The Chinese conception of rights: a latent class analysis of Chinese college students

Abstract

Elizabeth Perry and other theorists argued that a strong centralized government, as well as limited individual freedoms in China, had historically been legitimated by the state’s effective provision of economic security and prosperity to the people and that this moral economy still informed the Chinese conception of rights. This study empirically examined Perry’s notion of the Chinese conception of rights by analyzing survey data collected from over 1,100 college students across three provinces in China. The results of the Latent Class Analysis and the posterior regression analyses lent moderate support to Perry’s argument while revealing increasingly diversifying conceptions of rights among Chinese college students, including a stronger endorsement of civil and political liberties among those from certain demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. These findings caution hasty characterizations of political development in China: while the traditional Chinese conception of rights remains dominant, Chinese legal and political consciousness is indeed changing, at its own pace, among the educated, younger generation.