Research on policy experimentation has mainly focused on central–local relations; scholars have paid little attention to the interaction between policy experimentation and the public. We argue that policy experimentation can be used by decision makers as an instrument to communicate with the public, facilitating the building of a social consensus regarding controversial policies. We evaluate the effects of the Chinese government's policy experimentation efforts to promote shared responsibility between the state and individuals for the urban pension system on the public's regime support. Evidence from two rounds of a nationwide survey conducted before and after the policy experiment indicates that the policy experimentation has significantly contributed to citizens’ acceptance of their individual welfare responsibility. Moreover, the image-building of governmental responsibility via official news, with varied intensity across regions, consolidates the political trust of residents while posing a challenge to local government credibility in the long run.

This original analysis of the World Values Survey waves of 2007, 2012 and 2018 reveals important relationships among political trust and satisfaction, happiness, views of corruption, local elections and activism from the last half of the Hu Jintao administration through the first five years of Xi Jinping's rule. These data shed new light on the deeper dynamics underlying the high and growing levels of trust in government documented in other studies. Among this report's more novel findings, we find increased trust in government coincides with decreased local electoral participation, suggesting that participation in local elections is not key to perceptions of regime legitimacy. Views of corruption and a sense of personal efficacy through non-institutionalized forms of political participation such as peaceful demonstrations appear more relevant. Thus, constraints on people's ability to engage in peaceful demonstrations are likely to negatively impact views of regime legitimacy. In addition, the report uncovers demographic variations in these dynamics, indicating that regime legitimacy is more precarious among citizens at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and among younger Chinese. Overall, these findings complicate existing explanations of regime legitimacy centring on economic performance, nationalism, responsiveness/adaptiveness and efforts to combat corruption.

Survey results inflate political trust in China if the observed trust in the central government is mistaken for the latent trust in the Centre. The target of trust in the country is the Centre, which is ultimately the top leader. The critical issue domain for assessing the Centre's trustworthiness is policy implementation rather than policymaking. The Centre's trustworthiness has two dimensions: commitment to good governance and the capacity to discipline local officials. Observed trust in the central government indicates trust in the Centre's commitment, while observed trust in the local government reflects confidence in the Centre's capacity. A machine learning analysis of a national survey reveals how much conventional reading overestimates political trust. At first glance, 85 per cent of the respondents trust the central government. Upon further inspection, 18 per cent have total trust in the Centre, 34 per cent have partial trust and 33 per cent are sceptical.

Has survey nonresponse caused scholars to overestimate political trust in China? We analyse item nonresponse for sensitive questions on trust in government from our original survey of villagers conducted in China in 2012. We also analyse nonresponse in four other comparable surveys conducted in China between 1993 and 2014. We examine the association between nonresponse to politically sensitive questions and individual characteristics such as sex, level of education, Party membership and cosmopolitanism. We find that less privileged groups may be underrepresented in survey data generally. We find mixed results regarding the association between cosmopolitanism and nonresponse. We conclude that our understanding of political trust in China has been compromised by high rates of item nonresponse, leading to artificially high estimates of trust in the centre and exaggerated accounts of the gap between trust in central and local leaders.

China's blood-borne HIV catastrophe in the 1990s prompted the government to adopt a blood-collection system that combines voluntary donations with the state's monopoly on blood services. Juxtaposing fieldwork and survey data, this study examines how the intricate interplay between government manoeuvres and citizen reactions has led to blood shortages that are serious yet manageable. This article reveals that even though voluntary blood donations are adversely affected by a public distrust of state-run collection agencies, owing to political concerns healthcare officials shirk from engaging with citizens to overcome the distrust. It also finds that the blood shortages are nevertheless largely manageable because the authorities have the capacity to recruit captive donors through work units, with the caveat that such captive practices are used sparingly. Overall, this study argues that the lack of state–society synergy in voluntary donations, while exacerbated by government involvement, is also partially remedied by the government's mobilization of captive donors.

The social volcano thesis states that the rising inequality in China threatens regime stability. This idea, although widely held in the media and in academia, is backed by little positive evidence but by much negative evidence. Two primary pieces of negative evidence are that the Chinese people trust the central government and that they are highly tolerant of inequality. This paper discusses the shortcomings of the negative evidence and re-examines the thesis in a rigorous and direct way. Our multilevel analysis shows that provincial inequality has negative effects on individuals’ trust in the local government but not in the central government, and this negative effect holds for both the rich and the poor. Because distrust in the local government implies distrust in the central government, we conclude that a social volcano exists.

This article analyses the data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to investigate the effects of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on people's political trust and policy expectations in China. Results from difference-in-differences (DID) analyses show that those in the NRPS pilot areas reported higher levels of trust in government at both central and local levels than their counterparts in non-NRPS areas, with the former gaining more support than the latter. Moreover, the potential NRPS beneficiaries show similarly higher levels of trust in both central and local governments than non-NRPS beneficiaries. However, the policy did not increase rural residents’ rights consciousness that the government should take the main responsibility for the provision of the old-age support. These findings suggest that citizens' political trust under an authoritarian regime is mainly determined by the material benefits they receive.

Using official statistics and a pooled dataset of longitudinal surveys, the aim of this article is to examine the impact of the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) on political trust in Hong Kong. Our multilevel analysis found that the gradual inflow of IVS visitors (mostly overnight visitors) increased political trust in the first few years, but that this trust rapidly diminished in later years, especially after the introduction of the one-year multiple-entry IVS endorsement (which attracted mostly same-day visitors). The main reason for the reduction in the positive impact of the IVS scheme is that the growth in the number of same-day visitors has contributed less to Hong Kong's economy than has the increase in the number of overnight visitors, and has exacerbated several social problems. The impact of mainland visitors has varied across groups with different levels of education. The political trust of people with a senior secondary education has been enhanced more by the increase in overnight visitors and reduced less by the increase in same-day visitors than that of people with a tertiary level of education or a junior secondary education or below.

This paper argues that popular trust in the Chinese central government is significantly weaker than five national surveys suggest. The evidence comes from these surveys. First, the surveys show that between one- and two-thirds of respondents hold hierarchical trust, i.e. they have more trust in the central government than they do in local government. Second, all other things being equal, people who are less satisfied with political democracy in China tend to be less trusting of the central government. Finally, hierarchical trust holders tend to be less satisfied with political democracy in the country than those who express equal trust for central and local governments. Put together, the three findings show that hierarchical trust holders are less trusting of the central government than equal trust holders with regard to developing political democracy, although they sound equally confident. The fact that so many respondents hold hierarchical trust indicates that trust in the central government is significantly weaker than it looks.