Decent write up on history of Chinese polling, both by domestic institutions and foreign NGOs that have consistently supported these findings since PRC opened up. TL:DR; CCP gets shit done because legitimacy is derived from performance. Shit being done is mostly good for most amount of people, so most people happy.

The “Surprise” of Authoritarian Resilience in China

The information explosion based on public opinion surveys in China in the past thirty years has left a few cracks in the empirical foundation of some of the classic theories of political science that were first developed in the West with limited firsthand evidence. For example, the classic theory of civic culture was developed from survey data in only five countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Today, the World Values Surveys cover more than eighty countries in all continents with human inhabitation.

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Among these countries, China stands out as an outlier and does not fit the theoretical predictions of Western political science. As discussed in the above mentioned “surprises”: (1) the Tiananmen protest in 1989 was an anti-reform movement, but it was expected to be a pro-democratic movement; (2) the Chinese regime enjoys strong public support even though many in the West expected it to have collapsed already; (3) social capital in China is among the highest in the world, despite political science’s expectation that its authoritarian political system would produce public distrust; (4) the authoritarian government is (perceived to be) highly responsive while the theory of democracy predicts otherwise; and (5) Chinese citizens are politically active and enjoy a strong feeling of political efficacy even if they are expected to be politically apathetic.