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My colleagues at the China Data Center of 21st Century China published the latest findings showing increase trust among Chinese of their government; data can be disaggregated by age and edu level chinadatalab.ucsd.edu/viz-blog/pande…

Excited to see our paper with Jennifer Pan now available online in Political Communication. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda through ethnography + computational analysis of WeChat data. Check it out!

If you can read only one thing to make sense of the protests in #China, read “Now Out of Never” by Timur Kuran. It’s one of those studies that cannot be summarized in a thread, so I won’t attempt it. Just go read it in its entirety, it’s worth it. I have a few reflections 1/7🧵

Here’s a new working paper that I co-authored with Yutian An (Princeton University Ph.D. Candidate and Yale Law grad) on Chinese governmental expansion during Covid, titled “The Covid State: Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era.” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Paper "Strategies of Chinese State Media on Twitter" analyzing CGTN, Xinhua, People's Daily, China Daily from 2013-2020 out with Yingjie Fan, Jaymee Sheng tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

After CCP's push to boost its presence on global social media in 2017, all outlets increased share of posts with these narratives

State media outlets also increased share of soft news, positivity of reporting, number of countries covered

All outlets gained followers, with CGTN experiencing largest gains. Little evidence gains due to inauthentic accounts or bots.

Happy to see “Gender and Political Compliance under Authoritarian Rule” (w/ Jennifer Pan, Yingjie Fan) out Comparative Political Studies! When autocrats do not impose explicit rules of behavior, what does political compliance look like? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

Focusing on Confucius Institute (CI) teachers who are given broad political objectives, we find that women and men use divergent behaviors to express compliance to the Chinese regime.

Using interviews, primary documents, and in-person observation, we find that the Chinese regime sets broad objectives (defend national interests, create a positive image of China) to CI teachers but does not specify how to pursue these goals behaviorally.

Using a global survey with an embedded experiment, we show that these broad regime objectives motivate women to conduct uncensored discussions with host country students about Taiwan’s sovereignty, but the same objectives lead men to censor classroom discussion of Taiwan.

Evidence suggests these divergent behaviors stem from gender-based socialization experiences: women express compliance by trying to persuade students to accept the CCP’s position using open dialogues, while men comply by being assertive and suppressing opposition viewpoints.

Prior studies suggest that uncertainty of what behavior incurs punishment leads all risk-averse subjects to self censor. Our results indicate not all individuals self censor to mitigate risk of uncertainty - gender socialization affects censorship and shapes political conformity.

Three scope conditions of this gender-based difference in compliance: 1) patrilineal society; 2) no explicit behavioral dictates from those in power; 3) subjects in public-facing positions (e.g., teachers, street-level bureaucrats).

Also check out our online appendix, which provides more details of CI teacher participants’ socio-demographic backgrounds, perceptions of their job, and their day-to-day teaching. (end)

Thrilled to announce “From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China” is released! (amazon: tiny.cc/35zuzz or 30%off with code P327 at tiny.cc/2ouuzz via Princeton University Press) A decade in the making, my book presents how the world’s largest