Since its outbreak in late 2019, COVID-19 has brought tremendous health crisis and economic disaster to countries all over the world. How to take effective measures to curb the spread of the virus and alleviate its influence on population health and society has become a difficult problem for public health policies in various countries. In China, the “zero-COVID” strategy has been carried out since the pandemic, which highly relied on mass testing, contact tracing, scale lockdowns, infections isolation and international travel bans. China’s zero-COVID strategy had been implemented well and had successfully reached its goal of reducing virus transmission to near-zero levels until the March outbreaks in 2022 (Dai & Dai, 2022; Normile, 2022). The zero-COVID strategy not only avoids a significant number of deaths in China; It has also won space for economic development. China’s economy swiftly recovered from the nationwide lockdown in the first quarter of the year 2020 and reached a GDP growth of 8.1% in 2021, which was in the forefront of the world (Chen et al., 2022; Yang, 2022).

       Nevertheless, with the prevalence of the Omicron variant with low fatality rate but high rate of spread since the end of 2021, most countries have successively abandoned the compulsory measures for COVID-19 at the national level and attempted to coexist with the virus. With this global shift, some scientists and medical specialists in China began to examine pivoting from the zero-COVID strategy and study how to live with the virus (Normile, 2022). Meanwhile, the fact that social and economic costs of zero-COVID strategy are continuously rising makes some of the Chinese public dissatisfy with the zero-COVID strategy and called for easing restrictions. In March 2022, the outbreak in Shanghai tremendously challenged the zero-COVID strategy. The large-scale mass tests and strict lockdown, as well as the lack of food and drugs, have pushed the debate of zero-COVID or coexist with COVID to a climax in public opinion.

       As Kerr and van der Linden (2021) declared, evaluating public opinion is crucial because the effectiveness of the interventions depends on the agree to which people support the policy and voluntarily adopt their behavior. In particular, whether the public supports and actively cooperates with the zero-COVID strategy, which has brought damage to individual freedom and economic conditions, is of vital importance. Therefore, whether the Chinese public stands by zero-COVID or coexisting with COVID is crucial to the sustainability of the current policy. Furthermore, what factors are associating with the Chinese public’s attitude towards the zero-COVID strategy and coexistence?

       Although previous studies have found the effect of scientific variables and risk perception on the public’s attitude towards epidemic prevention policies, as Chen et al. (2022) pointed out, the scientific community remains controversial about whether to zero or live with COVID-19. Therefore, the current study explores how scientific variables and risk perception are associated with the Chinese public’s attitude towards zeroing or coexisting. In addition, evidences showed that in many Western countries, the public’s response to COVID-19 has been politicized, which has polarized their risk perception and attitude towards prevention measures (Kerr & van der Linden, 2021; Allcott et al., 2020; Gadarian et al., 2021). In contrast, due to the successful implementation of the zero-COVID strategy in China, the public has shown a high degree of consistence with the government’s COVID-19 policies until the Shanghai outbreak. On March 20, 2022, Shenzhen, which encountered the Omicron outbreak almost at the same time as Shanghai and resolutely adopted the dynamic zero-COVID strategy to contain the epidemic, published an article in its official newspaper, Shenzhen Special Zone News, claiming that the debate between the zero-COVID strategy and coexistence is “ostensibly a dispute over the concept, strategy and method of fighting with the epidemic, but in essence it is a dispute over institution, national strength, governance ability and even civilization” (Shen, 2022). Although this statement has been criticized as politicizing the pandemic, it somehow reveals the conflict of political values hidden behind this dispute. Therefore, we also tend to explore the relationship between political related variables, such as political trust, political ideology and nationalism, and the attitude towards the zero-COVID strategy or coexistence.

       Therefore, in the current study, we analyze Chinese public’s attitude towards the zero-COVID strategy and coexistence based on a nationwide survey by quota sampling in April 2022. We aim to explore how scientific variables and risk perception are associated with the Chinese public’s attitude towards zeroing or coexisting, as well as the role of political ideology, political trust, and nationalism on the attitude.