Conditional Compliance: Public Support and State Control in China’s Crisis Management
Do crises generate blanket support for authoritarian authority, or do citizens distinguish between the emergency powers a crisis warrants and the routine political controls a regime maintains? We argue that public compliance in authoritarian regimes is domain-specific and conditional on context: the boundary between crisis legitimacy and routine repression is actively negotiated by citizens rather than automatically erased by the experience of shared threat. Combining the 2021 China General Social Survey with provincial indicators of pandemic severity, we examine public attitudes toward two distinct facets of state authority. Support for COVID-19 emergency measures was overwhelming and unrelated to individual risk perception, yet this support did not translate into greater tolerance of government interference with political criticism. The separation between crisis compliance and routine political control, however, narrows as objective threat intensifies. Citizens who feel personally vulnerable but are not overwhelmed by fear shift from resisting political controls under manageable conditions to accepting them as local pandemic severity escalates. These findings challenge accounts of authoritarian resilience that treat crisis-era legitimacy as a durable reservoir of regime support, showing instead that the social contract during a crisis is continuously renegotiated across governance domains and that the political premium an autocracy earns from crisis management is far more bounded than it appears.
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