sanctioned local news agencies. Web 1.0 media often serve as shovelware for traditional media as they rarely employ journalists to produce first-hand news reports. Therefore, we speculated that the four items for state media would strongly correlate with the two items for Web 1.0 media in the analysis. This was confirmed in an additional test (available on request), in which we found that the two items for Web 1.0 media are significantly correlated with all four items for state media, whereas their associations with the four items for Web 2.0 media are relatively much weaker.

9 The work of Wu and Wilkes (2018: 10) offers an example. Based on data from the 2006 and 2010 Asian Barometer Survey, the authors found that Chinese respondents tended to have higher levels of hierarchical orientation and paternalistic values relative to citizens of most of the other countries in North-East, South-East, and East Asia. Although they ranked lower in group orientation, Chinese respondents’ average score (5.6) in this category was still above average (5.0).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yinxuan Huang

Yinxuan Huang is research associate at the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at The University of Manchester. His research covers a range of social and political issues, such as trust, religion, ethnic minorities, Brexit, and Chinese society. Recent publications include the 2019 article ‘Social Life and Political Trust in China: Searching for Machers and Schmoozers’ in International Political Science Review and the 2020 article ‘Exploring the Imprints of Christian Upbringing in the 2016 EU Referendum’ in the Journal of Contemporary Religion.

Lei Wang

Lei Wang is an Associate Professor at Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Honorary Research Fellow at Department of Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Manchester. His main research interests include spatial development in China and its sustainable challenges in the process of rapid urbanization and industrialization. His research analysis tends to use eastern China as the empirical testbed as it is relatively more developed to allow meaningful analysis of the dynamic process of change.