Social Attitudes in Contemporary China

Chen Yu, Fang Wei, Liqing Li, Paul Morrissey, Nie Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138102019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317435860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Unlike many studies of social attitudes, which are based on large scale quantitative surveys, or which focus on the attitude of elites, this book considers the views of ordinary people, and is based on in-depth, qualitative interviews. This approach results in rich, nuanced data, and is especially helpful for highlighting ambivalent attitudes, where respondents may hold positive and negative views on a particular topic, views which are liable to change. The book examines attitudes on a range of subjects of current importance, including views on nationalism and internationalism, housing preferences, and educational ambitions. Throughout, the book explores how far attitudes are influenced by traditional Chinese values or by the neo-liberal outlook fostered by recent reforms, and concludes that materialism and individualism have increased.

1
Introduction

Paul Morrissey

It has always struck me as remarkable, almost improbable, that in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping redirected the course of China’s economy at the same time as President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher set course for a radically conservative capitalism, as if all three were reading von Mises, Hayek and Friedman at the same time. The last 40 years has seen a tumult of political, economic, social and technological change which has affected China as much as any country on the globe, and an awareness of these changes, presented later, may permit some understanding of the attitudes and ideologies presented in this book. But the question which this book attempts to address is: have these tumultuous changes also brought about a revolution in the Chinese psychological landscape?

What does the Chinese citizen think, feel and believe about her economic, political, technical and social environment? Where would she like to go college? Where would she prefer to live? What does she think about the world beyond her national boundaries? Who does she communicate with when she goes online? How have these feelings and beliefs changed from those of previous generations? Our goal in this book is to contribute to what is recorded about the feelings, thoughts and beliefs of people in contemporary China, through a number of case studies and the analysis of the primary data that these have allowed. We do not aspire to provide a meta understanding of the field, but we do aspire to offer fresh insights and to stimulate the reader’s thinking in ways that might lead to further fruitful investigation. We do not regard the feelings, thoughts and beliefs of the contemporary Chinese citizen to be starkly simple; indeed, we offer a complexity, a level of nuance and a catalogue of inconsistency regarding these which both contribute to and extend the existing work.

There is plenty of easily digestible information available to the Western reader should he be interested in the questions outlined previously. Let’s take an example. On a beautifully presented website, with very accessible graphics, Eli Bildner tells us that 80 per cent of Chinese are satisfied with their country’s economic direction, as they have been for many years, and that Chinese respondents once again topped the list in terms of their level of satisfaction over their nation’s development (www.tealeafnation.com). Further, Bildner informs us that a similar percentage of Chinese respondents also agree that people can live better in a free market economy, a figure which surpasses that of the US and European nations and is at the forefront of satisfaction ratings worldwide. The site claims to use data from the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, a resource that I will return to later, and states that Pew conducted more than 3,100 surveys in China to collect the data. But comments on the site are encouraged and true to the style of many such internet spaces, typify the sorts of problems which this genre of data, and its methodology, faces. I found one such comment, relating to the ‘do people live better in a free market economy’ question, particularly pointed:

To be honest I don’t understand the questions. It is not true that China is a free market economy. China is a mixed economy in which economic development is a combination of market forces and state planning and intervention. Just like Singapore or South Korea, which have a market-driven economy with large state intervention. I find it astonishing that such polls put questions that assume that market economy is the same thing everywhere.

(Ibid.)

This book is not a critique of the survey methodology; indeed, the authors all concur that surveys have their rightful place in rigorous research. We accept that because it is easy, cheap and convenient, the conventional method of measuring social attitudes is to ask questions, often in writing, regarding an imaginary, or symbolic, situation; and because of this ease, convenience, economy and mechanical nature, the survey questionnaire has rightfully become a major tool in sociological and socio-psychological methodology. Indeed, all of the authors of this book have used the survey methodology in their own work in one way or another: survey data does appear in some of the chapters to follow. But we also accept that there are spaces into which the survey cannot go. Richard LaPiere famously painted a verbal picture for his students 80 years ago regarding the disjuncture between the symbolic Armenian lady on the bus and the symbolic negative reaction of the Armenian male (as a respondent to a questionnaire, in the comfort of a coffee shop) to the question of whether he should stand up for her, with the experience of the same Armenian male being on the bus with all the emotional reality of ‘stolidly avoiding the hurt eyes of the hypothetical woman and the derogatory stares of the other occupants of the bus’ (LaPiere 1934). His point was that an attitude or belief does not always equate to behaviour.

Our contribution here emerges from material relating to social, economic, technological and international dimensions, using the words and recorded preferences of PRC residents, material which has been collected within the last five years. We emphasise that all the data for this piece has been collected in China from ordinary Chinese citizens; the words and views are not of any elite group, nor of individuals who have been granted special permission to speak to the researchers. While the reliability of some research into attitudes in the PRC has often been questioned by Western scholarship, due to a lack of methodological transparency, we argue that the data here has been collected with due rigour.

Following this introduction, there are four further sections in this chapter. First, there will be a review of other writing relating to attitudes, values and ideologies in contemporary China, after which this will be an examination of the attitude construct, and an exploration of the qualitative and pro-qualitative methodology, the methodology which was used to collect much of the data for this piece; the final section will attempt to outline the contexts which frame the case studies which form the landscape of this book.

A review of work on attitudes in China

This section will draw upon examples of published work on attitudes in the PRC by both Chinese and Western scholars, in order to demonstrate the scale of this literature and to demonstrate some of the issues surrounding the collection of data on attitudes (see, for example, Johnston, A. and Stockman, D. on anti-Americanism, Cao, S., Chen, L. and Liu, Z. 2009 on attitudes to the environment, Chen, X. et al., on attitudes to child rearing, and Fairbrother, G. on attitudes to political education). It will point out and discuss the fact that some of these studies use elite interviews as a data collection method, while others collect the data from ‘ordinary’ citizens; some studies use data which has been collected from online or other surveys. Also discussed will be the work of the Pew Research Centre, in particular the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, which has presented a number of China-based topics using face-to-face interviews.

But before the review of this literature, one must acknowledge that in discussing attitudes, it is impossible to ignore other concepts such as values, beliefs, opinions and ideologies. Certainly, these concepts will be mentioned in the following chapters. It’s important here to outline my position regarding the enormous amount of theoretical and empirical literature on the concepts of values, attitudes and beliefs. Some have described this literature as contradictory: ‘Often, these concepts are used indiscriminately, even interchangeably, creating confusing and misleading theoretical propositions and empirical research results’ (Bergman 1998: 81). I accept Bergman’s summary that we should regard ‘an attitude (as) the cognitive construction and affective evaluation of an attitude object by an agent’, and ‘a value … as the cognitive and affective evaluation of an array of objects by a group of agents’ (ibid.: 87). This makes it clear that ‘value’ has more to do with the collective and a more general outlook, while ‘attitude’ has more to do with the individual and a defined, specific object. What I see is an inverted pyramid of concepts rooted in the Chinese psyche; I concur with Faure when he asserts that in China, what can be observed and recorded are behaviours, feelings and beliefs, and that behind these behaviours, feelings and beliefs, deeper in human personality, are anchored values:

Values elicit behaviours, explain them. Before surveying the set of values that makes the Chinese so specific to Westerners, we have to touch upon something even less visible: Chinese perception and thinking.

(Faure, G.O. 2002)

Let us start our review of the literature here, with Faure’s notion of ‘Chinese perception and thinking’. De Menthe’s The Chinese Mind: Understanding Traditional Chinese Beliefs and Their Influence on Contemporary Culture is typical of the genre of work that appears to be aimed at a wide readership. De Menthe’s piece is an examination of contemporary Chinese culture, offering insights into the values, attitudes and behaviour patterns of modern China – and their roots in the history of the nation. He insists that certain historical concepts are vital for an understanding of contemporary China and contemporary Chinese attitudes and behaviour, including yin and yang, the search for balance in all things, mianji, the importance of face, hong, looking at things holistically, de, the power of virtue, guo cui, the national essence of the Chinese, zhong fu, the pursuit of insight, and, bi, unity the Chinese way. His approach is of course fundamentally different from that of all the others described here in that The Chinese Mind is based on secondary data, and is his own reinterpretation of erstwhile cultural elements; the other writings, including this book, are based on fresh, or at least fresher, primary sources.

There is a great variety of empirical survey work by Chinese scholars interested in specific attitude objects, and projects which are designed to investigate an array of attitude objects. The reasons for such work are myriad, but it is interesting to note Sun’s comment that it is not only academics who concern themselves with how people feel and behave; he asserts that how the public feel and behave are becoming more important to the carrying out of domestic and foreign policies, and that therefore the Chinese government has extended a great deal of effort in seeking to understand what the public think (Sun 2013).

The Beijing Area Studies Survey of Beijing Residents (BAS) is one of the larger and longer term projects: surveys started in 1995, giving the project a unique longitudinal perspective. The BAS has been conducted annually since 1995 by the Research Centre on Contemporary China (RCCC) at Beijing University, and was apparently modelled on the University of Michigan’s Detroit Area Study (Johnson and Stockman 2007). The survey claims that sampling is done according to probability proportional to size (PPS), a form of stratified random sampling, and involves lengthy face-to-face interviews with respondents conducted by trained graduate students. Among its limitations is the fact that BAS responses are only from residents of the Beijing area, and only from residents with a Beijing hukou (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the hukou system), thus excluding both migrants resident in Beijing and all those Chinese citizens who live outside the capital.

We can see from the title of a research project under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, ‘China General Social Survey’ (www.uchicago.cn), that academics are certainly very interested in observing changing perspectives. I choose an example here from data provided by the ‘China General Social Survey’ to provide an insight into the contextual complexity, hitherto unmentioned here, and the procedural problems inherent in studying social attitudes in a nation which is so structurally fractured. Peilin Li and Yi Zhang suggest that the unprecedented social transformation and the ensuing complexity of the social reality in China have brought great importance, and great difficulties, to the research on the middle class in China. It is this group, the middle class, who are considered the nation’s actual and potential change-makers, those whose opinions ought to be taken into account (Peilin and Yi 2008). Peilin and Yi were interested in the definition and scale of the middle class in transitional China and whether those defined as middle class perceive themselves as middle class (op. cit.). Their research was based on data collected for the project ‘China General Social Survey’ (op. cit.) for 2006 using 7,063 questionnaires covering the whole country.

Drawing on various definitions and measurements of the middle class by scholars from different countries and in different social realities, the authors employ three variables – income, occupation and educational capital – to identify the Chinese middle class. And interestingly, the authors report the social and cultural factors which caused complications. Average income, for example, is taken as the average income of urban hukou holders, rather than a national average income. Further, there is the cultural tradition of being reticent regarding one’s wealth; to overcome this reticence, the authors readjusted income reported by respondents to improve the reliability of the data. How this readjustment was calculated and what effect it had on the results is not known, but the results are nevertheless very interesting. Those who met all three criteria variables – income, occupation and educational capital – are seen as ‘core middle class’, those who meet two are ‘half-core middle class’, and those who meet one are referred to as ‘the marginal middle class’. Research data showed that nationwide, the middle class constituted 12.1 per cent of the population, with 3.2 per cent ‘core middle class’ and 8.9 per cent ‘half-core middle class’; a further 13.7 per cent were defined as ‘marginal middle class’. However, 25.4 per cent of the urban population (7.0 per cent ‘core middle class’ and 18.4 per cent ‘half-core middle class’) were identified, with a further 24.3 per cent seen as ‘the marginal middle class’.

This work, and the thinking behind it, is significant. Within the literature relating to the study of contemporary Chinese attitudes, the problem of ‘who one should ask’ frequently emerges. Lu and Alon’s study (2004) into changing perspectives notes a new socio-type, and it is this socio-type – the young and educated – with which they engage in their empirical work. Lu and Alon aim to define the group within the current social strata of China and to differentiate it from other social groups, and they argue that not only do the young and educated form a significant consumer base, but they are a barometer of changing attitudes. This arises partly because of their role as a specialized labour force for multinational companies, and their consequent contact with external ideas. In the chapters which follow, the authors engage with the same socio-group, the young and educated, whose responses are recorded and analysed.

I now turn to some pieces from Western literature which focus on social attitudes. Johnson and Stockman’s 2007 article is an example of that category which investigates a particular attitude or sub-set of attitudes. They use language analysis, interviews, quantitative content analysis and survey data to examine Chinese attitudes towards the United States from multiple angles. One of the reasons for my choice of this article is that the topic under review has a certain resonance with Liqing Li’s contribution in Chapter 3, and there are other reasons. Johnson and Stockman provide useful comments on methodological issues which face this area of study:

… the problem is that conventional...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Exploring Chinese young people’s attitudes towards online communication and relationship formation: liberation, autonomy and ambivalence
• 3 Probing into attitudes and perceptions towards nation and nationalism in contemporary China: uncertainty, scepticism and disdain
• 4 Attitudes to housing tenures among young people in transitional China
• 5 Beliefs and behaviours: accessing higher education in contemporary China
• 6 Conclusions
• Index