The Structure and Strength of Regime Support in China: Findings from National Surveys

The authoritarian regime in China wields two distinct powers. On the one hand, the central government, the Communist Party, and the National People’s Congress exercise ruling power to formulate policies, enact laws, and issue orders that are binding throughout the country. On the other hand, local governments, the civil service, and the police exercise administrative power to implement policies, enforce laws, and execute orders with considerable discretion. People render support to the regime based on assessments of the trustworthiness of the two sets of power-exercising institutions. For most people, their two assessments converge into three patterns of largely coherent judgments, namely, full support, ambivalence, and full disapproval. However, about a quarter of the population indicate only partial support; they trust the ruling power but distrust administrative power. Existing studies overlook the structural features of regime support in the People’s Republic of China and overestimate its strength by conflating some respondents’ trust in ruling power with full regime support. This study proposes a typology-based measurement that captures the structural features and assesses the strength of regime support more accurately.