Explaining the Trust Paradox: How Foreign Media Strengthens Government Confidence via Political–Economic Awareness in China

This dataset accompanies the manuscript “Explaining the Trust Paradox: How Foreign Media Strengthens Government Confidence via Political–Economic Awareness—and for Whom—in China” (Zhao & Liu, 2025, submitted to Political Communication). It contains the fully de-identified, replication-ready microdata from the 2021 Internet Users’ Social Awareness Survey (N = 3,788), as well as metadata and documentation files. Contents: data.csv: Cleaned, de-identified respondent-level dataset (all direct identifiers, IP addresses, and timestamps removed). README.md: Detailed description of variables, data provenance, and usage instructions. LICENSE.txt: Licensing information (CC-BY-4.0 for data, MIT for code). CITATION.cff: Citation metadata for automated referencing. Provenance: The original survey was conducted by the Chinese National Survey Data Archive (CNSDA). This version has been processed to ensure full compliance with data protection and journal transparency requirements.