Researchers in Denmark, the US and Hong Kong find initial strong support for Beijing’s response fell sharply in 2022.
The Chinese government enjoyed significantly increased public support after the first Covid-19 lockdown in Wuhan, but its approval saw a “sharp decline” – to lower than pre-pandemic levels – in the wake of Shanghai’s 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 – 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 2½ 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 – after Shanghai’s two-month lockdown – compared to March that year, weeks before the city shut down.
The sudden decrease in support – from 8.6 in March to 7.8, even lower than 2019’s level – was a possible trigger for the protests against China’s harsh zero-Covid policy that spread to a number of cities a few months later, the researchers said.
The authors – Yue Guan from Aarhus University in Denmark, the University of California San Diego (USCD)’s Lei Guang and Yanchuan Liu, and Lianjiang Li of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University – 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’s school of global policy and strategy.
