ABSTRACT
Any assessment of how successful the Chinese communist political system has been presents problems of what weight to assign to the various criteria of success. Those who place high value on the criterion of a government’s ability to keep the peace, or that of satisfying its citizens’ minimal needs for existence, will make a judgment very different from those whose greatest concerns are issues, such as human rights and freedom of the press. In addition, since every political system has both its backers and detractors, one would normally want to consult the opinions of Chinese themselves as to how successful they feel the system has been. Carefully read opinion polls can tell us much about changes in citizens’ views of their government over time. Only within the last twenty years, however, has the People’s Republic of China (PRC) begun to use opinion polling, and there are limitations on what may be concluded from local samples. Although respondents’ trust in the anonymity of their answers to pollsters has increased, researchers have noticed that replies tend to reflect what the respondents perceive to be “correct” answers based on their understanding of official policy. Moreover, no data are available for the past. Therefore, both we and, for that matter, the country’s leaders are deprived of the guidance such data might provide.
