Researchers in Denmark, the US and Hong Kong find initial strong support for Beijing\u2019s response fell sharply in 2022.<\/b>
\nThe Chinese government enjoyed significantly increased public support after the first Covid-19 lockdown in Wuhan, but its approval saw a \u201csharp decline\u201d \u2013 to lower than pre-pandemic levels \u2013 in the wake of Shanghai\u2019s shutdown two years later.
Researchers from three universities in Denmark, the United States and Hong Kong, found that people surveyed during the lockdown in February 2020 gave an average score of 8.5 out of 10 when rating their trust in Beijing \u2013 up from 8 out of 10 in May 2019.
Wuhan in central China was the original epicentre for the coronavirus which causes Covid-19. The city was locked down on January 23, 2020 for nearly 2\u00bd months, a strategy that was followed in many other cities as the virus spread across the world.
According to the study, published online on May 27 by the Journal of Contemporary China, trust in the central government fell sharply in September 2022 \u2013 after Shanghai\u2019s two-month lockdown \u2013 compared to March that year, weeks before the city shut down.
The sudden decrease in support \u2013 from 8.6 in March to 7.8, even lower than 2019\u2019s level \u2013 was a possible trigger for the protests against China\u2019s harsh zero-Covid policy that spread to a number of cities a few months later, the researchers said.
The authors \u2013 Yue Guan from Aarhus University in Denmark, the University of California San Diego (USCD)\u2019s Lei Guang and Yanchuan Liu, and Lianjiang Li of Hong Kong\u2019s Lingnan University \u2013 analysed eight online surveys of urban Chinese residents.
The surveys, which each had around 1,000 respondents, were conducted between May 2019 and September 2022 by the China Data Lab of the 21st Century China Centre at UCSD\u2019s school of global policy and strategy.
Respondents were asked to rate their level of trust in the central government but were not questioned on their opinions towards local governments, unlike similar surveys that were conducted.
The researchers were interested in the rally effect, a political science term that describes the tendency for governments to gain support when countries face an external crisis.
According to the study, the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdown of more than 10 million people in Wuhan was \u201cthe only major political event in the country that could have significantly affected trust in the central government\u201d, causing a rally effect.
In May 2020, a month after the Wuhan lockdown was lifted, average trust in the central government reached a record high of 8.9, the researchers said. For the next two years, the figure remained above 8.5 \u2013 significantly higher than in the 2019 survey.
The authors argued that the high level of trust was down to the fact that \u201cthe government completed the seemingly impossible mission of containing the virus within the country\u2019s borders\u201d, as well as the official propaganda praising Beijing\u2019s achievements in fighting the pandemic.
The researchers also cited the large number of Covid-19 deaths that were reported in other countries at the time, which \u201cgave the Chinese people good reason to continue to rely on the government for protection\u201d.
Turning to the sharp decline in trust noted two years later, the researchers said there may be several causes, \u201cbut the most likely triggering event was the disastrous Shanghai lockdown\u201d.
\u201cIt not only eroded political trust among those directly affected but also affected political trust nationwide,\u201d they wrote.
\u201cBy early 2022, repeated and frequent lockdowns had already led to harassment and caused suffering, draining people\u2019s patience and confidence. The Shanghai lockdown in spring 2022 dealt a decisive blow to public confidence.\u201d
According to the researchers, the two-month shutdown had a different impact on Shanghai compared with other cities and played a key role in the sudden erosion of public trust in the central government.
\u201cUnlike residents of other cities who were largely muted, those in Shanghai managed to make their voices heard,\u201d the researchers wrote.
\u201cThey kept exposing the increasingly insane control measures and the resulting widespread suffering and mounting discontent through audio and video clips on social media platforms like Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin.
\u201cAs social media pierced the information bubble bloated by censorship, the voices from Shanghai revealed to people across the country what was actually happening.\u201d
According to the researchers, the impact of Shanghai\u2019s lockdown was key to the widespread protests that broke out in November 2022 across several cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu.
Protesters called for an easing of the harsh Covid-19 restrictions \u2013 with some advocating for political change \u2013 after people gathered to mourn the deaths of 10 people in a fire in a block of flats in Xinjiang that was reportedly under lockdown.
Most of China\u2019s Covid-related controls were dropped in December 2022, in a move that some analysts have attributed to political pressure from the protests and the country\u2019s growing economic difficulties.
Beijing has consistently argued that both its pursuit of zero-Covid and the abrupt relaxation of controls were the right decisions.
However, the researchers noted that \u201ca policy that initially boosts public confidence in the central government can end up causing a potentially unrecoverable loss of trust in the top leader\u201d.<\/p>\n