Political Science

A foundational question in political behavior is whether the public possesses struc-tured political preferences, something we can call ideology. The nature of ideology under authoritarian rule is particularly mysterious. In this paper, we examine the structure of ideology in Chinese public opinion using a nationally representative urban survey. We show that ideology in China is organized around a left-right economic dimension and an authoritarian-democratic political dimension, and that the most politically sophisticated individuals are the least likely to constrain their ideological preferences to one dimension. By analyzing the correlates of ideology, we see that younger and better-educated individuals are the most likely to favor free markets, and that while members of the Communist Party no longer possess any sort of distinct economic preferences, they are markedly more authoritarian. We argue that individuals can acquire a weakly structured understanding of politics in the absence of open partisan conflict.

In spatial models of political competition in democracies, citizens vote for the party or candidate that is the closest to their own ideological position, while in valence models, voters decide on the basis of non-policy factors, such as competence. What remains unclear, however, is whether citizens in authoritarian regimes use spatial or valence considerations to guide their decisions to participate in politics. This study uses data from the 2015 Chinese Urban Governance Survey to measure the ideology of Chinese citizens, and estimates an empirical stochastic model to explore how Chinese citizens use ideological distance and valence to determine how they want to participate in politics. The results show that valence issues, such as perceived government competence, play a larger role in political participation than ideology.

Ted Tokuchi has a truly global background. The son of a Japanese trading house owner, he first went to China when he was just 11 years old. He lived there for the next 13 years, studied at both Peking and Stanford Universities, and held middle and senior management roles at Daiwa Securities in the U.S., Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, and Japan. In 2002, Mr. Tokuchi signed on with CITIC Securities, a Chinese-based company. He joined CITIC Securities’ foundling investment banking division and helped develop it into the top investment banking department in China, rising to become the managing director of CITIC Securities Co. Ltd and chairman of CITIC Securities International, responsible for investment banking, marketing, and transacting of equities and bonds. Mr. Tokuchi is the first foreign senior manager employed by the Chinese securities industry, and is identified as a symbol of an age. He was awarded the Friendship Prize by the Chinese government in 2009, which is the highest accolade granted to foreign experts who work in China.
Ted and I started these Executive Focus interviews in a Beijing hotpot restaurant last December (2012), and continued over a Skype call a month or so later. As is our custom when conversing, the interviews were conducted mostly in English, but when a concept was better explained using Chinese or Japanese, we shifted languages. A more technical discussion of political constraints on cross-border acquisitions in which one party is a Chinese firm appears in Section 2 of this special issue.