GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
Critics of China like to portray the people of China as being compelled to live under a brutal tyranny presided over by the Communist Party of China. The experiment of the Soviet Union failed – the Communist Party of the USSR collapsed under President Gorbachev. China will go the same way, the critics assert. After all, their logic insists, the USSR and China spring from the same flawed Marxist doctrines. The USSR lost the support of its people and the People’s Republic of China will suffer the same fate.
Today’s South China Morning Post contradicts this conclusion. The Chinese public generally trusts its government, a recent survey suggests, thanks to the economic achievements since 1980, a forceful control of the Covid pandemic and the Communist Party’s publicity campaigns.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer conducted in November 2021, 91 per cent of Chinese citizens trust their government, the highest rating in China for a decade and among the 28 countries in the survey. The Barometer was the 22nd Annual Trust and Credibility Survey conducted by consultancy Edelman and based on 30-minute online interviews conducted with 36,000 respondents from 28 countries.
The Edelman Trust Barometer has status and standing when it comes to assessments of the popularity of leading governments in the world today. Its findings – which year-on-year place China in the top spot – worry the West. This is not meant to be. Communist governments are not meant to be successful. The Party in China should not be popular with their people and certainly not be better than the US, the UK, France, Germany and the rest of the advanced economies.
This is a difficult pill to swallow and it is the reason why the West engages in such sustained misinformation about China – to prevent its example from becoming popular in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is in this context that the efforts to damage China with allegations of genocide need to be viewed.
10 FEBRUARY 2022 CHINA AND RUSSIA RE-ASSESSED
