Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Due to the transition of social environment and the development of Internet, the differentiation of left-wings and right-wings has gradually emerged in China after the 1990s. The advocators of left and right wings have a wide range of debates on Internet, which reveals the divergences among different political issues. This article offers an empirical analysis (N=3781) of Chinese netizens’ political attitudes in terms of the characteristics of political positions.

Based on the results of the analysis, this article contends that 1) Chinese netizens have distinctly differentiated in political attitudes among different topics including political system, economic system, freedom of speech, national identity and diplomacy policies. The netizens who believe they are neutral actually have similar attitude with leftists in many issues; 2) Left-wings and right-wings netizens in China are opposite to their namesakes in western countries in many ways. Specifically, Chinese leftists tend to deem the concept of nationalism and populism easier to accept and be more conservative in political issues, which is different from its western counterparts. The leftists also tend to support the government authorities in media censorship and interfering the economic activities. The rightists, on the contrary, advocate the neoliberalism and freedom of speech, so they tend to negative the existing political system of China and advocate the electoral democracy. It is also worth noting that Chinese rightists are more concerned about social justice and low-income group, which also demonstrates the significant difference with its western counterparts; 3) Chinese leftists and rightists also have obvious divergence in political trust. The leftists tend to trust the authority and mainstream media while the rightists prefer to trust foreign media like BBC.

The findings show that the differentiation of left-wings and right-wings under the Chinese context is quite different from western countries. In China, the debate of “Left” and “Right” is focusing on the identification of political legitimacy and the divergence of views on democracy. This phenomenon can be attributed to two reasons. First, China’s revolutionary history and contemporary political system deeply influenced the people’s understanding of “Left” and “Right”. Because CPC regarded itself as a left-wing party when it was established, the “left-wings” consistently have the close relationship with the party and the government, regardless of the transition of the party and the government after the Reform and Opening since 1978. Second, because of the globalization and modernization led by the western countries, China’s political culture is also deeply influenced by the western world. So the debate between Left and Right has gradually been distorted into the debate of the legitimacy of Chinese political system and the relationship between China and West, which causes the unique phenomenon of political orientation in China.