Public policy and the people’s perception. Analyzing the relation between the shift in government policies and individual perceptions of the role of the government in China

A perennial issue in political science is the relation between public policy and public opinion. While the research on this relation has mainly focused on advanced liberal democracies, this paper will analyze it in a quite different setting. Public policies in the People’s Republic of China have undergone a strong reorientation in the first decade of the new millennium, focusing on social development and overcoming the traditional divide among urban and rural population. An analysis of the 2002 and 2008 waves of the Mainland China subset of the Asian Barometer shows a remarkable shift among respondents of the rural areas, having a clearer eye for the impact of government intervention on daily life. We conclude our paper with implications of our findings for the legitimacy of the Chinese government, and for the research on the relation between public policy and public opinion.