Differentiated Trust Under Unified Rule: How Foreign Policy News Shapes Public Confidence in the Central Government Across Greater China

This research investigates how foreign policy outcomes affect public trust in mainland China through a carefully designed survey experiment. While foreign policy traditionally aims to advance international interests, its domestic consequences—particularly on public trust—remain poorly understood in non-democratic contexts. Recent events from the U.S. and elsewhere regarding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Russia sanctions demonstrate how foreign policy profoundly impacts domestic sentiment, yet scholarship has focused predominantly on the reverse—how public opinion shapes foreign policy. This overlooks Gourevitch's "second image reversed": how international affairs reshape domestic politics. While cases from Vietnam to Iraq show foreign policy can alter domestic trust, the specific mechanisms remain underexplored in authoritarian systems where state-controlled information and different legitimacy sources operate. Public trust underpins governance effectiveness across all regime types—enabling civic participation in democracies and ensuring compliance in authoritarian systems. China presents a unique case where foreign policy serves dual purposes: projecting international power while reinforcing domestic legitimacy. Our research employs a survey experiment distributed evenly across different regions in mainland China, moving beyond observational methods to establish causal relationships. The experimental design tests a primary hypothesis that foreign policy outcomes significantly affect public trust in government. Recognizing that this effect may not be uniform, or may depend on other factors, we also embed additional experimental treatments examining the extent and conditions of foreign policy's influence on trust. First, we test framing effects by comparing government-framed versus unframed policy outcomes, with framed conditions further distinguished between effort-emphasizing and factual frames. Second, we investigate benchmarking by contrasting China's success presented alone versus alongside other countries' foreign or domestic policy failures. Third, we examine relevance by comparing foreign policy directly affecting daily life versus not so related diplomatic news. By systematically varying these experimental conditions across different parts of China, this study illuminates not just whether foreign policy affects trust, but the boundaries and mechanisms of this relationship.