In a nutshell, Princeton University found that those who dislike the Communist Party of China are predominantly fearful, disagreeable, and introverted, lacking close emotional attachments to others.
Those who like the CPC, conversely, score high on confidence, sociability, conscientiousness, and work ethic. These are what the study calls “traits associated with personal and professional success.”
Importantly, the first group only make up roughly 5% of the Chinese population according to the study, which completely inverts the stereotype. It turns out that charismatic, cosmopolitan, open-minded intellectuals are the ones overwhelmingly supporters of the Party. The critics of CPC are precisely the people who are least equipped to build coalitions, mobilize others, or persuade anyone of anything.
Not sure how meaningful this is cause you could claim similar about western capitalist society; being gregarious and able to work well with others takes you much further for much less effort than being a loner.
The main difference at a glance would be the conscientiousness variable. I would expect those who succeed the most in capitalist society to be among the least conscientious.
More insightful I think is the why. What are the causes of someone being fearful in CPC China as compared to causes of someone being fearful in the capitalist US, for example.
Yeah I’d like to see an analogous study done in various capitalist communities as well. “score high on confidence, sociability, conscientiousness, and work ethic” honestly is general enough to describe anyone “successful” (and certainly wealthy people start shoveling money into their “philanthropy” projects both to write off taxes and for PR purposes, and the propaganda that they’re generous or conscientious about fixing problems in the world certainly works on lots of people)
Yeah that’s a good point. Appearances can be deceiving. Tbh, part of the reason I’m skeptical of it is I live in the US and I would sync up well with fearful (well, anxious) and introverted (and if you ranked me based on how much I like the empire, you could argue disagreeable too). If you judged based on how good I am at building and maintaining social connections, I’d fit the last one pretty well too. Yet I somehow ended up as commie beliefs and I suspect if I lived in China, I’d have a much more favorable view of it than I would the US and would have an easier time with connections than I do in the US. I don’t think it would magically fix all of my problems, but I think I’d have a much easier time with life.
So it makes me wonder what is the reason the people there end up that way and what their actual mindset looks like. What causes them to be the fringe, ya know. Where I live, the fringe in terms of lefty realm seems to be like… you are too principled for your own good and it holds you back. Then there is the rightist end of fringe too, which is something like, you live on hatred of scapegoats and turn that into a whole identity.