An Analysis Of The Current Situation And Influencing Factors Of Populism In China

Populism has attracted more and more attention of political scholars,whose key focus has always been on the powerful social forces inspired by populism.In recent years,we saw Donald Trump won the president election of the US and the UK exited from the EU through a referendum,the term populism has appeared in people’s eyes more and more often.There is no doubt that populism is the key ideology to our understanding of the current social and political life.The realistic needs constitute the starting point for our understanding of populism.However,the complicated populist phenomenon makes it difficult for us to accurately understand and grasp what is the real populism.From the previous research,we can easily find that there is a lack of consensus on populism concept,which brings difficulties to the measurement of populism at the individual level.However,after reading and summarizing a large number of populism measure methods,I find almost all populism measure methods are all concentrate on these key words : the people,the elite,direct democracy,anti-establishment,homogeneity,collectivization.On this basis,I propose a two-layer three-dimensional model of individual-level populism measure methods,which measure one’s populism tendency from the value dimension : the people versus the elite,the institutional dimensions: direct democracy and anti-establishment and the logical dimensions:homogeneity and collectivization tendency.According to the three-dimensional measurement model,combined with the populist phenomenon in the real world,I also propose other three types of populism except classical populism: strategic populism,utopian populism and mass democratic populism.Through data analysis,I find the Chinese people have a large proportion of populism tendency,but generally the involvement is not deep,the extreme populists account for a small proportion.For the distribution of the three types of populism,I find that the utopian populism account for a large number while the strategic populism and the mass democratic populism have a relatively small proportion.In the previous explanatory theories of populism,it is generally believed that political corruption and economic crisis are important factors that cause populism.But as a product of modernity,populism has an anti-modern tendency,the connection between populism and anti-modern ideology has not been proved by empirical research.In addition,existing studies usually link nationalism with populism,which well explains the phenomenon of right-wing populism but also cause insufficient attention to the relationship between populism and nationalism.Through data analysis,I find that the traditional ethics which is the opposite of modernity have a significant positive impact on the formation of populism.Similarly,the nationalism which has the same logic to populism also have a significant positive impact on populism.