The psychology of political discontent in China

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Rory Truex.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to The China Project’s daily Access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources, or check out all the original writing on our website at TheChinaProject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to the tectonic shifts underway as China rolls out what we call the Red New Deal. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

There is a growing body of literature that explores the relationship between psychology and politics, and that’s something that’s been a topic of considerable interest to me of late. If you’re in the U.S., there’s a good chance you’ve come across some of these studies, as quite a few of them have received a decent amount of media attention. So you might have heard about, for example, studies that look at traits like the disgust reaction, and how that seems to be positively correlated with political conservatism. Here in the U.S., we’ve been wrestling domestically with the specter of authoritarianism, so not surprisingly, there’s been a slew of papers looking at personality traits, some of which may actually have genetic components to them that predispose certain people toward acceptance of or even a preference for authoritarian leaders or political styles.

But frustratingly, I haven’t seen a whole lot of this applied to China. So when I came across a still-unpublished paper a couple of months ago by Rory Truex, a scholar at Princeton I esteem — when I came across this paper that looked at potential associations between certain personality traits and political discontent in China, I was naturally intrigued. It’s a great paper once you get your head around all the methodology and the statistics and such, and if you do go to RoryTruex.com, you’ll see it there among his recent papers. It’s called “Political Discontent in China Is Associated With Isolating Personality Traits.”

With the holidays now behind us, we were finally able to schedule some time to really dig into the paper, which again, I found really fascinating. Rory is an assistant professor in politics and international affairs at Princeton, and listeners to the show may remember him from a show that we did about a paper he and Sheena Greitens co-authored, where they looked at whether China’s scholars are engaging in self-censorship. Neysun Mahboubi joined us on that show.

Kaiser: Rory, man, it’s been too long. Welcome back to Sinica, at last.

Rory: It has been a long time, and I remember seeing you in Chapel Hill, and I think we got barbecue, back in the “before times.” And so, hopefully that can happen again someday.

Kaiser: Yeah, the before times: Prelapsarian ages. Yeah, barbecue is on the menu. So, Rory, this paper is another contribution to an increasingly rich catalog of papers and monographs that look at authoritarian resilience in China, right? Not too long ago, I had Manfred Elfstrom on the show, from the University of British Columbia. We were talking about his book on workers and protest in China, another book that I think falls very much in that category. And as we were chatting, I just kind of rattled off the names of quite a number of guests that I’ve had on the show, or people who I have been in dialogue with, who have written about one aspect of this topic or another, and it strikes me that authoritarian resilience is something of an obsession for younger American political scientists.

I am not exaggerating when I estimate that half of the assistant and associate professors that I know who work on China and now teach in political science departments do at least some of their work on, perhaps even the lion’s share of their work, the best-known work, on some facet of authoritarian resilience. So it’s you, Rory. It’s Manfred. There’s Sheena, whom we’ve mentioned. Maria Repnikova, Christian Sorace, Dan Mattingly, Molly Roberts, Jennifer Pan. I mean, these are just off the top of my head, so I’m sure I could come up with many more.

My question is, what’s up with that, Rory?

Rory: Well, it’s a good question, and now that you say all those names, it does seem to be something of a trend. And I would say that part of that reflects a societal conversation about China, right? So, there’s this general narrative, certainly in the popular media, that always paints the CCP as inherently unstable, and there’s a certain collapsism that exists in our own political discourse about China, sort of assuming that this is a system that’s doomed to fail at some point.

And in political science, most political scientists I know who are China scholars would argue against that point of view, and we draw heavily on this piece which you referenced, which is by Andrew Nathan, about authoritarian resilience. It just points to the many, many features of the CCP that have allowed it to last this long.

And so, I tend to think of that piece and that concept as sort of a jumping off point for us to think about some of the features of the CCP as a regime, and it is unusual. I think that’s part of the reason why we write about this, is most authoritarian regimes live sort of brutish, short, violent existences, and this is a very successful party, a very successful regime. And so, I think that’s the reason why we get into it that way.

But I think in the end, what we’re seeing is, people are delving into different aspects of the Chinese political system, and just trying to understand them as they operate, right? So you have Manfred working on labor, and someone like Molly working on censorship, and Maria working on media and other things. And that’s consistent with the long tradition of Chinese politics, of just trying to understand these institutions and aspects of society as well as we can.

I think there is a tendency to assume a lot of these practices or sort of nature of political participation in China is indicative of frailty and collapse in the system, right? So we think about protests and so forth. A lot of people see protest figures in China, and they assume that this indicates that people hate the government, and it’s on the verge of collapse. And so, I think a lot of people are arguing against that type of simplistic logic.

Kaiser: Yeah, no, I totally, I think you’re completely right on that, that there is this narrative in sort of public discussion about China, this kind of expectation that’s been confounded, so there’s a little bit of a residue of that.

I think maybe for a lot of people, and you guys are probably a little too young for this to have been the kind of motive force in this, but still, there’s a lot of overhang from the fact that the end of the Cold War came right on the heels of the suppression of the Tiananmen protests. And so, you saw the USSR dissolve. You saw Communist rule end throughout the Warsaw Pact. But somehow it didn’t in China, and so therein lies the mystery, right? So I think a lot of people, we’re still sort of thinking about that in the background, maybe subliminally.

But yeah, you’re right. Years ago, I was chatting with this friend of mine, this guy named Matt Stinson, who’s an American who was living in Tianjin for a very long time, 20 years or so. He observed that America’s great question about China always seems to boil down to, “Why don’t you people hate your government as much as I think you should?”

Rory: Yeah, no, and certainly, and I think we’ll talk about this more in our discussion today. When you present information, like data that we have from public opinion in China that suggests that Chinese people not only don’t hate their government but actually like their government, support the political system, you sort of run into that line of thinking. People say, “that must not be true. Of course they must dislike it,” or something like that. So, I think there’s, frankly, a little bit of wishful thinking, as people impute their own ways of thinking or their own desires onto the Chinese political system.

The one thing I wanted to add to our brief discussion of resilience is, I think a lot of the reason why people are writing about this topic again is because a lot of the features of the Chinese political system that people were identifying, Andrew Nathan in particular were identifying in the 2000s, those seem to be eroding, right?

Kaiser: Yeah.

Rory: To fit your narrative, right? So, the 1990s were about people expecting the Party to fall. It didn’t fall in 1989, but it sure looked brittle, and then the 2000s roll around. They had a successful leadership transition, and people started to write about how the Party was institutionalized, but it also had village elections, and all these other things going on that suggested that people had some mechanisms to voice their preferences, right?

And so now, a lot of those practices — certainly like leadership succession, institutionalization — those seem to be eroding under Xi Jinping, certainly civil society as well. And so then, the question is, well, are there sort of articles written about authoritarian resilience 2.0, or is the party losing its resilience? Is it more fragile than it used to be? And so there’s a renewed conversation because, of course, the China we see in 2022 is quite different than the China Andrew Nathan was writing about in 2002, and I think that’s part of the scholarly narrative.

Kaiser: Oh, no, for sure. And yeah, I mean, it doesn’t just seem to be eroding. They are eroding, right?

Anyway, you alluded to the fact that there’s always that skepticism that you’re greeted with when you do any kind of social science research in China that relies on surveys or questionnaires, right? There’s a lot of methodology in your papers I have alluded to, but I think you’re really good at putting that in layman’s terms, so let’s go right to that question that you raised, that one unavoidable methodological issue that always comes up any time you talk about regime support in China, or what appears to be regime support. There’s always going to be people that say, you can’t get honest responses in a media-controlled environment like China. There’s always this kind of implicit assumption on the part of a lot of people that if you give the wrong answer on a survey, you hear a knock at your door at 3 AM. So, there’s this claim of preference falsification, to use the sort of…

Rory: The jargon-y term. Yeah, let me just sort of outline a little bit about what that concept is, and why it’s an issue we all have to grapple with in survey research in China. The basic concern is that in authoritarian systems, people are nervous about voicing their true opinions.

And there’s the idea of preference falsification is that people will say one thing in public and feel another thing in private. And certainly, that behavior exists as a phenomenon, not just in social science, in authoritarian settings. It exists at Thanksgiving dinner, when you don’t really feel like really talking about politics, or whatever. So, people do these sort of subtle lies all the time.

But the question is, when we do a survey, and we see that people in an authoritarian system voice support for their government, should we believe that, or should we chalk that up to their being scared, or is it something in between? And that’s a question that’s actually motivated a lot of my recent work, is to try to unpack that a little bit, and I think probably most of your listeners are aware of this, but I would just say it one more time, in case some folks aren’t, is that the most robust finding we have about public opinion in China is that Chinese citizens voice extremely high levels of support for their government. That is every single survey I have ever looked at, going back decades now, has that feature to it, and in fact, Chinese citizens voice higher levels of support for their government than any other people in the world, other than, I believe, Vietnam.

So then, the question is, is that real? Is it something else? There’s some people that believe when Chinese citizens take surveys, they don’t view it as an opportunity to express their own opinion, they view it as a test and are trying to say the so-called “correct” answer. So, I don’t think we should be naïve and just assume that problem away, and say, of course we can trust these responses at face value. But we also shouldn’t be paralyzed by that, and I think we can try to get to the bottom of it empirically.

One thing that I’ve been working on, and there’s also a really good paper I would recommend by Kerry Ratigan and Leah Rabin in the China Quarterly. It’s called “Reevaluating Political Trust.” We’re trying to understand just how Chinese citizens take surveys, and one thing you can look at is, when do they say don’t know? Typically when you ask someone a question, like how satisfied are you with the central government, something like that, you give people the option of saying nothing at all.

And that’s sort of a proxy for a couple of different things. That can be a proxy for political knowledge, right? Sometimes people say don’t know because they don’t really have a well-formed opinion. But sometimes they say don’t know because they might be a little bit nervous. And so, typically what we observe in China is that Chinese citizens, on sort of direct political questions, do say don’t know at higher rates than people elsewhere in the world. So, that’s worth noting. But it’s not that high. It tends to be about between five and eight percent of people will do that.

Kaiser: Yeah, consistently across a bunch of questions that are related to political opinions.

Rory: Yeah, across a bunch of questions, but an important feature of this is that it varies across different types of people. So, that behavior is particularly high in rural areas. It’s particularly high among older citizens, and generally citizens who might be more politically marginalized: women, ethnic minorities, people from rural areas, and so forth. So, one interpretation of that is, those types of people might feel a little more nervous about expressing their political opinions, and sort of rightfully so, right?

Kaiser: Right.

Rory: A lot of these surveys, especially the ones done face-to-face, like someone shows up at your door, knocks on your door in your village, and asks you to voice your political opinions for sometimes 30, 40 minutes, an hour. So, you would understand why an elderly, rural person might feel reluctant to just say their opinions based on what they’ve lived through. So, I think that’s an important caveat when we have our discussion today, is that there is a little bit of evidence that some of these questions are sensitive.

The flip side is, when you look at other types of citizens, like young, urban, highly-educated citizens, especially people taking surveys online, which is how a lot of surveys are done now, their don’t know rates are very low, so comparable with what we would see in a democratic system. So, I tend to take that as evidence of that kind of balinghou, jiulinghou [post-80s, post-90s]-type generation, they’re just more willing to say how they feel, and so I’m more comfortable making conclusions about that type of population.

Kaiser: And typically, what do you do when you have a body of people who you can sort of identify as self-censorer types, who will have a lot of these answers? Do you throw them out? A lot of people who declined to respond, or…

Rory: Yeah, there’s no easy answer. There’s different approaches. Some people try to correct for that, and they try to say, like Ratigan and Rabin, the paper I mentioned, they try to put boundaries on the level of support for the central government. Say, okay, let’s assume all those people actually hate the government. What would the number look like now? Let’s assume they love the government. What would the number look like now? So, you can, that’s called amputation. That’s one technique. You can discard them.

In the paper that we’re going to talk about today, one approach I use is to just analyze the people who say they dislike the government. So, you can kind of flip the question on its head and say, well, look, there are a subset of people on these surveys that really are willing to say they dislike the Chinese government, and dislike the regime. So, we know those people aren’t self-censoring. So, let’s understand them, and then that sort of mitigates the issue to some extent.

Kaiser: It sure does. And so, yeah, with that out of the way, let’s dive in now and talk about the actual research and your findings. Let’s talk about first of all these datasets that you did work with. There were three surveys, is that correct?

Rory: Yeah. Surveys in China are alive and well. A lot of people would be surprised to know kind of the extent of survey research in China. It’s been ongoing since the 1980s, and it’s a little bit complex from a regulatory perspective, and there’s different types of surveys, right? There’s face-to-face surveys, which tend to be more expensive and rely a lot on local implementation, and you need a local partner to usually execute those for you. Then there’s online surveys, which can be done in a number of different ways, sometimes through marketing companies. And then there’s standard sort of in-class surveys. So, there’s a lot of different approaches.

In this paper, I try to do the same thing three times. I have one survey that’s an online survey, one survey that’s a nationally representative urban survey, face-to-face, and then another survey that was conducted in classrooms in Beijing universities. And the hope is that no sampling of China… It’s hard to get a good sample of China, it’s really difficult, but if the same answer emerges in three different approaches, then we feel more confident in it, so that’s why I did it that way.

Kaiser: And in fact, that does seem to be the case, right? The same sorts of profiles emerge in all three of these.

Rory: Yeah, the results were pretty darn consistent, and I actually was surprised that the student sample… There is a sample which is not Beijing University, across several universities in Beijing, but sort of university-aged respondents, the same configuration of attitudes and personality traits emerged in that group. And that was a little surprising to me, because you might think that the position of the Party is different in their social world than in the rest of China. The younger citizens might be more critical, or something like that. But in fact, I found a pretty darn consistent finding. So, that’s so that we can talk about more.

Kaiser: Yeah, so let’s not spoil anything just yet, and we’ll do the drumroll when it’s an appropriate time when you can do the big reveal. But first, let’s talk a little bit about some of the terminology that’s important to understand here. You used what’s called a HEXACO model of personality structure. Can you explain how that works? HEXACO is an acronym for six different dyads, I guess. Can you walk us through HEXACO really quickly?

Rory: Yeah. Personality researchers — and personality research is a huge, huge field in and of itself in psychology, and a long tradition of trying to measure people’s traits, and there is a general consensus that personality is real. People have certain traits that reliably predict their behavior across a range of different situations. So, if I’m extroverted in one setting, I tend to be extroverted in another setting. It’s not always the case, but we do have personalities. I think that’s pretty obvious.

Kaiser: Some of us.

Rory: Some of us, or somewhat. I’ve got none left over these last years. But so, that’s one thing, and then other features of this that I think are important to emphasize are this idea that personality is in part genetically determined, and in fact you can… it manifests itself early in the lifecycle. There are studies that show personality at age three is correlated with personality at age 27, which is worrisome to me, because I have a very challenging four-year-old, and I’m like, he’s going to be challenging his whole life? Are you kidding?

So, anyway, personality is one part, genetics, but it is also the nurture and environment component is there as well. And then, in terms of HEXACO and how that works is, some of the big debates in the personality field, as I understand, are about what exactly are the traits, and how we can measure them. And there’s debate here, and there are some people that think there are five traits. That’s the so-called five-factor model, the Big Five. And then, the model I use is a six-factor model, which just says that there are in general six stable traits that we can measure across individuals, and importantly, across cultures and countries and context. And so, that’s why I used this particular framework, because it’s actually been replicated in many countries across the world, including China, so I felt pretty good about the data.

In terms of what the traits are, HEXACO stands for, let me know if I botch this. It’s going to completely undermine my credibility. Honesty – humility is the H. It’s the extent to which you’re honest and humble and kind of sincere in your dealings. Emotionality is the E. Emotionality is sort of how much do you feel emotion? It also captures things like anxiety and fearfulness. X is extroversion, versus introversion. A is agreeableness, which is the extent to which you sort of seek agreement and harmony in your interactions with other people. Conversely, are you willing to get into it with other people, have an argument? Are you kind of more curmudgeonly, cantankerous?

C is conscientiousness, which is the extent to which you seek organization in your life. Are you well-organized, disciplined, diligent, hardworking? And then O is a big one for our purposes today. It’s called openness to experience, and that tends to capture things like creativity, aesthetic appreciation, artistic nature, intellectualism. So, are you open to new ideas? Are you trying new things?

And so, those are the traits, and in the paper, I have just really good data on personality traits across the three surveys, and so I just ran a full battery of these personality tests across a lot of Chinese citizens, and I was able to then relate those to political attitudes, and try to understand what types of people like the Chinese government, like the Party, what types of people don’t like the Party, and even different groups, sort of CCP members versus not CCP members. How do they vary in terms of these different traits?

Kaiser: Okay, so what did you expect you might find going into this, and in what ways were you surprised? Let me ask about what your own expectations are, and also sort of what we would expect from what we know about the relationship between personality type and attitude toward the state, toward governments in democratic societies.

Rory: Yeah, I think my hypothesis was perhaps a little bit unimaginative and was driven by perhaps my own biases as a Westerner, but also reading this body of research, in that I expected to see what we might call the enlightened discontent model, which is that… How do you become discontent with the Chinese political system? Well, you expose yourself to counter-regime information, you’re leaping the great firewall, you’re studying abroad. Whatever you’re doing, you’re being exposed to information that’s counter to the regime’s narrative, and for that reason, we would expect people with this O trait, high openness to experience, that would be predictive of political discontent in China.

And the reason why that had some backing prior to my own study is that in other contexts, we’ve seen the openness to experience is highly correlated with sort of progressive and liberal attitudes in Western democracies, for example. So, it tends to be people with that trait that gravitate towards the liberal end of the political spectrum. Of course, we know that the liberal end of the American political spectrum isn’t the same as the liberal end of the Chinese political spectrum. But in general, you could sit in Princeton or Philadelphia, wherever I was sitting at the time, and tell yourself that, okay, it’s those sort of artistic intellectual types that are going to be most critical of the government, and that trait should pop. So, that was sort of the overarching hypothesis going in.

Kaiser: Sure, and now the final drumroll.

Rory: Well, yeah, the reveal.

Kaiser: The big reveal, yes.

Rory: As dramatic as an academic finding can be. The answer we found is that really, openness to experience is not systematically related to political discontent. And by discontent, people ask me, how do you measure this? And there’s different ways to go about it, but there’s a very common question format in China’s surveys, which is, “How satisfied are you with the central gov on a scale of 0-10?” I think 95% of people will give the government a six or above, which is telling. But you have about 5-8% of Chinese citizens that on a survey are willing to say they’re unhappy with the government. And we don’t know what they’re unhappy about. It doesn’t necessarily mean they want democracy. But that was sort of a relatively straightforward and I think transparent way of identifying discontent.

And so then, the question is, what do those people look like from a personality perspective? And the simple answer is, this sort of enlightened discontent model doesn’t appear to be correct, at least in average, those sorts of citizens do not have high levels of openness to experience. In fact, they might have slightly lower levels of openness to experience. And the big traits that pop are things like extroversion and agreeableness, and to some extent, fearfulness and anxiety.

Kaiser: Where they’re very, very low on the extroversion.

Rory: Low on those traits. So, another way of just summarizing it would be to say, it’s really more of an isolated discontent. So, China’s discontented citizens on average tend to be highly introverted. They tend to be removed from other people. They tend to have a more disagreeable personality, willing to get into arguments with people, have less harmony in their social relationships. And they’re also, interestingly, more fearful, more anxious people, and less emotionally dependent on others.

So, they tend to be kind of lone-wolf types, and I would emphasize it’s important to say tend to be, because this is all about averages, and certainly there are many Chinese citizens that we all know many of them that fit different models of discontent, and not everybody who’s discontent with China has this set of personality traits. I would emphasize that. But on average, that seems to be a finding, is that social isolation, as it manifests itself in personality, is related to political discontent in China today.

Kaiser: Well, obviously the question that I think everyone would immediately go is, what’s the causal direction, here? Frustratingly, of course, with the sort of thing we can never really know for sure. Are these people politically discontented because of their personalities, or have their personalities been malformed by political forces, by political repression? You make the suggestion that there is a kind of feedback loop operating here. Can you explain that?

Rory: Yeah, and I think the answer is that the causation probably goes in both directions, and that’s not always satisfying to people, and it’s also something that’s very difficult to tease out in any study, because personality doesn’t really change that much over time. It’s hard to measure that. So, all I can say is, look, there’s an association here, and then I have to do a little more speculation as to why.

Rory: The way I think about it is sort of those isolating traits that we identified: introversion, low levels of agreeableness, things like that. In personality studies, there’s pretty good evidence that those types of traits tend to be associated with social isolation and a lack of personal and professional success. So, you see everything from lower job performance, alcoholism, suicide, depression, those sorts of things. It’s certainly not determinative, but people with those personality traits tend to have a little bit of a harder time fitting into society.

And if you have that, then perhaps you’re a little bit disgruntled with your position in society, and that leads you to have a little bit less satisfaction with the political system. So, you can kind of imagine a pretty clear line of thinking that goes from having that set of traits to coming to the conclusion that there’s something bad about the Chinese government.

Now, then, the other side of the story, which I think you importantly raised, is, well, now let’s say I’m in kind of that dissident or discontent part of the Chinese political space. Maybe I’m participating in a little bit of activism. Maybe I’m having some more subversive conversations. Maybe I’m posting things online that the Chinese government doesn’t like. Once you start experiencing that repression, if the Chinese repressive apparatus kicks in, you can imagine that that would then lead to an exacerbation of these traits, right? So certainly fearfulness, which I identified, and anxiety.

Kaiser: Oh, yeah.

Rory: Once you start getting repressed, you probably feel those traits more strongly. Also, introversion, I think, is an important one. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of conversations with people in the activist community in China over the years, and many of them will cite the fact that once they became targeted by the state, they became poisonous, right? Like, people don’t want to be around them. They also don’t want to bring harm to their friends and family, and so they tend to become socially isolated once they become marked by the state.

So, the answer is, I think it does flow in both directions, and that’s why there’s a feedback loop, which is these traits sort of create a cycle, and in the end, the net result is you have a set of people who are socially isolated and have those personality traits, and the most critical citizens are probably in that space.

Kaiser: Yeah. So, we should probably make clear that the types of individuals that you’re focused on here in this paper are not the kind of dissidents with whom many of us are familiar. They’re not the prominent regime critics. Even though some of them might have told you that they have that sort of passive experience of becoming socially isolated, that’s not what we’re talking about here, right?

Rory: No, yeah. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, and I’ve been fortunate to get to know that community. A lot of them are based in the part of the country that I’m in. And those individuals have a very different personality profile. They have a lot more traits associated with leadership, like extroversion in particular, and social confidence, and things like that. So, what I’m talking about are people who are sitting in China, wherever they are, voicing discontent with the Chinese government on a survey, and that’s very different than leading a social movement, or engaging in protest and so forth.

And you can look at that in the data as well, right? I actually have, in my surveys I collected political participation variables, and things like petitioning, protesting, that sort of activity, and you see that those types of people actually have a very different personality profile as well. They tend to be a lot more confident. They’re a lot more…

Kaiser: Less fear, for sure.

Rory: Yeah, less fear. It’s a different type of person, which I think is also interesting, and speaks to this idea that people engaging in protest in China today aren’t necessarily the most discontented with the system itself, or with the government itself, and Lily Tai and Kevin O’Brien and many others have pointed to this idea that a lot of contentious activity in China might actually be regime reinforcing, right? There are, people are trying to voice their preferences to higher levels of government. Doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re deeply dissatisfied with the central government in particular.

So, these are different groups of people, but I think it’s… Yeah, I’m glad you pointed that out, and I got nervous as I wrote this study, because my nightmare is that somebody says, oh, a professor says that Chinese citizens who are discontent with the government have a certain personality type. And this personality type isn’t bad. It’s that there’s no one right personality, and so there’s different traits, and I can identify those traits, but I’m not speaking on any particular individual, and I just, I’m glad you helped me make that caveat, because I think it’s really important.

Kaiser: Yeah. There’s another passage in your paper which I thought was really important. It was… I can’t quote it chapter and verse right now, but you talked about the barriers that one has to get over in order to express discontent in the first place. I mean, that there’s a lot of social pressure, that it’s not just coming from on high. It’s not just the propaganda. It’s not just the other barriers that are placed in your path, but a lot of it is from your family, from your peers, from school, your whole process of socialization. So yeah, I think that’s important to point out, as well.

We’ve talked about what these disgruntled people might look like, sort of in aggregate. What about the other side of it? What does a Party member’s personality structure tend to look like? Because you’ve included that in your study, and I thought it was really fascinating. Quite a contrast.

Rory: Yeah, and unfortunately, in the process of publishing this paper, I had a pretty catchy, pithy title, called Personality of the Party, which I thought was nice, and that was nixed in the review process, and it became the sweeping Political Discontent in China is Associated with Isolating Personality Traits, which is less catchy.

But I do look at the personalities of CCP members as they compare to non-CCP members, and you tend to see that CCP members have personalities that are, for lack of a better phrasing, associated with personal and professional success. So, they tend to be highly agreeable. They get along well with other people. This personality trait’s also associated with kind of social conformity, political conformity, which makes sense. They tend to be less neurotic, less fearful, less anxious, which again is what we might expect. And importantly, they tend to have traits associated with leadership, so highly extroverted, a lot of social confidence, like being around other people, and so forth.

And so, I joke, and this is, again, this is a joke, but they tend to have a personality profile that’s not dissimilar from what I would observe among an average Princeton student where I work, and I say that with fondness for my students, in that these are really dynamic people, and a lot of young, dynamic people in China are gravitating towards the Party, which is not news to anybody who’s following what’s going on and understands anything about recruitment into the Party, but it’s really interesting to see it manifesting in the data that way.

Kaiser: Yeah. I think that there’s a very similar pattern going on with the whole college application process, right? The regime’s power rests in part on its ability to determine what psychological attributes are going to get rewarded and which ones don’t, or are even punished, right? So, there’s some kind of reinforcement going on here. The kids who are in grade school, who are conscientious and are gregarious and upbeat and helpful, and they apply themselves, they’re open, they’re the ones who get the red neckerchief, right? They become the young pioneers. They’re the banzhang, or whatever. Then they move on to the Communist Youth League, and then into Party membership, right?

So, these same traits, the very traits they possess are then the basis for picking the next crop. It’s sort of like, if we’re going to talk about university students, it’s sort of like the Greek system when I was in college. Of course they’re all going to end up being basically the same. They’re picking people who are like them.

Rory: Yeah, yeah. And importantly, the traits… I’d have to look back at the data. I actually do think… I’d have to look back at it, but I believe Party members also have relatively high levels of openness to experience, and so they’re not…

Kaiser: Robots.

Rory: Sort of these brainwashed automatons.

Kaiser: Exactly.

Rory: They’re creative people that are trying to contribute to Chinese society in different ways, and the path to success in China lies through the Party, lies through the government. So, it’s not that surprising, but I think it speaks a little bit to the question we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, about stability, and it’s hard to imagine. I wish I could do this study in 1989, 1988, right?

Kaiser: Yeah.

Rory: And you wonder if the same configuration of traits was present then, and was it… I won’t go as far as to say that the Party is cool today. I don’t think… I think that’s a leap from the data. But there’s little in my data that suggests that people who are kind of more sociallt adept, have a lot of social capital in Chinese universities, are moving away from the Party.

But what I was going to end with, say is, that if you have this configuration of political attitudes and social dynamics, you can see why kind of a large-scale political protest aimed at destabilizing the regime would have trouble getting off the ground, right?

Kaiser: Yeah, today.

Rory: Yeah, today. If the discontent lies on the social periphery, and by nature of their personalities have trouble interacting with other people, getting along well with other people, you can see why there’s a certain stability baked into the social structure of China today, and I was interested to see that play out in the data.

Kaiser: So, I’m wondering, did you have a kind of intuition about the difference between the types of individuals, with their propensity toward political dissent in a democracy, versus an authoritarian regime? Because it’s funny to me, when I think about this. This is something that my wife and I talked about, really quite early on, when we first started to notice that so many regime critics in the Chinese context, who were in the United States, or were interested in American politics in some way, were gravitating toward Trump. They tended to be Trump supporters. Now, I ended up actually doing a show on this. I don’t know if you heard it, but with Lin Yao.

Rory: Yeah, it’s like that concept of beaconism, I think.

Kaiser: Exactly.

Rory: There’s a paper in the Journal of Contemporary China about it.

Kaiser: That’s the one. That’s the one. So, yeah, we talked about that beaconism. Ian Johnson was on that show, as well. My wife, though, said that we were ignoring in that whole conversation the obvious thing to her, which was that she said that it just was all about personality. Her sense was that the people who are political malcontents in China share a lot of traits, she said, with people in the United States, Chinese people I’m talking about, who are interested in Trump.

I wasn’t really quite sure what she was getting at, but after talking to her for a while, I think she was kind of onto something. For her, there were a couple of types. There was the one that was a little too conscientious, and a little too much of a busybody. The one who had to, the xie da zi bao type, or the person who was the person shouting zaofan youli, geming wu zui. But I still, I mean, for her, it wasn’t the same exact batch of isolating traits, but it was things like suspicion, right? A low level of trust. And that general cantankerousness. And I have to say, I think that she was onto something there.

Rory: Yeah, no, and I want to tread lightly here, because I don’t want to draw false equivalencies. I do think there’s a set of traits, and I think your wife’s point about trust is particularly important, right? You mentioned the cognitive process one has to go through…

Kaiser: To become…

Rory: To come to the conclusion that the Chinese government is wrong, and they’re lying to you, your teachers have been lying to you, many people around you have been brainwashed. That kind of, that thought process is not easy to get to, and it requires to you accept a certain level of dissonance in your life, and it’s much easier to go along with the system, believe the narrative that the Party represents the nation, and it’s going to bring about the rejuvenation. It’s sort of an easier cognitive sell. And there’s arguments in psychology called system justification theories, is the big one, and the basic idea is that people tend to…

Kaiser: Take the blue pill.

Rory: Yeah. They tend to go along with the system they’re in, and justify it and understand it. So, then you talk about discontent elsewhere, and yeah, I think there’s a certain personality type in the United States that’s also just generally of the belief that we’re being fed a bunch of lies by people in powerful corporations, and the government and so forth, and that sort of disagreeable cantankerousness, distrust, conspiracy theory mindset is true on all sides of the political spectrum, probably more true on the American Right today.

But relatedly, there’s different types, and I think your wife’s point about different types, I think, matters. So, there’s a difference between that person who’s commenting on Kaiser’s Twitter posts, or the person who’s out in the street, or the person who’s part of an organization. There’s different types, right? And so, I think there’s the set of people that maybe I’m identifying are the people that are more isolated, not as actually politically active, but distrustful, and there’s a pocket of those people that perhaps can be mobilized by more entrepreneurial types, if that makes sense.

Kaiser: No, it does make sense. Speaking of different political settings, toward the end of the piece, you draw some comparisons between these results with China and the results of similar work looking at Putin’s Russia. Can you talk about what you found, and what you believe might account for some of these differences?

Rory: Yeah. There’s a really good study called “Agreeable Authoritarians,” by Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson, who do a very similar exercise in Russia. And the findings are quite similar, and they find that support for Putin, or willingness to vote for Putin, I believe was their outcome, is highly related to agreeableness. That’s the kind of key feature that they identified. And that people who are conscientious, which is again, sort of seeking organization in your life, diligent, that type of person, that trait tends to be associated with political conservativism in a lot of places. They find that is related to support for Putin.

So, it’s a similar set of findings. The key difference I find in China is that extroversion, sort of social isolation, really, really matter even more. And so, the way I think about it is that, perhaps it’s the case in authoritarian systems that this configuration of personality traits that I identify, and that Greene and Robertson identify as well, maybe that’s consistent across a lot of different regimes. And the key difference in my mind, I’m not a Russia specialist, but a key difference in the two political systems is the degree of political competition and political participation. The nature of political participation in Russia, in contrast to China, there are elections. They’re national elections. Putin can… is not… has to go through an electoral process. There are opposition parties in the Duma and so forth.

And so, there’s a little bit more of a social structure and political structure in place for people who are more oppositional thinkers. And perhaps that’s the reason why they’re not quite as isolated, they’re not quite as removed from the social network as we see in China.

Kaiser: Yeah. Another key difference…

Rory: But that’s a guess. That’s a conjecture.

Kaiser: Yeah. My guess would be, I mean, in addition to what you said about the somewhat competitive nature of politics in Russia, is that in Russia, the party, the ruling party, is only a thin layer. It doesn’t permeate the state. The party isn’t almost coterminous or congruent with the state.

Rory: Yeah, the congruence between the Party and the government, right? And also, the patronage network, so the nomenclature system in China, and just the fact that, what is it, 100 million jobs or something like that are controlled by the Party.

Kaiser: Exactly.

Rory: So, yeah, I think that’s a regime capacity story as well, would matter.

Kaiser: Yeah, for sure. So, over the last couple of years, I don’t know how many times I have been in these debates, or watched these debates unfurl, over if culture, however that’s defined in any given discussion, if culture is a valuable explanatory variable in different COVID responses. Not just by state actors, but also by the government, or in the case of the U.S., by the ungovernable. It’s just not a big surprise that there’s a ton of resistance from your discipline, within political science, to any explanations that invoke culture. And I totally get that. Nobody wants to be that essentialist, right?

But when we start seeing patterns in character traits that correspond to political attitudes in one country, and these patterns look different from the set of character traits that you’d see corresponding to similar political attitudes in another country, are we that far away from saying, hey, there’s a difference in political culture going on here, and it’s important? I mean…

Rory: Yeah. I think, of course there’s a difference in political culture between China and the U.S., and I think of course that’s manifesting itself in the COVID response, and how individual citizens across the two places are viewing their obligation to each other, and viewing information coming out of the government. I don’t think Chinese citizens… I think people in both places are also a little bit distrusting of official narratives about COVID, because they’ve been so politicized in both places for different reasons.

But yeah, culture’s always thorny in political science, and I would say it hasn’t always been that way, so a lot of the classics we read, like Allman and Verba and others, we talk about political culture and try to identify different political cultures, and the ones you hear are like an individualistic political culture, or a participatory political culture, or a subject political culture, where someone views themself as being ruled. We tend to avoid those because, yeah, they’re a little bit essentialist, and also just, I don’t think they capture a lot of the nuances to what’s going on.

But the one thing I would say on this point is, a key difference for me that keeps coming out, and I’ve been doing some work looking at political education materials in China, and I think it’s important to note that political culture is just sort of a shared set of attitudes. That’s generally how it’s defined. A shared set of attitudes about the political system, and how it works, and what it’s all about.

And in the U.S., you could say, what are our shared beliefs? Well, it’s that we live in a democracy. Democracy is important. Individual votes and political participation is important. Also, freedom matters, right? So, the role of the government is to protect people’s freedoms, and it shouldn’t interfere too much in people’s lives. That’s a part of our political culture.

But a key feature of political culture is that it requires socialization. It’s passed down from generation to generation, and in places like China, the government plays the major role in setting culture, and we’ve seen a renewed emphasis on that under XI Jinping. So lately, I’ve been looking at political education textbooks at different levels, and what’s very striking to me is this sort of subservience of the individual’s goals to that of the nation.

And that’s not news to you or your listeners, but I remember being in Beijing when I was doing fieldwork, and you would see these billboards at the beginning of the China Dream Era, like Zhongguo meng. Wo de meng. They would just say those two phrases, and they’d show somebody playing chess or something like this. And I just thought that captured it neatly, which is sort of, my dream is the equivalent of the Chinese nation.

And so, I think that’s part of why we see the difference in the COVID response, is I think there’s a little bit more emphasis on individual responsibility to public health in China than there is here.

Kaiser: Yeah. I didn’t mean to talk specifically about the COVID response, just that this is one of those things that brought culture back into the conversation again. I’m curious what you understand the difference between political psychology and political culture to be.

Rory: Yeah, this is, that’s a good question, and it feels like a comprehensive exam question that I would probably be bombing. Political culture is a shared set of beliefs and attitudes, that give order to the system, help people understand their political system. And shared doesn’t mean uniform, but it does mean sort of a widely-held set of ideas. And I would say kind of the political psychology, the constellation of traits and attitudes that we observe, is a reflection of the political culture, right? So, you grow up in a political culture, and the ideas you gravitate towards, the leaders you gravitate towards are a function of the culture you’re in and the traits that you possess.

Kaiser: Right.

Rory: And so, I would say that that’s the direction, that’s how it flows, but they’re certainly entangled with each other.

Kaiser: I would pass you on that, yeah.

Rory: That was, yeah, that felt like a…

Kaiser: That felt like a B+.

Rory: Pass answer! Like let him go on to the next stage of the program. Not distinction, but we’ll take it.

Kaiser: Well, I’ll ask you the harder one. So, is China authoritarian because of the political psychology of its people, or do they have that particular political psychology because China has its particular authoritarian political system?

Rory: Brutal. Brutal. Don’t make me answer that.

Kaiser: I know. I’m actually joking here, because that’s not knowable. Rory, what would be the next question, though, to explore, for anyone who’s interested in doing further work on this set of topics? What do you feel like you came into this, where you feel like the data is there, but you didn’t yet decide to tackle the question? What’s the next one?

Rory: Yeah, I’m increasingly thinking about psychology of authoritarian rule. And so, taking this question of why people support the government seriously. And this is not a new question in our field, right?

Kaiser: Absolutely.

Rory: There’s been a lot of work by Bruce Dickson and Tang Wenfang and Melanie Manion and Pierre Landry, and many, many other people, on kind of public opinion questions in China. But trying to bring in some of these ideas from psychology into our field, and understanding a little bit more about how people process information, I think that’s an area for growth.

Another trap that I fall into quite a bit, and certainly in this paper, is there’s a tendency to say, the Chinese people say this, or kind of a tendency to treat Chinese citizens as a monolith.

Kaiser: You were pretty good on that count.

Rory: No, I try. But I’m not as good as I should be, and I think there’s a lot of different configurations of attitudes and beliefs and personalities and forms of political participation that we don’t really understand, and I think there’s a lot of work that can be done on that, like understanding the New Left, or understanding all these different political movements, especially among younger people. I think that would be fruitful.

So, I feel like we’re just, we have, there’s actually a lot of public opinion data on China. A lot of the interview-based work that’s been done, some of it by journalists, like Eric Fish, that’s really compelling work as well. And so, I think that would be another area for growth in this space, yeah.

Kaiser: Oh, for sure. By the way, I just have to commend you. Your list of references in this one paper, it’s as long as the damn paper. I mean, it’s like a pretty comprehensive bibliography of work that’s been done on psychology in authoritarian states. It’s amazing. It’s actually…

Rory: Well, you can, if your listeners just want to look at the references, that’s completely fine. They don’t have to read the paper, but if they just want the reading list, that’s more than welcome.

Kaiser: The reading list is really good. No, I mean, you read a paper like you read a paper these days. You skip the math in the middle. You just read the diagonal reading style. You all know how to do that now. And we just assume that you guys know what you’re doing when it comes to regression analyses and all that stuff. So, no, this was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed it. Those of us who are interested in reading about the nexus of psychology and politics could do worse, definitely, than looking at your references.

Rory: Thank you.

Kaiser: Rory, you are somebody who likes to bring in approaches and ideas from other disciplines. Can you talk about some of the other work that’s done that kind of inter- or cross-disciplinary thing?

Rory: Yeah. I mean, the China field, I think is a really exciting place, in that it’s growing so fast.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Rory: And I’ve been fortunate to, I was on our Ph.D. admissions committee this year, and the level of talent coming into social science Ph.D. programs is wild, and a lot of it is coming from China, and people are coming in with a lot of training and a lot of different lenses through which to look at the world. I’ve had Ph.D. students that are coming in with a computer science undergraduate training, or math undergraduate training, or other types of training, literature, other things. And so, I think, I’ve always been a believer in kind of cross-pollination across fields, and how that can produce new insight. And the person, people that I admire deeply on this front, someone like Molly Roberts, who we’re all a fan of.

Kaiser: Oh yeah, a huge fan of Molly.

Rory: Molly was one of the first people to kind of do “Big Data goes to China,” and because of her unique training, her masters in stats and other things, she’s led the way for a lot of us, and we’re all trying desperately to catch up, and unable to ever do so, but we can just try to follow her wherever she takes us.

So, that’s one tradition that’s alive and well, but I also think there’s some really good qualitative researchers out there right now who are having a tougher time because it’s harder to get access to China, who are approaching things from a more anthropological approach. Izza Ding is one that comes to mind, has done really good ethnography on the Chinese environmental bureaucracy. Maria Repnikova, who you mentioned.

So, I think, yeah, there’s just so much. The China field is becoming a very, very big tent, with a lot of people doing a lot of different things, and I think we’re learning more, and I’m very optimistic about the direction of the field moving forward. The one catch is, there’s just not that many opportunities, and the position of China studies in the United States just wildly lags behind where it should be. Most universities have one or two China specialists in the social sciences, if that, and will have 15 people studying the American political system, or something like that. And so, my hope is that in the next 5-10 years, there’s more of an investment in China studies, because there’s so much talent coming in and not enough opportunity to meet that talent.

Kaiser: As long as they’re not all hijacked by the national security apparatus, which seems to have a boundless appetite for them. It’s just a…

Rory: Well, and that’s, I think you’re making a joke, but I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a deep China specialist entering into the U.S. government, and historically there’s been an issue where the closer one is to China, the better one’s language ability, it seems to be a negative when trying to get into the U.S. government.

Kaiser: Yeah, that’s the problem.

Rory: Yeah, feeding the kind of Ph.D. population into the U.S. government or other governments around the world wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Kaiser: No, no, that’s what I want.

Rory: Yeah.

Kaiser: Anyway, fantastic. Rory, it’s been such a pleasure to talk about this paper with you, and congratulations on not just getting bogged down in the weeds of methodology and all that.

Rory: I did all right.

Kaiser: You did great.

Rory: All right, good. Cool.

Kaiser: That was fantastic. Let’s move on to recommendations, but first, a very quick reminder that if you enjoy the work we do with the Sinica podcast, the best way you can support us is by subscribing to The China Project access, our daily email newsletter. It is just chock full of great tidbits and things from all over, hundreds, literally hundreds of different news sources, and it’s hand-curated by our own Jeremy Goldkorn and his crack team. So, that’s what you do to support us, and I think you in advance.

Let’s move on properly now to recommendations. Rory, what do you have for us?

Rory: Okay, so I have two. I have one more serious and one more lighthearted.

Kaiser: Oh, great.

Rory: The first is an organization, which I’m sure many of your listeners have heard of, but in case they haven’t, there’s a think tank, kind of an academic think tank called Center for Security in Emerging Technology, CSET, which is out of Georgetown. And I was on their website the other day. They have roughly 50 people working there now, and it’s just a new think tank that’s just doing a lot of really good data-driven work on technology, and a lot of their work does touch on China and informs things like immigration policy, and the China Initiative, and all of that going on. So, I have found them to just be a real voice of reason, and they’re not particularly on one side of the political space when it comes to China, but they just do really thorough work, and I admire what they’re doing and their organization. So I would encourage you to check that out. That’s the serious one.

Kaiser: Yeah, in fact, they’re just not on one side. They are on all sides of it. It’s really funny, I was reading… I do this China Stories podcast, where I will read aloud long pieces, and there was one from The Wire that relied very, very heavily on CSET sources. But they were almost uniformly in opposition to each other. They never had the same opinion. It was great.

Rory: Yeah, no, and you don’t always see that in a think tank.

Kaiser: You don’t.

Rory: And a lot of their staff are relatively young, and they’re doing cool data-driven work, but they also do things like document translations and so forth. So, if you’re kind of on the younger end of the China-watching community, and looking for a place to go work, I think that would be a fantastic place to start your career.

All right, and then the less serious one. People are, “What are you reading?” Right? “What are you reading?”

Kaiser: Right.

Rory: Well, I’m getting through a pandemic with two kids under five, so I’m reading a lot of children’s books, and I’m going to recommend some for the moms and dads out there. I’m sure you have a lot of time to be listening to podcasts right now. But there’s two guys, Eric and Terry Fan. They’re the Fan Brothers. They are Canadians, but I believe they have Chinese heritage. I think their father was Chinese, is Chinese. And just the most fantastic storytellers. Really imaginative. Like, I read a lot of children’s books, and a lot of them are pretty dull. These guys are so creative, and there’s two books, one called The Night Gardener, and one called The Barnabus Project, that are our favorite children’s books.

Kaiser: Oh, great.

Rory: So, I would recommend those to anybody looking to mix up their library.

Kaiser: Fantastic. Thanks. Great recommendations. I am actually making my way through some of the books that have been recommended by recent guests, so there’s nothing new from me on the book front. In fact, the one that just published, or I will have published today, we’re recording on January 13th, with Anthea Roberts and Nicholas Lamp, is so full of book recommendations, either that we sort of mention in passing, or that we actually recommend, that it’s going to take me a while to get through.

But the one thing that I have been doing, like so many other of my sort of low-willpower friends on social media, is playing the game Wordle.

Rory: I feel like I have to do it, just to understand the phenomenon.

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s a phenomenon, and I know that I’m a cliché talking about this even.

Rory: But am I going to lose like a day of my life?

Kaiser: No, no, no. That’s the thing.

Rory: Can I get in there?

Kaiser: That’s the great thing about it, is they only give you one a day.

Rory: Ooh, it’s bounded.

Kaiser: It’s bounded, and yeah, you’ll jones for doing more of them, because it’s pretty fun. It’s Mastermind, but with words. It’s sort of Hangman meets Mastermind. It’s super, super simple, but it’s fun. I mean, it’s incredibly fun. And I don’t know, I ended up spending way more time actually discussing optimal strategies with different friends of mine. A couple of guys I knew at Baidu, one of them has decided to write an algorithm that…

Rory: I’m sure someone out there has coded this thing up by now.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, they have. I mean, there have been clones and knock-offs, but also just sort of solving agents for it. But I actually have found myself, every night for the last week, staying up until midnight when the next puzzle drops.

Rory: Oh, yeah. That’s not what I need right now, but I am going to check it out.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, then by 12:10, I’ve tweeted my score. I should be ashamed of myself, and yet. And yet…

Rory: It’s all right. It’s all right. Got to get through January.

Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely.

Rory: All right, Kaiser.

Kaiser: Yeah, Rory. Thank you so much. What a pleasure.

Rory: Thank you for having me.

Kaiser: The Sinica podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We’d be delighted if you’d drop us an email at Sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just as good, give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @SupChinaNews, and make sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.