Does China's Authoritarian Rule Sustainable? Economic Performance, Social Protest and Regime Support

Abstract

What makes China as a durable authoritarian regime? Unlike most previous studies that focus on one single factor to explain the puzzle, this paper proposes an alternative interpretation and argues that the resilience of China’s authoritarian rule is the outcome of the combination of the following two conditions: economic performance and power structure. These two conditions together allow the central government and the local government both to receive regime support from good economic performance, while the stratified central-local power structure is able to entrench the central government from the challenges generated by social protest. Careful hypothesis tests are conducted by the use of Asian Barometer Wave 3 dataset.