Scapegoating: A Text-Mining Study on Diversionary Collective Actions in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries I

Abstract

The bulk of the recent burgeoning literature on China's internet censorship seems to reach a consensus on one proposition ("responsive authoritarianism" thesis): In order to increase its governance, the Chinese government strategically allows the messages criticizing it, while censors those having the potential to incite all kinds of collective actions. (King et al, 2013; Qin et al., 2017) This paper enriches this literature and suggests that dictators might not necessarily censor the messages with collective action potential (CAP) across the board. We distinguish different kinds of collective actions in terms of their targets and argue that some CAP messages are allowed since certain collective actions can actually be strategically used to divert critical voices away from the regime. We call this diversionary collective action effect “scapegoating.” In the theoretical model developed in this paper, we show that when the dictator cares enough about the short-term diversionary effect and the perceived regime strength is sufficiently high, he would allow diversionary collective actions to happen by not censoring the CAP messages targeting the chosen scapegoats. We conduct a text-mining study on Chinese netizens’ responses to a recent medical incident where a college student (Wei Zeixi) died of misguided advice from an online medical consulting platform. In this tragedy, at least four parties are involved. They are China's largest search engine Baidu, the largest private medical group Putian, the Armed Police Hospital, and the government regulatory department. The first two are private companies while the Armed Police Hospital belongs to the Military. Our text mining analysis shows that the private actors (i.e., Baidu and the Putian private medical group) were at the center of public criticisms and the CAP messages targeting them were not censored. Social media’s coverage of military hospitals, by contrast, was relatively small. The criticisms against the Armed Police Hospital were significantly dwarfed by those against Baidu and Putian. Our study on the Wei Zexi incident reveals the dictator’s scapegoating strategy and suggests a new perspective for understanding the politics of online censorship in dictatorships.

Author

• Chihsung Teng, National Taiwan University