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A Chinese conservative supports the teachings of the philosopher Confucius, backs a strong state and wants the government to have a strong role in running the economy. Chinese liberals yearn for more civil liberties, believe in free-market capitalism and want more sexual freedom.

That’s the key finding of a new paper by two graduate students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that draws on an online 50-question survey of more than 171,000 people to give a rare look into the lively political culture of what would be, if it were not in a Leninist straitjacket, the world’s biggest electorate.

China may even be divided, much like the United States, into “red” conservative provinces mostly in the poorer rural interior and richer, urbanized “blue” coastal provinces, the draft research paper found. The paper, quickly translated into Chinese and posted on social media sites, drew blistering criticism from the state news media.

The data that Jennifer Pan at Harvard and Yiqing Xu at M.I.T. draw on comes from an online Chinese survey that was conducted in 2014 and hosted on a website outside the country. It posed questions seldom asked in China, where social science research is overseen by the state and the ruling Communist Party.

People taking the survey were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “human rights takes precedence over sovereignty,” “modern Chinese society needs Confucianism” and “I will recognize the relationship between my child and a homosexual partner if it is a voluntary choice.”

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The Chinese political divide differs from the current split between Republicans and Democrats in the United States. Chinese conservatives are, roughly, more akin to Southern Democrats who backed the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt — socially conservative but supporting a strong government hand in the economy. Liberals in China are more like American libertarians or traditional British liberals — socially progressive and supporting a lighter role for the government in the economy.

“These conceptions of left and right or conservatism and liberalism, we’re just using those as labels,” Ms. Pan said in a telephone interview. “I think their connotations are very different than their usage in the U.S. or Western European context, and I think that makes sense given that China is coming from a very different intellectual, historical tradition than the U.S. or Western Europe.”

Ms. Pan said that the survey the paper drew on was not representative of the Chinese population, that their findings were preliminary and that she and Mr. Xu were seeking critiques on their methods from other scholars.

Most respondents were young, male college students living in prosperous coastal areas such as Beijing, Shanghai and the southern province of Guangdong. Much of the 59-page draft paper, published on Saturday, is spent applying statistical methods, including weighting the survey to census data, to account for this. “The reweighting does not make the data representative,” Ms. Pan said.

China’s state-run news outlets were quick to attack the paper’s methods and question the motivation behind it.

“The crude data in the report is far from reaching the academic standards of Harvard or M.I.T.,” Global Times, a paper under the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, wrote in an editorial on Wednesday. “We can’t help but suspect that its publishing has been specially ‘customized’ for certain political ends.”

Turning Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism on its head, the Global Times editorial also said that “regional differentiation has never been a dominant factor in Chinese ideology, and there is no solid link between economic development and ideology.”

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Ms. Pan said that even with the skewed sample size, she and Mr. Xu were confident that they had identified the ideological divide in China. She said they were surprised to find that it was “uni-dimensional,” meaning that social conservatives were generally economic conservatives in the Chinese sense, and social liberals were economic liberals.

In the United States and Western Europe, she said, the landscape is more diverse. Many Republicans in the United States believe in free-market liberalism but are social conservatives, while still others are libertarians. And while most Democrats believe in a stronger state hand in the economy and are socially liberal, others are social conservatives who oppose gay marriage and expanded abortion rights.

“I think going in, we weren’t sure what we would find in terms of the ideological dimension,” Ms. Pan said. “On the one hand we thought maybe there was going to be no coherence at all, that people’s responses would be all over the place. Quite surprisingly we found that there was this seemingly coherent difference in ideological views.”

But it’s the geographic breakdown of China into conservative red, liberal blue and mixed purple provinces that has drawn the most attention on China’s social media. By that measure, the survey found that Shanghai was the most liberal region in the country, followed by the wealthy coastal provinces of Guangdong and Zhejiang.

The relatively poor interior provinces tended to be the most conservative. Xinjiang, in the far northwest, was the reddest of the red, ranked as the most conservative region in the country.

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But even with more than 171,000 respondents, very few people from many interior regions took part, especially women and people over 40, making the province-by-province breakdown of politics problematic and often unrepresentative of important segments of the population, Ms. Pan said. Xinjiang, for example, had only 664 people answering the survey. Beijing, with a population about the same size as Xinjiang’s, had more than 40,000 respondents. Tibet and Qinghai, also in western China, had too few respondents to be included.

And the fact that Xinjiang ranked as most conservative might strike many observers as unusual, given that more than half of the region is made up of ethnic minorities, suggesting that the survey respondents from Xinjiang may have mostly been members of the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

“The reality could be very different than what we found,” Ms. Pan said.





Survey questions extracted from “M.I.T. Political Science Department, Research Paper No. 2015-6,” below.

Follow Michael Forsythe on Twitter at @PekingMike.