According to a 2022 Pew Research study, 82% of Americans have a negative view of the Chinese political system. 42% of Americans are very critical of what they see as China’s human rights offenses. 43% are very concerned about China’s growing military power. And 47% resent what they believe to be China’s involvement, or meddling, with US domestic politics. [1]
A 2021 Pew study found that 89% of US adults consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner. [2] In August of 2022, Foreign Affairs magazine published an editorial by Elbridge Colby urging the United States to do more to prepare for war with China due to the increasing likelihood of a People’s Liberation Army (mainland China’s military) invasion of Taiwan. [3]
These attitudes are reminiscent of the Cold War era, when Ronald Reagan denigrated the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Such a characterization, of course, factors out everything good that the political leadership may have done for the people in that country. [4]
Inspired by this year’s APSA conference theme of “Rights and Responsibilities in an Age of Mis- and Disinformation,” we ask, to what extent is US negative public opinion towards the Chinese political system a result of misinformation, disinformation, or both?
We go beyond mere “fact checking.” The “facts” selected may be correct, but facts can be presented in ways that influence the positive or negative attitudes that the public fashions as a result of the information to which they are exposed. This paper, then, will propose a way to make an evidence-based assessment of the appropriateness of the public’s negative or positive images of a political system.
We start with a reminder of David Easton’s definition of the “political system” as behavior related to the authoritative allocation of values for a society. The system has five elements: inputs, conversion, outputs, feedback, and the environment in which it operates. Easton intended this scheme to guide political science empirical research. However, the paper shows that he also, perhaps inadvertently, used the theory of the political system as a standard for assessing how well a system is operating.
He presents a Flow Chart as a model of the political system. The system works by information flowing from one phase to another. The functions of the system can be analyzed under two major standards of operational “goodness.” One is for how efficiently and effectively the flow proceeds. Is there waste, fraud, and abuse that interferes with the flow of the process? Secondly, Easton considers the effects of a system’s operations on membership’s opinion of their political system. Of course, such opinion can be empirically discovered.
Here is an evidence-based method for assessing the non-moral, operational goodness of a political system. In theory, at least, political scientists could empirically assess the goodness of any political system. An assessment of one system could be compared to that of another system. Comparisons might highlight high performance and low performance operations in the various systems. These assessments could also be contrasted with prevailing public attitudes favoring or condemning a political system. This might encourage leaders, media, and other people to re-think their opinions.
Current research shows that some of the operations in the Chinese political system, such as the conversion, or law and policy making, processes are currently difficult to discover. Thus, a complete assessment of how information flows through the system cannot be finalized. But there are some factors that can be contrasted with US negative opinions about China. For instance, a 2022 World Bank report states that “Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China [living in] extreme poverty—has fallen by close to 800 million.” viii This could be seen as an astonishing humanitarian accomplishment by the political system. In comparison, the number of people helped out of the ruins of WWII by the US Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and other Allied programs, has been estimated at just over 600M.
Probably related to this accomplishment, several pre-COVID studies show extraordinarily high levels of public approval of the Chinese political system. [5] One states that “95.5% of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing.” Another found that 82% of Chinese are optimistic about the future of their country, “in stark contrast to the pessimism found in the United States and much of Europe.”
Yet another study found that 97% of respondents expressed trust in the national government, and 79% for their local governments. Over 82% of the “middle class are proud of their state” and over half agreed “that their system of government does not need to be changed.” Indeed, far from wanting political change, about 77% “of Chinese believe that their way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence.” 45% see the US “as posing a major threat to their country … up from 39% in 2013.”
Of course, the authenticity of these responses should be carefully examined. But one may ask, how odious, or “evil,” can the Chinese political system be, when the human beings who live in it are so supportive of it?
As the APSA Theme Statement asks, “Given the potentially pernicious and polarizing effects of mis- and disinformation, how can we conceive of and undertake helpful research and scholarship?”
In response, this paper introduces the possibility of an empirical, evidence-based, method of assessing how well a political system is operating, including the assessment by the people living in it. Applying the method to the Chinese political system suggests ways in which the political science profession might participate in a public discussion which is so important that war and peace hang on the balance.
Twitter: @InterpretivePo1
Mastodon: https://sciences.social/@WilliamJKelleher
Notes
[1] The Pew Research study is reported at,
[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-must-prepare-war-over-taiwan
[4] The Russian Revolution ended centuries of brutal serfdom under the Tsars. Soviet contributions to space technology as well as to world literature are undeniably significant. The Soviet Union was our ally in WWII, and did much to defeat Germany, at a great sacrifice. Perhaps there is also good in China that our government and media are failing to shed light on for the American people
[5] Citations in the paper’s endnotes at,
https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/63056b2e11986c67ce43949e
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