Subjective Motivations for Mass Political Participation in Urban China.

The article examines the effect of individual attitudes toward low- and high-politics on mass political participation in Beijing, China. There is a consensus among the motivation analysts themselves that individual subjective orientations significantly influence political participation, especially during the reform period, the question of which kinds of subjective orientations influence what types of political acts has by no means been settled. Some analyses (e.g., DiFranceisco and Gitelman, 1984; Friedgut, I 979) including some more recent studies of China's mass participation (e.g., Shi, 1997; Jennings, 1997) within the motivation model, tend to downgrade or neglect the impact of individual attitudes toward high-politics issues (e.g., political ideas/principles, the political system, and the current political leadership) on most of the legitimate and conventional forms of participation. Instead, these studies focus mainly on the role of basic sociopsychological attributes and orientations to low politics issues (e.g., daily lives, communal matters, and workplace conditions).