In Washington, assessments of China—specifically, its economy and the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—are more polarized than ever.
Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to trade negotiations assert that China’s slowing growth, mounting debt, and weak consumption will enable Washington to extract valuable concessions from Beijing. Trump himself recently insinuated that he could induce “civil unrest” in China if Chinese President Xi Jinping refused to meet U.S. demands, implying that shuttered factories and diminished exports would jeopardize the Chinese leader’s political support.
Others, however, remain concerned about China’s formidable industrial and technological capacity, warning that excessive tariffs will not only harm the U.S. economy but provide Xi with a political scapegoat to blame for any economic hardship.
Yet both camps are missing a key point about Chinese people’s perceptions of their country and its leadership.
Over the past year or so, I’ve made three long trips to China, most recently in May. I’ve spent time in urban and rural Henan as well as Beijing and other major cities, speaking with people from various industries. The people I met were clear-eyed about the structural problems afflicting China’s economy. Yet they remained broadly supportive of the regime and its record of delivering public goods, from safety to seamless transportation, over the past several decades.
U.S. policymakers should recognize that many Chinese outside of the country’s impressive high-tech industries are pessimistic about their economic outlook. At the same time, policymakers should not overstate the regime’s vulnerability to popular unrest, even in the face of widespread economic woes.
Bad and likely getting worse—that’s essentially how a Chinese friend of mine, Sean, sees the economy. (This name and all subsequent ones are pseudonyms to protect the identities of those speaking on sensitive issues.)
“Things are already tough now, but in 10 years, we might look back on this year and say there hasn’t been a better one since,” he told me in May.
Sean, 46, lives in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan. He is a professor at a local university and an aspiring entrepreneur. He lives with his family in a modest three-bedroom apartment in the western part of the sprawling city. Like many in Henan’s exploding middle class, Sean and his family own two additional apartments, which they bought as investments about a decade ago, when China’s now-collapsed real estate market was booming.
Driving on the highway encircling Zhengzhou, Sean and I see a vista dotted with lanweilou—unfinished apartment buildings, office parks, and other building projects stalled for lack of funds. They are stark reminders of the declining value of his investments as well as the mounting fiscal crisis facing local governments, which have long relied on land sales to finance their budgets.
The state of the economy has become a sensitive issue in China in recent years as Beijing has censored economic data and punished researchers who openly challenge official projections or raise doubts about measures to boost consumption. Frank conversations can still happen behind closed doors, but I’ve personally seen how officials can get nervous about deviating from the party line even in private and otherwise informal exchanges.
Over the past year, Sean has introduced me to people working across a range of sectors in Henan, whose perspectives get less attention in media coverage and policy conversations than the people and businesses involved in high-tech industries. Their views also differ from and sometimes directly contradict those expressed by Chinese officials.
My conversations with these people corroborate the bearish view of China’s economy. Nobody I spoke with in Zhengzhou was optimistic about the prospects for significantly stronger consumption in the near term; the general impression was that improvements would be marginal.
Often, they expressed doubts when I presented them with talking points I had heard from officials. For example, people were skeptical of the much-touted trade-in programs meant to boost household spending by subsidizing purchases of new appliances, vehicles, and other products when consumers exchange them for older versions. If your refrigerator isn’t working and you really need a new one, people will take advantage of the program, Sean’s wife, June, told me. But when I asked if she thought it would fundamentally change consumer behavior, she said, flatly, no.
In Beijing, I met with an economist who studies U.S.-China relations at a state-affiliated think tank. When I asked if he thought the government’s efforts to boost spending were working, he said yes and referred to tourism statistics from the recent Qingming Festival holiday as evidence. But when I raised this issue with Sean, he countered by teaching me the term qiongyou, or “budget travel,” which he said was an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Families were indeed traveling more than they had during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were skimping on accommodation, food, souvenirs, and other expenses.
In May 2024, on my first trip back to Henan since the pandemic, Sean and I visited Bella, the CEO of a Zhengzhou-based company that runs international education programming. Bella’s business occupies what has long been a reliable growth sector in China that could generally count on middle-class families’ willingness to spend on their children’s education. But when I asked Bella about her view of the economy, she seemed deeply ambivalent. She said people were disappointed with the slow pace of the post-pandemic recovery and emphasized that she had come to believe that China’s economic problems were “complicated” and could not be resolved with quick fixes.
I heard a similar perspective from Lilian, Sean’s high school classmate, who runs a Zhengzhou-based company that manufactures and sells wellness goods inspired by traditional Chinese medicine.
When we first met in May 2024, her company occupied a full floor of an office building and was expanding further. Despite this growth, she was concerned about weak consumption, and when we met for the third time last month, she spoke more bluntly than ever about China’s bad economic situation. So did some of her employees. Driving me back to Sean’s apartment one evening, one of them shared his grim analysis of the inefficiencies of Beijing’s industrial policy and local governments’ unwillingness to let poorly performing companies fail, since doing so would risk even higher unemployment.
What struck me about the opinions I heard was not just that they went against the official view but also that they sounded so familiar. What ordinary Chinese people are saying about the economy sounds a lot like what China analysts outside the country are saying: Problems are structural and unlikely to be fixed without major reform, regardless of what official propaganda and even sincere optimists say. Just because there’s a party line doesn’t mean everyone believes it.
At one point, I asked Sean if the trade war could be an effective scapegoat for Xi, and he said he didn’t think so, since many of China’s economic problems are unrelated to it. U.S. behavior may rally some patriotic sentiment, but people clearly understand that Trump isn’t the source of all their problems. Personally, I find it rather patronizing to suggest that Chinese people would simply believe government propaganda that puts all blames on the United States.
But although people were frustrated with the economy and skeptical about the efficacy of current policies, they were broadly supportive of the regime. It isn’t hard to understand why. The dramatic economic and social development China has experienced over the past four decades has generated deep wells of legitimacy that will not be depleted simply by an economic slowdown or even significant economic frustration.
Sean, June, and Lilian all grew up in rural Yuzhou under extremely difficult conditions. I’ve visited their hometowns, and it is virtually impossible to overstate the contrast between them and the hypermodern megacities filled with Luckin Coffee shops and interconnected by subways and high-speed rail lines. Sean’s hometown got running water just a few years ago. His parents live in a house across the road from the yaodong—a kind of furnished cave dwelling common throughout northern China—where he grew up.
The contrast isn’t just between the cities and the countryside; it’s also between China and many other countries. In my experience, Chinese are fascinated and disturbed by the widespread availability of guns in the United States and take particular pride in the safety of their city streets. When I watched the evening news with Sean and his family, we saw a steady stream of disaster footage from wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine. To be sure, state media has a strong interest an accentuating this contrast—violence and chaos abroad, peace and stability at home—but propaganda wouldn’t work if it didn’t resonate with people’s direct experience.
Even those with profound grievances were quick to point out that the government was responsible for a lot of good things. In May 2024, I visited a Hui village in northern Henan with two Chinese scholars. We met with an imam and a man studying under him. When one member of our party shared his sense that the government’s crackdown on Islam had eased somewhat over the preceding year, the imam and his disciple countered that in fact things had gotten even stricter. Over lunch, the student shared his bleak assessment of religious life in contemporary China. But in the same breath, he told me that the government had made life more comfortable and convenient. I have heard similar sentiments over the years conducting research on Islam in China: Many Hui take pride in China’s rapid modernization even as they complain about state efforts to restrict Islamic practice.
To be sure, some people may express pro-government views as a form of self-protection, and certain segments of China’s population are profoundly aggrieved by CCP rule. China’s political system is intolerably cruel to many of those deemed dangerous by the state, from political dissidents and human rights advocates to Christian missionaries and Muslims in Xinjiang.
But the fact that the people I spoke with were willing to share their negative sentiments made their expressions of overall support for their country’s leadership more significant and credible. It suggests that widespread anxieties, though profound, are contained.
No matter the economic reality, it is important to recognize that many Chinese still feel real economic frustration and pessimism. If the mood I observed in Henan is allowed to fester, Beijing may face a legitimacy crisis in the long run. For the time being, however, it would be unwise for the Trump administration to hold its breath waiting for the CCP’s popular support to collapse.
A prolonged trade war may damage China’s economy, but it will take a long time to overturn popular satisfaction with the monumental material progress the regime has delivered within the lifetimes of many Chinese citizens.