Family Matters: Education and Indoctrination in an Authoritarian Regime

• In Event: New Perspectives on Chinese Politics

Abstract

Extant research on the role of propaganda in cultivating people's proregime attitudes has yielded mixed evidence. This suggests that the key question is no longer whether propaganda indoctrinates but instead when and how it can do so. Building upon research from information processing and intergenerational transmission, this paper argues that receptivity of students to propaganda embedded in school textbooks is conditional on their familial connections with the government. Results from a natural experiment exploiting China's most recent high school curriculum reform show that a new political education curriculum indoctrinated only those whose parents had worked for the government. By contrast, the new textbooks exerted no demonstrable effects on nonaffiliated students, the great majority of the population. The results are robust to a wide range of additional analyses. Two falsification tests are also conducted to corroborate the causal identification. This paper further evaluates competing mechanisms potentially underlying the causal relationship. Taken together, findings suggest that indoctrination occurs only among people whose families are connected to state patronage. They also highlight the role of people's early socialization processes in families in affecting their receptivity to subsequent propaganda.

Author

• Jay Chieh Kao, University of Texas at Austin