ABSTRACT
Politicians in America and China have blamed each other for the COVID-19 pandemic, but prior surveys did not disaggregate blame attitudes. Using a 15-country survey conducted in June 2020 (the early stage of the pandemic), we make the first attempt at unpacking blame by asking: When people blame the US and/or China for the pandemic, who specifically do they blame — the national leader, the government, or the people? We find that whereas the most blamed actor in the US is President Trump, the most blamed actor in China is the Chinese government, not President Xi. In particular, mainland Chinese respondents blamed Xi the least, less than the Chinese people. Our findings indicate that Xi successfully avoided personal blame during the early stage of the pandemic, despite his personalization of power. This perception likely reflects his regime’s effective control of the virus using top-down mobilization methods, in contrast to the Trump administration’s dramatic politicking and mismanagement. This initial success in 2020 through 2021 bolstered Xi’s propagandistic claims about the “institutional advantage” of centralized authoritarian rule. By 2022, however, Xi’s insistence on maintaining “Zero-COVID” was no longer compatible with the milder strain of the virus and came at staggering social and economic costs. The mass protests and abrupt ending of Zero-COVID in November-December 2022 may have deflated Xi’s popularity and the credibility of his claims about the advantages of top-down controls.
