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Growing social unrest and emergent protest groups in China

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... As events in East Europe and China in the late 1980s show, one party systems are particularly vulnerable to a low level of trust in government (Wong, 2009). China experiences a large number of public protests, each of which is a small instance of social instability (Chen, 2009; Tong & Lei, 2010; Göbel & Ong, 2012). Our interest in this paper is not in these relatively isolated events, but in widespread social tensions that are bubbling under the surface, and can potentially pose a fundamental challenge to stability. ...
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Following the 2008/9 financial crisis, China instituted a 4 trillion RMB stimulus package that was spent mostly on infrastructure, with a particular impact at local level. The goal was to sustain economic growth and preserve social stability. We use the Asian Barometer surveys from shortly before and after the stimulus to examine its impact on public trust in government, and find a reversal of a previous downward trend and a substantial increase in trust in local government post stimulus. We consider a number of alternative explanations for this increase in trust, and conclude that the stimulus package is the most convincing explanation. Both perceptions of corruption and experience of corruption increased over the stimulus period. Given the strong negative correlation between corruption and trust, this implies that trust would have increased even further if the level of corruption had remained the same.
... Data source: China Statistical Bureau, China Statistical Yearbook, various issues regarding land acquisition and labour rights, and crime rates increased more than ten-fold between 1993 and 2007 (Chen 2009). To calm down protesters, one-off cash payments and administrative powers have been used to fight the fire. ...
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