The Functions of Critical Content in the Public Media in China

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Information Politics: Collection, Communication, and Processing

Abstract

Why would autocrats with access to internal media allow the public media to print critical content that is available to the general public? The paper argues that in order to understand the functions of critical content in the public media, we need focus on the role of such reporting among the set of instruments that are used to collect information on popular discontent. Communist regimes want to incentivize citizens to voluntarily provide information (mostly in the form of citizen complaints), but this requires either a high level of individualized responsiveness to complaints or some other method that can transmit a message of responsiveness. Because they are overwhelmingly based on citizen letters, critical content and investigative reporting in the public media can send a signal of responsiveness cheaply and efficiently. The effect of such publicized responsiveness is to incentivize citizens to continue to provide information about their grievances, which can subsequently be analyzed and transmitted to decision-makers internally. Thus, critical content in the public media makes a contribution to solving the dictator's dilemma not by what is officially published but by facilitating internal information transfer, which remains hidden from public view. This leads to a more general point: namely, political processes in autocracies can be understood differently depending on whether we think of them as public artifacts or as phenomena that may have a hidden internal logic. The paper is based on a large corpus on internal (neibu) Chinese materials spanning the period from 1949 to the present.

Author

• Martin Dimitrov, Tulane University