Editor's note: This article was translated and edited from an article that appeared on the Boxun.com news service. It concerns a recent survey of political opinions conducted by a university professor. Though intended for a broader spectrum, the online survey attracted mostly young, well-educated, city-dwelling Internet users (a.k.a. netizens), which the article's author (Shanghai special correspondent Cao Guoxing) believes accounts for the predilection toward Western political systems and the opposition to the "Chongqing model" associated with the recently stricken politician, Bo Xilai .

On July 13, Li Kaisheng, a political scholar and associate professor at Xiangtan University in Hunan Province, published the results of a survey he conducted on the

"Political and Social Consciousness of Chinese Internet Users" on the popular social commentary website 21ccom.net.

According to Li, Chinese people's views on social and political problems will most likely influence the direction of China's development. He believes the most scientific approach to conducting a survey on this topic would be to select samples in layers according to gender, ethnicity, geography, and culture prior to conducting interviews by phone or in person. However, without proper funding, this kind of survey is impossible. Unfortunately, in the current political environment, individual researchers find it difficult to draw such funding from domestic sources, while many, to avoid suspicion, also opt out of applying for international funding, as Li eventually did.

To save on costs, Li conducted his survey electronically via the online survey service SoJump. He posted information about the survey on his personal Weibo and QQ accounts and used email to invite contacts to participate. The survey was available from April to May of this year, pulling in a total of 4,697 usable samples. According to Li, "Because we only had limited methods and channels for communication, most of the samples we collected were limited to online users… out of 4,697 samples, only 58 people respondents completed and uploaded the offline version, making up only 1.23% of our total sample size."

Most responders are well-educated urbanites

College graduates and city dwellers make up a significant majority of those who completed the survey. Responding to online inquiries on how well the sample represents the population at large, Li admitted, "Most people who contacted us are students, teachers, and researchers. This group naturally tends to comprise mostly college graduates and those who live in cities." Because participants tended to be young, educated, high-earning city-dwellers, the survey essentially became a study on the political leanings of young netizens, rather than the entire Chinese population.

Li believes this group tends to be the most active in internet communities, saying that their viewpoints and opinions tend to be the ones that stand out the most, and that their ideas concerning social and political problems may have disproportional influence on the survey results. Because of this, Li believes the results of his survey can serve as a kind of micro-portrait of the political and social opinions of Chinese society, especially those who use the Internet.

Favorite political heroes: a surprising disparity

The first section of the survey is titled "Basic political consciousness," in which participants were asked to list the political figures of which they most approve and most disapprove.

The top five "most approved" politicians were: Zhou Enlai (36.13%), George Washington (35.64%), Hu Yaobang (34.68%), Deng Xiaoping (30.79%), and Abraham Lincoln (23.91%). The top five "most disapproved" were Adolf Hitler (49.41%), Joseph Stalin (46.54%), Kim Jong-Il (45.54%), Mao Zedong (41.84%), and Muammar Gaddafi (24.19%).

Interestingly, out of all contemporary Chinese leaders, Zhou Enlai leads the "most approved" list, while Mao Zedong is one of the "most disapproved." Also interesting is that Mikhail Gorbachev's rates of approval and disapproval were quite close: 12.88% and 12.45% respectively. Perhaps this illustrates that, even amongst the relatively radical opinions of young Chinese Internet users, there still exists a fairly large disparity of opinion on the subject of notable political figures.

Favorite governments: how much should China learn from the West?

Participants were also asked to list the national governments of which they most approved and disapproved. The top five "most approved" governments were found to be the United States (71.98%), Sweden (32.38%), the United Kingdom (30.76%), Germany (28.81%), and Singapore (27.51%), Singapore being the only non-western nation. The five "most disapproved" governments were North Korea (73.62%), China (54.12%), Iran (32.38%), Vietnam (11.33%), and Pakistan (11.16%). Communist governments apparently rank high on the list, perhaps owing to the majority of respondents being younger, more radically opinionated Internet users.

The Chinese official media has repeatedly criticized Western governments with a tripartite (three branches of government) system. Survey results, however, indicate that only 1.49% of participants fully support the official Chinese opposition to Western political systems, whereas 67.64% believe the tripartite system to be reasonable, and worthy of at least partial adoption by the Chinese government. Furthermore, 28.4% believe China should completely embrace every aspect of Western systems.

Li believes Chinese netizens generally support democracy, tripartite governments, and the political systems of developed Western countries, though their understanding of democracy still emphasizes the people taking care of their own affairs, representation by government leaders, and other ideals of the Chinese system.

Participation in local elections remains low

In China today, the law allows the average person to vote in two kinds of circumstances: either in an election of a base-level self-governing body (like a village or residential committee), or for National People's Congress elections for the county-level and below. Survey results show that respondents' participation in both kinds of elections are very low, no more than 20%. Respondents who "know about the elections but have never participated" make up 56.76% for village or residential committee elections and 46.63% for NPC elections.

73.66% of those surveyed have never participated in any non-governmental organization, suggesting that Chinese society is currently in a state of atomization, and that the role of non-governmental organizations in Chinese society and politics is still quite low. Moreover, the survey results indicate that, at least currently, active participation in politics is also quite low: more than half (56.12%) of survey participants are content to monitor the actions of the government without taking part, while less than 30% are willing to participate publicly.

Additionally, most of those surveyed believe corruption in China to be a serious issue. In the survey results, "corruption" ranks higher than "not enough democracy" and "society is unjust" on their evaluation of China's current biggest problems.

Ethnic problems? It depends on who you ask

Another noteworthy section of the survey concerns ethnic issues in China. Only 4.77% believe ethnic issues to be a serious challenge to China today, though even the results themselves appear to be ethnically correlated: only 4.38% of the Han Chinese respondents believe ethnic issues to be a serious problem, compared to 44.44% of Uyghur respondents and 30.00% of Tibetan respondents.

Of course, with only 18 Uyghur and 10 Tibetan respondents, the sample size wasn't enough to influence reliability of the results, though the huge disparity is itself indicative of a troublesome phenomenon, namely that the Han majority and two of the biggest minorities disagree so significantly on the ethnic issue.

Bo Xilai and the "Chongqing model": what's the damage?

On April 10th, three days before the start of the survey, the Xinhua news service officially announced an investigation into the termination of prominent politician Bo Xilai, effectively dropping an explosive final curtain on the infamous "Chongqing model" (characterized in part by increased state control and the promotion of a neo-leftist ideology which involved campaigns against organized crime and mass public work programs), though online discussions continued to rage on the subject.

Although the largest portion (49.89%) of those surveyed disagrees with the "Chongqing model" (including both "disagree" and "strongly disagree"), many (20.33%) remained neutral. Most notably, support of the model's so-called "experiments" was as high as 15.71% (including both "support" and "strongly support").

Most agree that the Chongqing model employed mass movements, sacrificed the rule of law and was opposed by intellectuals. However, although more than 80% of those surveyed had graduated from university, opponents of the Chongqing model weren't as many as one might expect. The survey did show however, that many were happy with the fact that Bo's political career had effectively ended, a viewpoint consistent with many who follow and comment on Chinese politics on online social media.
 

Source: boxun.com
 

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Keywords: Chinese netizens online survey political opinion Chinese netizens