Apologies, this paper is too long and a lot of the conclusions have the whiff of biased conjecture; but there’s some good stuff among the often circular-referencing social ‘science’.
The authors, Kristin Shi-Kupfer, Mareike Ohlberg, Simon Lang and Bertram Lang all from the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, have tried to take China’s ideological pulse. Their purpose, by first establishing where we are today, is to then see if anything useful can be said of how China’s future thoughtscape may develop?
This is how they summarize the landscape today.
What was interesting to me, and chimed with my prior understanding, is how dissent outliers are really just that. The majority of the respondents to their survey you’ll see are within the ‘Party-state ideology circle’.
I read the paper so you don’t have to; but if you have the appetite for a little more jump straight to the conclusion which begins on P.77.
Perhaps the most important point made is despite effort the Chinese Communist Party have failed to get majority buy-in to their ideology. China’s leaders have yet, despite the West’s efforts to make itself look like a wobbly alternative, to convince it’s citizenry that the ‘China Path’ [Which is? Ed.] is a more reliably successful option.
In time though….??
You can access the paper in full via this link Ideas and Ideologies.
Happy Sunday