Confidence in China’s Political System is Linked to Attitudes toward Dynamic Zero-COVID Policy

How may the current zero-COVID policy affect Chinese people’s confidence in the political system? This paper uses two waves of online survey experiments in 2020 and 2022 to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward dynamic zero-COVID policy and confidence in China’s political system, and how the attitudes toward the zero-covid policy were predicted by ambiguity aversion, risk aversion, political beliefs, and lockdown experience. We find that subjects’ confidence in the political system is positively correlated with their support of the dynamic zero-COVID policy. The change in confidence between 2022 and 2020 can be explained by people’s attitudes toward the dynamic zero-COVID policy. Ambiguity averse subjects, those perceive a higher covid infection risk, and those with higher degree of national collective narcissism and political conservatism are more supportive of the dynamic zero-COVID policy. Subjects with longer experience of lockdown have lower support for the dynamic zero-COVID policy. In sum, these findings suggest that zero-COVID policy affect Chinese people’s confidence in the political system, and subjects’ attitude towards the zero-COVID policy are not only affected by ambiguity attitude, perceived covid infection risk, but also their political beliefs