Abstract China’s ambitious initiatives to address climate change have attracted significant scholarly attention, yet much less focus was on how climate change is understood in Chinese society. This study analyzes the results from two surveys in 2009 and 2016 with nationally representative samples. The findings suggest that Chinese people have a fairly high awareness of the existence and anthropogenic causes of climate change. They consider climate change less urgent than air pollutions but more important than conservation. There is strong support for China to take leadership to address climate change. The respondents consider the government, especially the central government, as the entity most responsible for taking actions on climate change and generally approve its contributions. Policy measures such as carbon tax and cap and trade enjoy high support in China. Finally, the respondents also show a strong willingness to partake in individual actions.
Citation: Liu JC-E (2023) Public opinion on climate change in China—Evidence from two national surveys. PLOS Clim 2(2): e0000065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000065 Editor: Shah Md Atiqul Haq, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, BANGLADESH Received: January 6, 2022; Accepted: December 27, 2022; Published: February 23, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 John Chung-En Liu. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The data that support the findings of this study belong to the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. This data is not publicly available due to the privacy restriction in the contract. Funding: The Author J.L. is supported by the China Energy Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Ash Center for Democratic Innovation and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) grant 109-2410-H-002-007-MY3. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
1. Introduction China contributed 31 percent of global fossil CO2 emissions in 2020—it is the single largest carbon-emitting country with emissions totaling greater than those of the US, the 27 European Union countries (EU27), and India combined [1]. China has set a goal to peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Much of the literature examines the role of the state in shaping and implementing China’s climate policy, yet it is also of great importance to understand how Chinese citizens perceive climate change and the policies designed to address it. Over the past two decades, environmental issues have emerged as a major concern for both the Chinese people and the Chinese government [2]. Some scholars have described the shift in terms of the Chinese public moving from a state of "mass unconsciousness" to becoming "citizen stakeholders" [3]. Even with an authoritarian system, the Chinese government has actively managed or accommodated citizens’ concerns regarding the environment [4–8]. China has exhibited many, sometimes contradictory, value systems in the past few decades—from communism to market capitalism, revivals of Chinese traditions such as Confucianism, and the recent rising nationalism—making it a particularly interesting case for studying environmental ideologies [9]. Since the late 1990s, the field has produced a growing number of surveys examining people’s awareness and perceptions regarding climate change [10]. In the 2000s, most surveys were carried out by commercial entities, such as GlobalScan and Gallup, and think tanks, such as Pew Research Center. In recent years, scholars have used refined survey instruments and targeted sample populations to advance understanding of China’s public opinion on climate change [11–20]. As noted by Wang and Zhou’s thorough review [21], however, many surveys suffer from weak sampling schemes—sample sizes tend to be smaller than ideal and samples often lack representativeness. The most in-depth study among this literature comes from the "Climate Change in the Chinese Mind" project by the China Center of Climate Change Communication (the "China4C" survey) at Renmin University [22–24], for which two surveys were conducted in 2012 and 2017, respectively, covering more than 4,000 samples. Despite the growing literature, empirical research on this topic remains scarce. Although there are nationally representative surveys, such as the Chinese General Social Survey, the data from these queries often does not delve into climate issues in particular or does not adrress the scale of China’s emissions. Compared to China, the United States has seen many surveys examining every dimension of public opinion on climate change. This research analyzes two of the few climate change public opinion surveys with nationally representative samples in China. These two surveys offer a rare perspective on how perceptions of climate change have changed over time and explore other dimensions that are not examined in other surveys. National-level studies on this topic in China remain rare, and this paper adds essential data points, enabling triangulations. The findings suggest that Chinese people have a high awareness of climate change’s existence and its anthropogenic causes. The majority of Chinese people surveyed consider climate change less urgent than air pollution but more important than ecological conservation. The respondents view the government as the entity most responsible for taking action on climate change and generally approve of its contributions. Policy measures such as carbon tax and cap and trade have high levels of public support in China. The survey’s respondents also show a strong willingness to undertake individual actions.
2. Methods The two surveys used in this paper were conducted in 2009 and 2016, respectively (hereafter "2009 survey" and "2016 survey"). The surveys have an identical sampling frame and use some of the same questions. Both draw from nationally representative samples from seven major cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, Shenyang, and Xi’an) and seven smaller towns and nearby rural villages. Fig 1 shows the locations where the surveys were conducted. In each location individual respondents were randomly selected from neighborhood committee lists using the KISH method [25]. The survey drew no fewer than 250, 150, and 100 samples in each city, town, and village, respectively. The respondents, who were at least 18 years old, must not have participated in survey research in the past six months, and they and their family members could not work for survey research companies. Both surveys used face-to-face settings where interviewers read the questionnaire to respondents and recorded their answers. Each respondent received a small gift after completion. PPT PowerPoint slide
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TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Survey locations. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000065.g001 Table 1 summarizes the descriptive statistics of the two surveys. The 2009 survey has 3785 respondents, while the 2016 survey has 3794 respondents. The sex ratios for both are roughly 48 percent male and 52 percent female. The 2009 sample is more rural and less educated than the 2016 sample, yet the difference matches well with the demographic changes during the seven-year gap between the two studies. PPT PowerPoint slide
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TIFF original image Download: Table 1. Summary statistics of the two surveys. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000065.t001 This study has larger sample sizes compared to typical climate change survey studies in the United States and Europe. It shares some similarities with the "China4C" survey—both feature two waves, national representative samples, and are administered by independent third parties. Yet, this study’s data has some important distinctions. First, the surveys are conducted with face-to-face interviews instead of computer-aided phone surveys (CATI). The different sampling and survey methods may help triangulate research findings with other survey studies. Second, the surveys were conducted during two different administrations in China: in 2009 when President Hu Jintao was in office, and in 2016, four years into Xi Jinping’s administration. The two surveys in this study also were administered around the time of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (December 2009) and Paris Climate Summit (December 2015), when media at all levels had heightened attention on climate change. This data can be viewed as reflecting two different eras in China’s recent development.
4. Discussion and conclusion The paper analyses two surveys on public opinions regarding climate change, with nationally representative samples in China. The results show that Chinese citizens have a high awareness of the existence and anthropogenic cause of climate change; they also view climate change as less urgent than other environmental issues. Compared to the China4C survey [23], the paper shows a lower perception of climate change but higher awareness that climate change is caused by human activities. Compared with the China Governance and Public Policy Survey (CGPPS) [18], this paper reports a slightly higher level of climate change concern. This study also finds that gender, age, education, and urban residence is associated with how people think about climate change. Respondents show a willingness to change their behaviors, while expecting that the government bears the most responsibility for taking action. These insights could help communicators better craft their messages to improve the publics’ understanding of climate change and relevant policies. This paper shows the dominance of the Chinese state in climate governance. The Chinese public overwhelmingly expects the government to take action and expresses strong support for its initiatives. The respondents also affirm public perception of China’s leadership role on the global stage, a dimension less explored by previous surveys. These results are useful contexts for understanding China’s geopolitical moves with regard to the climate. We recognize that this research area evolves quickly. Six years have passed since the latest survey data was collected in 2016, and much has changed since then. The Trump administration retreated from the Paris Agreement; China, to a certain extent, filled in the leadership role. A trade war strained Sino-US relation. President Biden re-entered the UNFCCC framework, and yet climate change remains one of the most important and contentious issues in US-China relations. Within China, observers have witnessed rising nationalism along with a more assertive, even aggressive, stance in international affairs [35]. Climate change is often entangled with nationalist sentiments [36]. The Chinese state media and many netizens openly deride and shame climate activist Greta Thunberg [37]; the WildAid’s climate campaign turned into a fiasco due to their foreign origin [38]. To understand rapidly evolving public opinions and to develop insights from survey studies like this paper, this field would benefit from innovative research methods designed to contextualize how Chinese people perceive and respond to climate change.