ABSTRACT
The respondents of the last three countries to be analysed, all three of which are in Asia, Malaysia, Singapore and China, have an ‘optimistic’ vision of the state and nation to which they belong. On the one hand, Malaysia and Singapore combine highly supportive attitudes towards the state and nation with substantial satisfaction about life and with widespread confidence in the authorities. There is a problem with China, on the other hand, since questions about the authorities could not be asked in that country. Thus one knows only that that there are also highly supportive attitudes towards the state and nation as well as a substantial satisfaction about life. To provide some idea as to what Chinese citizens feel about how the state is organised, the only alternative was to rely on one question, Question 202e, which asks whether respondents are at all ‘worried about the way their country is going’: this is not a truly satisfactory substitute as it is not part of the same factor as is confidence in the authorities; but, in the absence of any other indicators, the replies to that question give at least some idea as to what the Chinese feel about how their country is progressing. It is worth noting that 40 per cent of the Chinese have no worries about their country – 10 per cent more than in the whole sample and 15 per cent more than in East and Southeast Asia.1 Meanwhile, in the three countries, 64 per cent of the respondents feel the nation to be very important to them, as against 55 per cent in the whole study (Q. 2). Sixty-five per cent, a record, are satisfied with life, appreciably more than the respondents of the group of happy non-nationalists and of the group which was examined in the previous chapter, in both of which the score is 59 per cent (Q. 502). Finally, in Malaysia and Singapore, 72 per cent have confidence in the authorities (Q. 101 a to g) – even more of a record, as that score is over 30 per cent above that of the respondents of the two groups which have just been mentioned. It seems therefore justified to suggest that these countries form a group which can be defined as being optimistic.
