China’s Ideological Spectrum

A Sinica Podcast

Last week, Harvard doctoral student Jennifer Pan and MIT graduate student Yiqing Xu co-released a paper, “China’s Ideological Spectrum,” that has garnered a tremendous amount of attention in China-watching circles. And the reason for the fracas? Their paper uses data from the Chinese Political Compass to try and map out Chinese ideological tendencies and surprisingly discovers that China’s ideological spectrum may be more uni-dimensional than it seems.

Joining Kaiser Kuo and David Moser to discuss this study and the question of what—if anything—Pan and Xu missed is Trey McArver, founder of China Insight and author of the China Politics Weekly newsletter. This is a fun show that veers from George Lakoff to Confucianism to Chinese patriotism and the anti-corruption crackdown.

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