this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.
I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.
They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.
Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.
If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)
If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”
If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.
People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.
So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.
You'd have more of a point if the fact that the people of China support their system wasn't regularly proven in various metrics, not just a single poll.
Why would that have any effect on the point of my argument?
My point is about the ineffectiveness and unscientific nature of this kind of questionnaire.
Doesn’t matter what topics or debates these are used in or who is right in those debates; the point is that these kind of charts are useless regardless of their content.
Sidenote: if you had “various metrics” why’d you post the least scientific one? Like bro, brain-dead “libertarians” could probably pull out some statistic or study that is more sound than this chart to support their idiotic bullshit. If a fellow anarchist tried to use a metric like this I’d call them out too even if I agreed with their point
The questionaire is valid, though. It highlights differences in the system, in an easy to understand graph. If you want, here's another bunch of sources.
The only thing the questionnaire does, assuming it is built well, is show that when asked those questions people in different countries answered differently.
Did the Chinese populations sampled by the study respond more positively to those four questions more than the samples of other nations? Yes.
Can you assert that this is proof that china is more democratic and less authoritarian than those countries? NO.
At best, this study shows that public opinion of the government in china is higher than that of the other countries. Which definitely doesn’t mean all that much at all, for example I could ask half my family members and they’d say that things are better now under trump than they’ve ever been before. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Does that change their minds? No.
Now, the original article you linked seems much more soft science but the article it first mentions actually has more concrete data but still that data is on public opinion.
Unfortunately the democracy index site appears to be missing and “for sale”
If you could find me the actual questionnaire in mandarin so we could read it as it was presented and compare with the English version we could rule out some of the bias I presented earlier, but not all.
Lastly, kairos buddy, your argument was that a country (which many of the people you’re trying to persuade think is George Orwell big brother level controlling) isn’t authoritarian. Using polled data, especially that which was “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” is not going to hold much evidentiary worth to your target audience.
I’m not Anti-China, in fact I was and possibly still am thinking about taking a semester or internship out there; I only wanted to point out that you aren’t actually backing your argument up with any solid evidence especially with regards to your target audience.
I really am curious about the test though, especially since the democracy index paper is on a dead site, so if you could find it in Mandarin I’d be interested. If you could find a source on what “reputable polling firm” Harvard used I’d be interested in that too since the report didn’t actually mention the name..?
Oh and one last thing is that the article mentions “Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world.” Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.
From just the “my government serves the people” bars alone, it would appear the Chinese dataset is well beyond 1.5 standard deviations if the other three are so much lower and show such low variation. If this was a single data point, one would throw it out, but considering it is supposedly a longitudinal collection of samples it implies that there is a very strong influencing factor that is only largely affecting the Chinese survey takers.
If the pattern holds for many other metrics, then it implies this singular factor (or other factors) have significantly biased the Chinese samples. This doesn’t necessarily mean that factor is government intervention or bias from being raised in rhetoric from an authoritarian state, but it is statistically unlikely that this factor is simply due to china just somehow having a better democracy than every single country on earth (including all of its allies and enemies alike) by a statistically gigantic margin.
"This jet's speed is an outlier in this set of planes. Outliers mean the methodology must be invalid, so jets can't be faster than planes."
This is nonsense. China and the euros have fundamentally different political systems, there is no reason to suppose they should have similar outcomes. The whole point of the discussion is that China's system is superior, if you say that any data that supports that is an outlier, and therefore must be invalid you're just presupposing your conclusion.
On your other point about the usefulness of this data: while it is true that there can be many different explanations for the observed results, that just means that we need more evidence to show which system is more democratic, not that this evidence is useless. Saying that people's opinion of their own system is irrelevant is extremely chauvinistic. In the case of China, we can see the massive increase in quality of life of it's citizens, as well as a systematic overview of it's political structures like here. I've also heard the book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners is good, but I haven't read it yet myself.
Furthermore, your point about manipulation of public opinion goes the other way, too. Where did the idea that China is authoritarian come from? People going to China and studying what life is like there, or media manipulation? Who do you think is more likely to be manipulated like that, the people living there who actually experience the political structures of China, or rando westerners whos only source of information is capitalist media? A simple poll like this is more than enough to debunk the people who think China is authoritarian based on nothing but vibes from capitalist media.
KimBongUn already provided other sources, I'm not going to go through the trouble of finding a poll in mandarin when I can't speak it. Popular support for the PRC is well-documented, as well as the ability for the people to direct policy in a far more material way than in liberal countries.
China has democracy comparable to other socialist states. The difference is socialism vs capitalism, it's as simple as that.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
The study in that link is the same one from the last in the report they have the “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” line.
The brief neither mentions the name of the polling organization nor does it list or link to the actual questions asked. Honestly seems odd given that it’s Harvard, then again isn’t meant to be a rigorous academic paper and I doubt the Chinese government would be up for letting more research be done if they had found negative associations.
Still odd that they won’t name the firm anywhere. Like “The work began in 2003, and together with a leading private research and polling company in China, the team developed a series of questionnaires for in-person interviews.” what leading polling company? Wouldn’t they want their name attached to this? Also an in person questionnaire seems both much more qualitative and much less private than I would have expected. If you want to get people’s true anonymous opinions without any coercive bias, having them physically go somewhere and have to answer questions to an actual person is definitely not the best approach.
ok
Nice straw man. First, ethos is bullshit man, don’t idolize people or institutions to the point you think they’re infallible.
Second, you aren’t making the same claim as the source. And I’m not contradicting it (Harvard’s research). The source rightfully states that their survey found high satisfaction in government, higher than in most other countries. The original paper is on how those reports seem to be increasingly positive overtime and show that development of rural areas correlates with increased reports of happiness in that survey.
The researchers question the validity of their results because they are abnormally high and list possible other factors influencing the data. One of the researchers states that they believe the abnormally high levels are likely due other factors like the “highly positive news proliferated throughout the country” so I’m not doubting Harvard I’m actually agreeing with it
Lastly, my concern over data collection doesn’t actually apply to Harvard. I’m reasonably certain that Harvard did the best with the data they were given. And the Ash Center used that data to create their little positive promotional brief well too.
The research done by Harvard seems sound, as are my concerns about the validity of the collected data and my statement that this kind of data cannot be used to draw conclusions on the actual state of democracy or the actual workings of the government.
Fuck it maybe I’ll just send the researchers an email about it tomorrow and see if they respond. I’ve gotten responses from physicists and mathematicians before, might be fun
To be fair I doubt that would change your mind since you seem dead set on ignoring my actual argument. If they agree with me you’ll just say they’re producing propaganda for the western elites haha. But hey chances are the researcher will actually engage me in real discussion which would be nice
Funny how stuff like this only applies when it's against the western narrative
The western brainpan cannot comprehend a genuinely popular government
This stuff applies always. It’s called critical thinking skills and it absolutely applies when someone is speaking “for the western narrative” too
Clearly you can’t comprehend elementary statistics like the central limit theorem lol
And honestly god damn you tankies give communists and socialists such a bad name with all your braindead bullshit. Nothing talks me out of trusting china more than talking with you idiots
Look I know it’s easy to think that there’s a singular big bad out there. That there’s just this one entity called “the west” and you’ll be able to fight and conquer it. It’s easier to believe things are black and white, that certain countries are innately good and others innately bad at all times. But that’s not reality.
If you give into those kinds of delusions you’re not really better than the people who blindly believe in Trump or God etc. It’s easy believe that kind of blind faith because it’s less scary than admitting you might be wrong. We are driven to cling to the idea that there are hero’s out there, a righteous nation behind us fighting for good, someone we can always depend on, but if you don’t see reality as it is, you’re setting yourself up for more pain. Those feelings are opium not a cure, and often they hurt you and your causes too
If you’re delusional people won’t believe what you say even if it’s true. So if you constantly go around attacking people with ad hominem, or claiming literally everything is western propaganda without actually providing evidence, you’re really just hurting the causes you’re trying to support
Anyway dude, even if you didn’t actually engage my argument you did point me to a fascinating rabbit hole to go down, so thanks for that, but I think I’m going to disengage now
I hope your days go well, and I wish you peace and happiness mate
A Chinese source claiming Chinese are happy with their gvmnt doesn't hold as much materiality as a western source claiming that Chinese are happy with their government. (And vice versa) Do you even know what bias is? So much for cirtical thinking on your part
And you talk about strawman GTFO shitlib
The commenter was questioning the validity of the organisation conducting the survey, which was weirdly not specifically mentioned in the research article. Saying that the data comes from some „reputable“ source is always very untrustworthy even when it’s regarding western countries.
This just makes the science difficult to control/refute which is a necessary thing for good scientific research
What? The central limit theorem states that if you take many averages of a distribution, the distribution of averages will be a normal distribution. What does that have to do with anything? Since the resulting normal distribution has a variance of sigma/n, the central limit theorem supports these kinds of polls, since they get more accurate as the number of responses increases. You know you can't just say the words 'central limit theorem' like it's some kind of magic spell right? Like you have to actually make an argument that uses the central limit theorem to support your conclusion.
Unless you mean that stuff about outliers? But again, the underlying distributions for different countries are different, so the central limit theorem doesn't apply. There is a more general version of the theorem, but that has many preconditions for validity, so again, you have to show your work that it applies here. You are extremely arrogant for someone who doesn't understand statistics.
Even if everyone here did have invalid arguments, trusting China less for someone on the internet having a bad argument is a fallacy fallacy. So much for your critical thinking skills.
Communists regularly criticize China, they criticize the actually bad parts about it, rather than the delusions that only exist in liberal minds, so if you're coming in here with "The ebil authoritarians" commies don't take a 'nuanced' outlook, because the situation has no nuance. What a massive strawman. So much for your critical thinking skills.
Once again, massive strawman. So much for your critical thinking skills.
Just saying mean things isn't an ad hominem. If I say 'You're wrong because x, therefore you're stupid' that's just an insult. If I say 'You're wrong because you're stupid', that would be an ad hominem. So much for your critical thinking skills. Also real smart complaining about insults in the middle of a massive insulting screed.
They did provide evidence. Not great evidence, but more evidence than anyone provided to claim that China is authoritarian, which is zero. So more than enough evidence for the situation, in other words. If any libs made more specific claims with more specific evidence, more specific counter evidence would have been provided. So much for your critical thinking skills.
"You're just hurting your own cause" says the person who hates us and our cause.
You know, getting overly familiar with someone you don't know during a disagreement by saying things like 'dude', 'bro' and 'buddy' comes off as massively disrespectful and arrogant.
Hell of a thing to say to someone you just insulted and belittled. I might almost think you're being disingenuous.