Chinese government's handling of the pandemic boosted people's trust: survey

Chinese government's handling of the pandemic has actually boosted its people's trust, according to a survey published on The Washington Post.

The empirical research was conducted by Carrie Wu, a sociology professor at York University, in collaboration with 17 Chinese academics. Nearly 20, 000 respondents were recruited in online interviews, covering people from various educational background and administrative regions.

The survey inquired people's trust in all 5 levels of government, namely the township, county and city level as well as the provincial and national levels.

Chinese government already enjoyed very high levels of trust from its citizens before the pandemic, said the report. The result of The 2018 World Values Survey was quoted as saying 95 percent of Chinese citizens said they trust in national government.

According to the survey, the high level of trust in national government even rose further to 98 percent. The other four levels of government also saw a universal increase of trust levels.

The survey also found out nearly half of the respondents said they had become more trusting in the national government since the COVID-19 pandemic started, with 48 percent reporting no change. Only 3 percent had become less trusting.

Besides the quantitative research, the survey also identified the denotation of the trust from a qualitative perspective.

"Understanding the impact of political trust requires making a distinction between diffuse and specific trust. Diffuse trust is moral, value-driven and reflects a deep-seated orientation toward political community as a whole. Specific trust, in contrast, is based on how citizens evaluate government outputs and performance," the report clarified.

Under this dimension, the survey found 44 percent of the respondents showed specific trust. In other words, they critically evaluated the government based on facts, and therefore a high level of trust (89 percent) among this group of people had a significant meaning.

These were people who "look at government performance with a critical eye," said the report, "and a high level of trust among them reflects Chinese citizens' true satisfaction with their government performance during the pandemic."

According to a Statista survey on evaluation of government's response to the pandemic, people's satisfaction levels in the US, UK and Germany were 30 percent, 35 percent, 55 percent respectively. Surveys conducted by CVoter showed a drastic fall in the Indian people's approval ratings toward their government, as the pandemic continues to rage on across India.