Geography of government support in China: a case study of college students

Scholars have debated why people support the Chinese government, but few have studied the spatial pattern of such support. In this article, drawing on a nationwide survey of college students in 2017 (N = 21,674), cumulative link mixed models are used to study the factors accounting for government support in China at individual, prefectural and provincial levels. The results show that competing economic-nationalist, institutional and cultural theories of government support in China all contain elements of truth. However, students in this sample support different levels of the government for different reasons, and these factors vary across places and by geographical scale. In general, economic performance mainly explains support for local government and political and ideological considerations mainly explain support for central government.