The Limits of Performance

Abstract

While governance performance is often regarded as the cornerstone of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, its capacity to sustain national identity among a generation socialized in prosperity remains a critical question. Challenging the assumption of a linear relationship, this article examines the mechanisms and limits of performance-based legitimacy through two novel studies. In a priming experiment with 652 high school students, exposure to images of China’s development achievements did not significantly increase national identity and in fact lowered students’ reported sense of responsibility. A second survey of 1,625 university students reveals an inverted-U-shaped relationship between evaluations of governance performance and national identity. The relationship is conditioned by equity values and attribution of development problems: governance performance most strongly reinforces identity when individuals attach high importance to social justice but also attribute developmental problems to the government. These findings reveal the fragility of a legitimacy model based solely on material outputs.