Demanding Censorship: How Public Participation Justifies Censorship in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries & Critical Political Science
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Abstract

Conventional wisdom of government censorship in authoritarian regimes regards it as a top-down tool of the authoritarian government to silence criticism and dissent. Such an understanding overlooks the important role of ordinary users in the censorship process and is inadequate for explaining how citizens perceive censorship in authoritarian regimes. In this study, I introduce a novel bottom-up perspective of censorship in which ordinary users actively report online content that they disapprove of and demand censorship from the government. I argue that public participation in censorship shifts citizens' perception of censorship and increases their support for the regime and its censorship policy. Using an original online survey in China, I show that more than 50\% of the respondents self-report to have participated in censorship before. Moreover, participation in censorship is positively correlated with support for censorship and satisfaction with the regime. I further conduct an experiment on an original simulated social media page. I find that providing respondents with the option to report social media content increases their approval of government censorship. My findings have significant implications on the relationship between public participation and authoritarian control.

Author

• Tony Zirui Yang, Washington University in St. Louis