A major survey report from Harvard was just released, finding that satisfaction among Chinese citizens with all levels of gov have steadily increased from 2003-2016.

The survey up-ends numerous myths about China that I'll try to summarize below https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time?admin_panel=1&utm_campaign=China_Public_Opinion_Survey&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_source=ashtwitter

The big question of this report was "Is the CPC losing legitimacy?" The answer is overwhelmingly No and that actually CPC legitimacy is *increasing*.

Keep in mind, this is a policy paper meant for DC think tanks and elite decision making bodies.

China's urban and rural poor seem to have benefited the most in recent years, with these groups reporting dramatically higher increases of satisfaction. The increase is higher in peripheral regions

Across the board, Chinese citizens are more satisfied with their gov at every lvl

With local officials, Chinese citizens are more satisfied concerning a variety of issues. Big increases in kindness, problem solving, concern with ordinary people, etc. (I'd like to see a comparative survey in the US)

In particular, there's been a massive increase in satisfaction on the outcomes of dealing with local government. If you interact with a local official, you're much more likely to be satisfied with the outcome

The report also tracked the re-expansion of public services which began under Hu Jintao and is continuing under Xi, reintroducing many of the programs lost from the Iron Rice Bowl. The report notes that urban-rural inequality may be shrinking under Xi

One other interesting bit from the report found that about 2/3 of Chinese citizens would be willing to participate in environmental protests. This challenges the lie that Chinese citizens are too afraid to protest their government. I thought this was an "authoritarian regime"?

Some meta-thoughts about this report: interesting to me that Harvard appears to have sat on this data for quite some time. Is it normal for survey results to be released 4 years after the last data point was collected?

Maybe it just took a long time to process the data. Or maybe the data was provided to "other audiences" before it could be released for public consumption. Given the generally positive conclusions from the data, maybe they wanted to hold this close to the chest first.

The underlying function of this report, IMO, was to give an accurate understanding of how US imperialism could disrupt China and cause social unrest. The report found that Chinese citizens' positive view of the CPC is based on material (economic) gains and effective governance.

Given that this report's data collection immediately preceded Trump's election and the start of the trade war, I'm betting data was first passed to the US gov first to inform its current strategy against China