Reining in Public Dissent via Media Coverage on Administrative Lawsuits in China

• In Event: Censorship, Dissent and Legitimation under Autocracy

Abstract

Why would an authoritarian leadership publicize information about citizen resistance against the state? In general, allowing public knowledge on the widespread antipathy towards the government is self-defeating for an autocrat because such information could incite collective actions (Kricheli et. al. 2011). However, China allows its centrally controlled media outlets to actively cover administrative court cases in which its citizens file lawsuits against the state. Why would the Chinese leadership make such a risky choice? How could this choice be reconciled with its fundamental interest in maintaining regime stability?
By comparing the entire administrative court cases with the cases that are covered in the centrally controlled media, this paper argues that such choice is the authoritarian leadership’s co-optation and repression strategy towards its potential regime challengers within the society. Administrative litigants are the people who are willing to take the costliest action against the government when facing administrative conflicts. Hence, by selectively increasing visibility of the information on certain administrative court cases, the authoritarian leadership sends out two messages to those potential regime challengers. First, within the permissible level of challenge against the state, the regime will leave a room for discussion. Second, any further challenge, however, will be suppressed.
Using a difference-in-differences method, this paper further claims that the co-optation and repression argument is significant with the data after 2014, when the publication of court rulings have become mandatory in China. Before 2014, the central media carried out an additional role of providing information on local administration to the central leadership, resolving the principal-agent problem. Because this information problem diminished since the publication of court rulings, the centrally controlled media is now more exclusively used for delivering political messages to the public.
Specifically, this paper finds that when a citizen-government conflict is less political and thus tolerable to the central leadership, the autocrat is relatively free in letting the public aware of such administrative cases. Many of such less politically sensitive cases that are covered in the media conclude with the citizens prevailing, showing the regime’s willingness to accommodate them. On the contrary, when a conflict between a citizen and the government is highly political and thus potentially regime-threatening, then the autocrat is less willing to disseminate relevant information. When the regime does decide to release such information, then the conflicts are likely to have ended with the government prevailing, showing that any attempt on unintended political empowerment of the public will not be tolerated.
To put it differently, the central leadership is proclaiming its intended use of the nominally democratic institution, namely the administrative litigation system. By doing so, it is preserving the authoritarian nature of the institution and preventing misuse – for liberalization or for over-empowerment of the public – of it. In this regard, this paper expands the studies on nominally democratic institutions under authoritarianism. Beyond the meaning of the mere existence of the institutions, this paper draws attention to the ways in which an autocrat makes the existing institutions sustainable and functional as they were originally designed for. Because institutions are often double-edged swords, keeping institutions advantageous to the regime and preventing them from backfiring is a pending problem for most of the established authoritarian countries.
By suggesting the main role of the central media as delivering the regime’s messages to the public, this article further adds to the literature on media politics under authoritarianism. Since mass digitization, the overwhelming view on authoritarian censorship and propaganda has been that they have not been as effective as they were in the old days. People now have access to alternative information sources and are aware that the centrally controlled media is biased. Yet, under such circumstances, state media outlets are still broadcasting biased information as seen in China, even when the expectation is that people are unlikely to be deceived by it. Hence, this paper suggests that the main role of the centrally controlled authoritarian information platforms has evolved from indoctrinating the public to delivering political messages to them.
Finally, this paper provides an extensive dataset on the central-level news coverage on the administrative lawsuits in China from 2004 to 2018.

Author

• Jongyoon Baik, The University of Chicago