How Government Image Tactics Win Over Skeptical Young Citizens in China

Young people across China consistently report lower trust in government than their parents and grandparents, a generational gap that has puzzled political scientists and policymakers alike. A new study published in Current Psychology suggests that part of the answer lies not in what governments do, but in how they present what they do. Researchers from Zhejiang University of Technology and Shanghai International Studies University found that carefully crafted government communication—what psychologists call impression management—can measurably increase trust among young citizens, and that the effect runs through a surprising psychological bridge: a shared sense of moral agreement the authors term overlapping consensus.

The research team, led by Yuting Zhang, set out to test a question borrowed from organizational psychology and applied to the political arena. In workplaces, employees manage the impressions colleagues form of them through two broad families of tactics. Promotive tactics highlight achievements, competence, and positive outcomes, painting the actor in an aspirational light. Protective tactics, by contrast, defend against blame, offering excuses, justifications, or apologies when things go wrong. Governments, the researchers reasoned, deploy the same repertoire when they broadcast policy successes or explain away failures, and young audiences steeped in social media may be especially sensitive to these signals.

To disentangle cause from correlation, the team combined a controlled experiment with a large-scale survey, a methodological pairing that allows each approach to shore up the weaknesses of the other. In the experimental phase, participants were randomly exposed to government messages framed as either promotive or protective impression management, and their subsequent trust in government was measured. The survey phase then captured naturally occurring perceptions of government communication among a broader youth sample, along with measures of the psychological mechanisms and cultural values the researchers believed would moderate the effects.

The experimental results were unambiguous on the first question: both types of tactics increased youth trust in government. When young participants read government communications that emphasized accomplishments and capability, their trust rose. When the communications instead acknowledged problems and offered protective framing—explaining constraints, taking responsibility, or contextualizing setbacks—trust rose as well. Neither strategy was inherently superior; both moved the needle, suggesting that the act of strategic self-presentation itself, regardless of direction, engages citizens’ evaluative machinery in ways that silence or generic messaging does not.

But the study’s most intriguing contribution lies in the mechanism it identified. Drawing on the philosopher John Rawls’s concept of an overlapping consensus—the area of agreement that emerges when people with different values and worldviews nonetheless converge on shared principles—the researchers proposed that impression management works by building this consensus between the government and its young audience. When a government message resonates with what youth already believe is fair, competent, or legitimate, it creates a zone of moral overlap. The survey data supported this pathway statistically: the relationship between both promotive and protective tactics and trust in government was mediated by overlapping consensus, meaning the tactics boosted trust at least partly by convincing young people that government and citizen share common ground.

Culture, it turns out, decides which tactic works best for whom. The researchers measured two dimensions of cultural values at the individual level, adapted from Hofstede’s classic framework: collectivism, the tendency to prioritize group harmony and in-group loyalty over individual goals, and long-term orientation, a future-focused perspective that values persistence, thrift, and sustained effort over immediate gratification. These two values played strikingly different moderating roles for the two tactic types.

Collectivism amplified the power of promotive impression management. Among young Chinese participants who scored high on collectivism, the positive relationship between achievement-focused government messaging and overlapping consensus was significantly stronger, which in turn produced a larger indirect boost to trust. This makes intuitive sense: citizens who see themselves as part of a collective enterprise are more receptive to narratives of shared accomplishment and national progress, and promotive messages tap directly into that identity. For this group, a government showcasing what it has built and achieved reads not as bragging but as reporting on a common project they belong to.

Long-term orientation produced a result the researchers did not anticipate. The original hypothesis predicted that a strong future orientation would weaken the effectiveness of protective impression management, on the logic that forward-looking individuals might be impatient with excuses and defensive framing. The data said the opposite. Long-term orientation strengthened the positive relationship between protective tactics and overlapping consensus, and the indirect effect on trust was stronger at higher levels of this value. One plausible interpretation is that young people who think in long horizons are more willing to accept that governments face constraints, trade-offs, and delayed payoffs, and therefore find protective explanations—acknowledging difficulties while committing to eventual resolution—to be credible rather than evasive. Rather than dismissing defensive communication, patient, future-oriented youth appear to read it as evidence of prudence.

The findings arrive amid a rich literature documenting China’s distinctive trust landscape. Previous surveys have shown that political trust in China is often hierarchical, with citizens expressing more confidence in the central government than in local authorities, and that trust levels shift across birth cohorts as generational experiences diverge. Scholars have also documented how Chinese officials actively construct their public image online, and how government microblogs worked to sustain trust during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new study adds a psychological micro-foundation to this macro picture: it specifies not only that government communication matters, but through what cognitive route and under which cultural conditions it matters most.

For practitioners, the implications are concrete. Governments seeking to rebuild credibility with skeptical young audiences should not choose between boasting and apologizing—both can work—but should instead match the tactic to the audience’s cultural profile. Achievement-oriented messaging gains traction with collectivist youth, while candid, protective communication resonates with those who take the long view. More fundamentally, the study suggests that the goal of government communication should not be persuasion in the shallow sense but the cultivation of overlapping consensus: demonstrating that government actions align with values young citizens already hold. Whether these dynamics, observed in the Chinese context, generalize to societies with different media environments and political cultures remains an open question, and the authors note that fostering consensus and accounting for cultural differences among youth groups offers practical guidance for governments everywhere. As trust in institutions becomes a defining political currency of the digital age, the psychology of how governments present themselves—and how young citizens decode those presentations—may prove as consequential as the policies being presented.

Subject of Research: The effects of government impression management tactics on youth trust in government in China, mediated by overlapping consensus and moderated by cultural values

Article Title: The influence of government impression management on youth trust in government: evidence from China

Article References: Zhang, Y., Guo, J., Wang, F., Pan, Y., & Wen, H. (2026). The influence of government impression management on youth trust in government: evidence from China. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09907-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09907-8

Keywords: government trust, impression management, youth, China, overlapping consensus, collectivism, long-term orientation, political psychology, cultural values, government communication, Current Psychology, trust in government