1 Introduction

Despite the rapid urbanization and industrialization that have occurred in China over the past 30 years, most Chinese are still classified as residents with rural hukou (household registration) or nongmin (peasants)¹ even though many of them have temporarily migrated to work and live in the cities. China's breathtaking economic reforms started in the countryside in the early 1980s with the adoption of the household responsibility system. There followed significant improvement in the economic life of the Chinese countryside in that decade. However, the rural economy has been stagnating or even deteriorating in many areas in China since the 1990s. The rural–urban income gap has been widening at an alarming rate. The rural situation in China still causes the Chinese government problems. Riots, demonstrations, and sit-ins are commonplace in the countryside. Fortunately for the government, these rural disturbances are neither large-scale nor organized, as it is unlikely that the countryside may spark a major system collapse in China. However, rural problems, if not addressed properly and promptly, could become a contributing factor in a potential regime crisis in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Western studies of Chinese rural areas over the last 30 years have focused primarily on rural economic transformation, rural social life, village elections, village administration, and central–local relations; and the methods used in these studies are primarily historical and descriptive case studies.² However, none of these studies deals with peasant political culture in particular. There is no single book that studies political culture in rural China in an empirical fashion in contemporary China scholarship. Few scholars dispute that political culture is an important aspect of Chinese political studies and an independent variable in understanding Chinese politics. As Moody pointedly observed,

Chinese politics cannot be understood separately from culture. Culture provides the setting for politics. In China particularly, cultural change and continuity are substantive themes of politics and perennial topics of political debate.³

Political cultural study has been a popular discipline in political science since the 1960s. In their seminal study The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Almond and Verba define political culture as ‘specifically political orientations—attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system.’⁴ They further detail three types of orientations: cognitive orientation (knowledge about the political system), affective orientation (feelings about the political system), and evaluative orientation (judgments and opinions about the political objects). The importance of studying political culture is that it is one of the best (though not perfect) predictors of people's political behavior.⁵ Scholars differ on how to study political culture, but few question its impact on behavior and political development. Political culture tends to define a context or a set of parameters on how to operate and behave for those in a political system.

An important question to be asked when studying political culture in China is: do the Chinese have a unique political culture? This question is very much related to another: how should China be studied as a whole? Should China be treated as a normal country like any other in the world or as an anomaly or a unique case? The origin of Chinese political study in the West came from Sinology, which puts much emphasis on Chinese culture and history. Before the 1960s, few China scholars in the United States received formal social science training. As a result, their study was a typical ‘country study’ or ‘regional study’. Many of the China scholars in the United States developed their original interest in China out of a curiosity about and the ‘mystery’ surrounding China. Therefore it is understandable that they tended to treat China as a unique case that was drastically different from western countries or any other country in the world.⁶ A well-known phrase among China scholars then was: ‘China is China is China’.⁷ Studies by these China scholars were certainly not intended to connect China with other countries and to develop general political science theories. Pye once noted:

China is not only Communist; it is a developing country. Strangely this second dimension of China has been more appreciated in popular press and in official policies than in scholarly research. Academically there has been little inclination to apply to the analysis of Communist China the concepts and theories that have given such vitality to the study of political and economic development in the rest of the Afro-Asian world … The China specialists have seemingly taken on some of the pride of their country of study and have been anxious to stress its world-shaking importance, often, possibly quite unintentionally, giving the impression that the rest of the underdeveloped countries are insignificant in comparison. This has helped to spread the impression that China's problems and those of the other transitional societies have little in common.⁸

Since the 1960s, the study of Chinese politics in the West in general and in the United States in particular has made significant strides in making the field more ‘political science study’ rather than ‘country study.’ One of the factors was the ‘significant innovation and maturation in the social sciences’ in the 1960s.⁹ Most of the China scholars who study Chinese politics today in the West received their doctoral degree in a political science department with formal social science training. They tend to be more interested in studying China in the context of general political science or social science theories and apply more rigorous social science methods. Harding used the phrase ‘academicization of Chinese studies’ to describe this trend.¹⁰ However, the debate on whether China or Chinese culture is unique or distinctive continues, sometimes subconsciously. As Steve Chan observed,

Any random selection of texts on China will comment on alleged Chinese cultural traits such as a yearning for dependency relationships, a fear of social chaos, an emphasis on “face” and personal ties, and a strong attachment to family and deference to authority figures.¹¹

Despite Pye's call to treat China as any other developing country, he is probably one of the most ardent advocates of the view that Chinese culture is unique in its various dimensions and he uses Chinese unique or distinctive culture as a key to explain politics and political development in China.¹²

This debate has much to do with two different approaches to studying human behavior and social phenomenon: the idiographic approach and the nomothetic approach.¹³ The former tends to treat human behavior and social and political phenomena as something uniquely confined by history and context, while the latter believes in and seeks for generalization of human behavior and social and political phenomenon. I believe and argue that a study of Chinese politics should be treated as a case study confirming or disconfirming social science theories. No two countries have an identical political culture, if we define political culture as sets of orientations and attitudes toward political objects. It is expected that political culture varies across borders. The very essence of social science is to identify variances or differences and to explain them. When someone says that a country's political culture is unique or distinctive, it can be construed that only that country possesses a certain type of political culture. The word ‘unique’, or ‘distinctiveness’, conveys a meaning of exclusiveness. I would rather use the word ‘different’ to describe countries’ political cultures. When one country's political culture is said to be different from another country, it means that they have different degrees or distributions of certain political cultural attributes. Therefore, the difference is a matter of degree.

After identifying a country's political culture, we need to dig further to look for the causal factors that determine or shape it. The causal factors, as Przeworski and Teune argue, have to go beyond proper names or replace proper names with explanatory factors with a broader application. A good example of the latter is Almond and Verba's study of civic culture. According to the descriptive findings in their survey, the level of civic culture in the United States was, not surprisingly, higher than that in Mexico. In other words, people in the United States had a higher degree or greater distribution of civic culture than Mexicans in Mexico. However, as social scientists, we should not be satisfied with the descriptive data. If we go beyond the descriptive findings, we will find that Mexicans who received a college education had a similar level of civic culture as their counterparts in the United States. Therefore, it is plausible that as the educational level among Mexicans improves, their civic culture level also increases. Thus, education becomes a crucial variable and we can replace the proper name ‘Mexico’ or ‘Mexicans’ with the variable of education when we study civic culture. Nathan provides the example of political tolerance level in China. One of the major political cultural traits in China is said to be popular obedience to the official ideology.¹⁴ Comparing data from a nationwide survey in mainland China and a survey of six other countries, Nathan found that the Chinese respondents were less tolerant than people from the other countries when it came to allowing deviant speech. However, the difference can be easily explained by the relatively low level of education of the Chinese respondents.¹⁵

How should political culture be studied? For example, how do we know that Chinese culture is obedient and authority oriented, or otherwise? Political culture can certainly be studied through personal experiences, field observations of political behavior or a reading of popular literature and folk stories. However, these methods are highly subjective and lack credibility with regard to representation. Almond and Verba's civic culture study broke new ground by studying political culture in an empirical fashion through a carefully designed random survey. Even though the survey research is by no means a perfect method of studying political culture,¹⁶ it can still provide more systematic and reliable empirical evidence for political culture and values than anecdotal stories, personal experiences and insights based upon casual observation. Since the 1960s, survey research has become one of the most important tools in studying political culture and behavior in political science. In fact, a number of scholars have applied this method to tap into Chinese political culture and behavior. In particular, three studies (T. Shi's Political Participation in Beijing, Harvard University Press, 1997; J. Chen's Popular Political Support in Urban China, Stanford University Press, 2004; and W. Tang's Public Opinion and Political Change in China, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) shed much light on Chinese political culture and behavior based on mass random surveys, even though all their studies focus on urbanites in China. In his comparative study of political attitudes and values based on the World Value Survey, Steve Chan convincingly demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdoms, mainland Chinese do not necessarily hold more authoritarian, obedient attitudes and values than Americans and Canadians even though the Chinese tend to be more socially conservative-oriented.¹⁷ Chinese Political Culture: 1989–2000 (S. Hua, ed.) makes a good effort to study contemporary Chinese political culture in its various dimensions.¹⁸ However, none of the contributors deals specifically with political culture in rural China.

Following the positivist tradition of political cultural study, this book is an empirical study of political attitudes, values, and participation among Chinese rural residents in southern Jiangsu province based on the survey conducted in 2000. It is crucial to know what Chinese rural residents think since they are still the majority of the Chinese population. Key questions to be answered include: what is the current status of core democratic values among Chinese farmers in southern Jiangsu province? What are the factors that possibly affect their support or lack of it for core democratic values among Chinese rural residents? Are southern Jiangsu rural residents interested in politics and how active are they in interacting with Chinese village and local officials? What makes them more or less interested in political issues? To what extent do rural residents in southern Jiangsu province support the current political system in China? How do rural residents evaluate governmental policies? Who among them tends to be more supportive? What factors affect the level of support among farmers in southern Jiangsu province? What is the attitude among southern Jiangsu rural residents toward the market-driven economic reform in China? How supportive are they of the new economic system? How is their support or lack of it related to factors such as their perceived benefit from the new system, prospective evaluation of China's economic future and democratic orientation? How many villagers vote in village committee elections in southern Jiangsu province? What subjective factors motivate people to vote or not to vote in village elections? What are the views of village officials with regard to relationships with township/town government, village elections, the relationship between village committee and party committee in the village, and the difficulty in running village affairs?

Why is it important to study political culture among Chinese peasants? First of all, as mentioned earlier, peasants are still the majority of the Chinese population, and what they do and what they think are important areas of study. Farmers in China during the reform era fundamentally changed China's economic, social, and political landscape and, as Zhou acutely pointed out, their economic success threatens ‘the very base of the Leninist dictatorship’ in China.¹⁹ Daniel Kelliher argues that the literature on Chinese peasantry greatly underestimates the Chinese peasants’ capacity to influence state policies.²⁰ After all, the ‘household responsibility system’, the centerpiece of Chinese rural reform that has had a far-reaching impact on the course of Chinese economic and political development in the last thirty years, was initiated by Chinese peasants themselves. However, most of the studies on rural China tend to focus on the institutions and the local state, less on the peasants themselves. Thus far there is no systematic empirical study of peasant political culture in the literature of Chinese political studies. Political culture is one of the better, if not totally precise, predictors of human behavior. Studying what Chinese peasants think will shed more light on how Chinese peasants act. So, a peasant-centered approach can reveal more on where rural China is going and on the future of China.

Second, it is often said that Chinese peasants have their own sub-political culture, which is different from that of the urbanites in China. The peasants are often perceived as being passive, deferential to authorities, apolitical, anti-democratic, and superstitious, especially among Chinese intellectuals.²¹ Are these popular perceptions necessarily right or are they just stereotypes? If the Chinese peasantry is so passive, apolitical, and deferential to authorities, it is hard to explain the frequent peasant rebellions in Chinese history and the large number of peasant petitioners in Chinese provincial capitals, even in Beijing. This study, in part, attempts to capture peasants’ attitudes toward politics, democracy, civil liberties, and authorities in southern Jiangsu province. In addition, this study goes beyond descriptive findings and digs deeper into the factors explaining and predicting the types of political attitudes of the Chinese peasantry. These factors have been used in other countries and in urban China. Analytical findings from this study will confirm whether the same explanatory patterns of political attitudes can be found among the Chinese peasantry.

Third, political scientists in the West have developed a significant number of theories and causal relationships concerning political culture and attitudes in western and non-western countries. Several American scholars have applied many of the western theories to the former Soviet Union and today's Russia. Southern Jiangsu rural areas in this study provide a testing ground on which to evaluate social science theories that have been developed in the West to the case of China. If we believe social science research is a process of constructing building blocks, this case study of southern Jiangsu province peasantry will be another building block in the endeavor of the scientific study of political culture and participation.

Finally, peasants’ public opinions and political attitudes do have the potential to influence the course of Chinese political development. Scholars have long argued about what causes political change in China. Many scholars contend that public sentiment and social forces shape and constrain state actions in China.²² Liu goes as far as to argue that the various post-Mao economic and political reforms ought to be considered as reactions by the party to the general sentiment and demands of the public in China.²³ To save its legitimacy and to build a ‘harmonious society’ the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has become much more vulnerable to public sentiment and pressure, as evidenced in a recent government response to control the runaway housing market and to combat inflation. Indeed, due to the rapid development of modern communication technologies, especially the internet, the Chinese government is arguably more than ever paying particular attention to public opinions and sentiment, which can be demonstrated in the cases of Sun Zhigang and Deng Yujiao. The party does care about its image in the eyes of the general public. In promoting stability, the Chinese government cannot afford to ignore public opinion and the political attitudes of peasants, the largest social group in Chinese society.

Data for this study come from a random public opinion survey conducted in the summer of 2000 in 12 southern Jiangsu counties (often referred to as Sunan). Southern Jiangsu was chosen as the survey site for a number of reasons. First, southern Jiangsu rural areas have one of the lowest levels of illiteracy in China (only 9 percent, compared to 19 percent nationwide) owing to the province's long-held respect for knowledge and education, and recent economic development in the area.²⁴ It is much easier and more practical to carry out surveys in a literate population, as it avoids unnecessary confusion and bias.²⁵ Second, southern Jiangsu is historically known as yu mi zhi xiang or land of fish and rice. Southern Jiangsu's economic development has accelerated since the economic reforms in the late 1970s owing to its successful rural industrialization driven by the collective economy of township and village enterprises (TVEs). Therefore, southern Jiangsu may not be typical of rural China. However, if we accept the positive linkage between economic development on the one hand and political cultural development on the other in western literature, it seems that southern Jiangsu is one of the best sites in the country from which to predict where political culture is heading in rural China. After all, the rest of the Chinese countryside will look more like southern Jiangsu instead of the other way around. Obviously, I cannot take the descriptive findings of this survey to generalize about the rest of the Chinese countryside. However, the multivariate analyses can be generalized to the rest of the Chinese countryside since the analyses are carried out at the individual level.²⁶ This is the same rationale used in the ‘most different system’ design advocated by Przeworski and Teune.²⁷ If we believe social science research is an incremental building process, then this research is a small brick in understanding the bigger picture of Chinese rural politics. Third, survey research in China requires a good collaborator. I had one in the Sunan Social Research Center of Suchow University in Suzhou. The Center specialized in conducting surveys in southern Jiangsu province.

The survey draws from the literate rural adult population (with rural residency status or hukou) over 18 years of age residing in 21 towns and townships in southern Jiangsu. The sample obtained 1,162 valid responses of 1,270, using multi-stage random sampling procedures. Twenty-one towns and townships were randomly chosen after the first stage of sampling. Four villages were randomly chosen from each town or township after the second stage. The third stage produced approximately 16 households from each randomly chosen village. One individual adult was randomly chosen from each randomly chosen household as the respondent at the final stage of sampling in our Jiangsu rural survey. We employed advanced and trained undergraduate and graduate students as field workers to conduct the survey. A field worker brought the questionnaire to the randomly chosen individual respondent who filled out the questionnaire; the field worker then brought the questionnaire back to the survey center. As a result of this survey method, the response rate is close to 92 percent.²⁸ Care was taken to minimize respondent effects and linguistic misinterpretations. The original wording of the questionnaire, first designed in the United States, was reviewed by Sunan Social Research Center to fit the Chinese social and cultural context. Respondents were assured of absolute confidentiality and encouraged to provide answers that best captured their true feelings.

Did the respondents in southern Jiangsu province tell the truth in the survey? This is always a fair question to ask in a survey which is done in an authoritarian country. There is no guarantee that every respondent in the survey expressed his or her true feelings or opinions. It is well understood that people do lie in surveys, even in open and liberal democracies. However, I am reasonably confident that people in the survey told the truth for the following reasons. First, the questions in the survey are not the most sensitive questions (such as disliking particular leaders and Tibet or Taiwan issues) in the PRC. China is much more relaxed in terms of speaking one's mind in public these days. Second, no government officials were with the survey conductors and the survey was done anonymously. Third, if a respondent was reluctant to answer questions that could be perceived as sensitive, he or she had the choice of not answering the question or choosing ‘hard to say’. Many people did choose the option of ‘hard to say’ throughout the survey. I suspect that some of them did so because they were reluctant to give negative answers to some of the questions.

The outline of this study is as follows. After the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 looks into the levels of support for core democratic values among southern Jiangsu peasants. The core democratic values include a belief in the democratic election of public officials, ordinary people's rights in the decision-making process, press freedom, and freedom of expression. The chapter answers questions about whether the popular negative view of the Chinese peasantry with regard to democratic values is valid, the current status of democratic values among Chinese peasants, and how Chinese peasants compare to Chinese urban residents. A number of factors, such as socio-economic satisfaction, income, political satisfaction, free-market values, political efficacy, perceived need for political reform, and some key socio-demographic variables, will be used to count for the support for core democratic values among rural residents in southern Jiangsu province.

Chapter 3 examines the levels of support for the market-oriented economy in China among southern Jiangsu peasants. It is often asked whether Chinese traditional dominant Confucian culture is conducive to a market economy. This chapter will try to measure levels of support for the market economy among southern Jiangsu peasants and how their support or lack of it is related to such factors as their perceived benefit from the new system, prospective evaluation of China's economic future, political efficacy, and democratic orientation.

Chapter 4 looks at the levels and sources of both instrumental and defused support among peasants in southern Jiangsu province for the current political system and regime in China. Specifically, the following questions will be answered: to what extent do rural residents in southern Jiangsu province support the current political system in China? How do rural residents evaluate governmental policies? Who among them tend to be more supportive? What factors affect the level of support among peasants in southern Jiangsu province? Even though the descriptive findings cannot be generalized across all rural areas in China, they may be illustrative and suggestive in understanding rural support for the current political system and the legitimacy of the CCP.

Chapter 5 tries to measure and explain levels of interest in both national and local public affairs among southern Jiangsu peasants and the frequency of political discussions with others. Given the intricate relationship between the level of political interest or psychological involvement in politics and likely participation in political activities, it becomes important that we understand who is more likely to have higher levels of political interest and what factors may lead people to be psychologically involved in politics. Factors analyzed include age, gender, education, political status, socioeconomic satisfaction, and a perceived need for political reform.

Chapter 6 shifts attention to subjective motivations to vote in village committee elections in southern Jiangsu province. Village self-government and the elections of village officials have attracted much attention among China scholars in the last decade. The literature on political participation in Chinese villages since the 1990s has gone beyond the mere description of electoral processes and procedures. In the survey of southern Jiangsu province, I found that a large number of peasants did not vote in village elections. Therefore, the key question to be answered in this chapter is: what subjective factors motivate southern Jiangsu peasants to vote or not to vote in village elections? Among the subjective factors examined in the chapter are levels of political efficacy and democratic values, socio-economic satisfaction, level of political interest, and sentiment about official corruption.

Chapter 7 taps into the views and opinions of village officials with regard to the relationship with township/town government, village elections, the relationship between village committee and party committee in the village, and the difficulties involved in running village affairs. Village officials are the foot soldiers of the Chinese government who implement government policies and maintain political and social stability in the countryside. Chapter 8 is a conclusion chapter.

There are a number of unique features about this study. First, it uses scientific random survey method to study political culture among Chinese peasantry. An advantage of using such a method is that it can capture people's political attitudes and feelings in a more precise and empirical fashion. Findings generated from this method are more representative than anecdotal stories. Second, this study is not based on one village, one township, one county or even a few counties. It involves a whole region. Therefore, findings from this study are more representative than otherwise. Third, this study is more concerned with causal relationships than with descriptive findings. In other words, the study is interested in how many peasants in southern Jiangsu province think one way or another. However, the study is even more interested in the patterns and variations of the political attitudes of the peasants. Finally, a major strength of the study is the comparison of the survey findings from southern Jiangsu peasants with findings from two similar surveys conducted in Beijing in the 1990s.²⁹ Most of the questions asked in our southern Jiangsu province survey were also asked in the Beijing surveys. The comparative findings between southern Jiangsu province and Beijing are extremely revealing and interesting. A major limitation of this study, however, is that the survey was conducted in one region in rural China, southern Jiangsu province, which is atypical of China's rural areas due to its high level of economic development and industrialization. Therefore, the descriptive findings are not representative of the rest of China's vast countryside.