Nationalism, conspiracy theories and vaccine mandates: Exploring the statism determinants for attitudes to COVID-19 control in China

Introduction China’s loosening its COVID-19 controls highlighted its insufficiency in vaccination protection. Mandatory vaccination might be necessary if the gap cannot be filled over a short time. However, few studies have explored how Chinese people view the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, let alone placing such views in the country’s highly politicized context. Material and methods The current study utilizes data from a national survey adopting quota sampling to analyze the Chinese public’s medical and non-medical considerations when judging compulsory COVID-19 vaccination (n = 1,523). The survey was conducted between 1 and 8 April 2021. All adults aged 18 years and older were eligible to take part. The survey included sociodemographic details, perceived susceptibility to infection, perceived vaccine benefit, attitudes to vaccination policies, nationalism, beliefs in various conspiracy theories and science literacy. Multiple regression analyses were done to examine factors associated with the attitude to COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Results The study reveals that personal risk and benefit perceptions did not dominate the Chinese public’s attitude toward vaccination mandates. Instead, nationalism was relatively strongly associated with their willingness to accept mandatory vaccination. Contrary to studies in the West, various conspiracy beliefs and conspiratorial thinking were robustly related to the support for mandatory vacciniation. Science literacy didn’t link to the attitude to vaccination mandates. It only had a weak moderating effect on the influence of conspiratorial thinking on attitudes to the vaccination policies. Conclusions The results indicated that Chinese people’s attitude to the COVID-19 vaccination policy is highly politicized and influenced by conspiracy theories. Given the potentially massive impacts of the COVID-19 infection, we need to educate the Chinese public with more medically valuable and relevant information to help them make sound decisions regarding vaccination. Meanwhile, we can adopt nationalistic tones to improve the persuasion effect, but misinformation during the process must be overcome.