Neil Thomas on regime support in the P.R.C.
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2019
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Neil Thomas of MacroPolo sits down with Kaiser to talk about what we know — and what we don’t know — about popular support for the Chinese political leadership. Taking into account the effects of censorship and propaganda, how much “natural” regime support is left, and what explains it?
8:51: How reliable are public opinion surveys of regime support?
19:53: Ian Johnson’s NYT op-ed on the October 1 parade
22:20: The Party and the People
38:18: Anniversaries and “dark anniversaries” — the significance of 2019
43:56: Hong Kong and Party legitimacy
Recommendations:
Neil: “Twists in the Belt and Road,” by Ryan Manuel.
Kaiser: New episodes of The China History Podcast on the Warlord Period.
This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, cynical listeners. I have a little clarification about an earlier show that I've tacked on to the end of this show, so listen to the end for that if you're interested, and enjoy. |
| 0:18.4 | Welcome to the cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 0:23.9 | SubChina is simply the best way there is to keep on top of all the important news coming out of China. |
| 0:28.1 | Our indispensable daily newsletter features a roundup of the news from hundreds of sources, plus links to the original writing on our website. |
| 0:35.3 | SIEOp for SubChina access access and you get all that and much more with |
| 0:38.4 | stories on everything from the Belt and Road to local entrepreneurship and innovation in China, |
| 0:42.5 | from the travails of ethnically Chinese researchers in the U.S. in this age of creeping McCarthyism, |
| 0:48.1 | to China's ongoing extra-legal internment of hundreds of thousands or by some estimates over a million Uyghurs and other |
| 0:54.9 | Muslims in China's Xinjiang region. We're sure you'll agree that it's a feast of business, |
| 1:00.1 | political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. I'm Kaiser Guo, |
| 1:05.2 | coming to you today from the Seneca South Studio in downtown Durham, North Carolina. What do we know |
| 1:10.6 | about how Chinese people feel toward |
| 1:12.6 | their political leaders? What can we say about popular attitudes toward individual political |
| 1:17.0 | figures like Xi Jinping or Wang Shishan toward the party itself, toward local and provincial |
| 1:21.9 | officials versus the central government, toward specific policies or toward China's foreign |
| 1:27.3 | relations? Obviously, without the benefit of |
| 1:29.8 | public opinion polling, except some highly circumscribed and in most cases officially sanctioned |
| 1:36.0 | polls, coming to any kind of rock-solid conclusions about any of this is really difficult. |
| 1:41.8 | Our own sense of things, it, based on our on the ground or |
| 1:45.1 | sometimes online observations, is pretty unreliable too. We suffer pretty badly from |
| 1:50.3 | selection bias. We're unsure as we're reading through Weibo posts or the comment sections |
| 1:56.3 | of news pieces of just who might be one of those paid commenters, one of those infamous members of the so-called |
... |
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