While Washington spends its days locked in partisan gridlock and its nights leaking scandal after scandal, a recent Harvard University study found that Chinese citizens give their president a 93% approval rating.
That number is so absurdly high that most Americans instinctively assume it's fake.
But the research was conducted by the Ash Center at Harvard's Kennedy School, using long-term in-person surveys across China's provinces, not a phone poll run by a party hack.
Here in the United States, meanwhile, Congress hovers somewhere in the low 20s on a good week.
The current president's approval rating bounces around the low 40s depending on which scandal is dominating the news cycle.
We are a country that cannot agree on whether the sky is blue, yet we feel qualified to lecture the other side of the planet about governance.
The Harvard study, published in 2020 and tracking attitudes since 2003, found that satisfaction with the central government actually rose over time, not just among party members but across income levels, regions, and age groups.
The researchers were themselves surprised.
They had expected to find the usual pattern of economic development breeding political demands.
Instead, they found something closer to durable legitimacy.
This should be a wake-up call, but instead it's a talking point.
American pundits dismiss the number as propaganda, then go back to screaming at each other on cable news.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are dealing with a collapsing trust in every institution that once defined public life.
Trust in the Supreme Court just took a historic dive after a string of ethics scandals.
We mock the 93% as authoritarian theater while our own system produces something closer to 19% and calls it democracy in action.
A society where half the population believes the last election was stolen and the other half believes the winner is a threat to the republic is not a model for anyone.
Of course, comparing approval ratings across different political systems is apples to oranges.
China's survey methodology, however careful, operates in a country where expressing dissatisfaction with the top leader carries real consequences.
But even discounting for social desirability bias, the gap between how Chinese citizens view their government and how Americans view theirs is too wide to explain away.
What's really collapsing is not China's political system.
It's our confidence that our own still works.
We have turned governance into entertainment, policy into tribal warfare, and the public square into a shouting match.
Xi Jinping is not the reason for any of that.
He is simply the mirror America refuses to look into. **Closing opinion:** It is easy to sneer at a 93% approval rating when your own institutions are polling below the rate of random chance.
But the real story isn't China's numbers — it's why Americans have stopped believing their own system can deliver anything but dysfunction.
Final Thoughts
Until we face that, we're just yelling at the reflection.