The Impact of the Zero-COVID policy on Political Trust in China

Drawing on seven waves of an online national survey, the paper shows that the draconian zero-COVID policy has an inverse-U correlation with political trust in China. The first wave was completed in September 2019 before the pandemic broke out. Its results are highly consistent with those of earlier national surveys and constitute a valid baseline for comparison. The second wave was conducted right after the historic lockdown of Wuhan city in January 2020. It observed a remarkable increase in public confidence in the central leadership. The plausible justification and the effective enforcement of the lockdown strengthened people’s belief that the Center was committed to and capable of acting in people’s interests. The ensuring four waves conducted from May 2020 to March 2022 showed that trust in the Center remained at the newly reached high level. However, the lockdown of Shanghai in April 2022 seemed to be a game-changer. By then, it was clear that the zero-COVID policy was neither necessary nor feasible. It was also evident by then that Xi Jinping insisted on the ill-advised policy solely to secure his controversial third term. The seventh wave completed in September 2022 found that trust in the Center dropped below the pre-pandemic level. In particular, public confidence in the central leadership’s commitment to acting in people’s interests dropped by 15 percentage points. The evidence suggests that Xi Jinping’s obsession with the zero-COVID policy backfired. In the end, it seems that he gambled with the pandemic and won some political capital initially but ended up losing what he gained and some more. Methodologically, the paper confirms that a two-dimensional measurement of political trust in the authoritarian country is more sensitive and accurate than the commonly-used unidimensional scale.