Digital Politics and Entertainment in China: From Repression to Influencers

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The growing influence of social media has transformed China’s authoritarian rule. The Chinese state has shown a sophisticated approach to managing and leveraging social media for ideological conformity and political support. The tactics, however, are divergent. Through examining the Chinese state’s informational repression strategy, social media content such as bottom-up propaganda, and Chinese celebrities’ political signaling, this panel offers a close look at how propaganda and ideologies are (re)produced in the online public discourse. Using government documents and series of online experiments, Blake Miller finds that careful and covert information control, when paired with targeted repression, can mitigate the threat of virality on social media while also limiting backlash and chilling effects that can result from heavy-handed censorship. Using computer vision and automated text analysis to analyze a novel dataset of 5.7 million videos from over 20,000 regime-affiliated accounts on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, Yingdan Lu, Jennifer Pan, Xu Xu, and Yiqing Xu find that the Chinese state mobilizes tens of thousands of regime-affiliated organizations through flat-rate and tournament incentives to create and spread propaganda content and compete for audience attention. Content analyzing over 415,000 posts on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Dan Chen and Gengsong Gao find that the Chinese state has captured the most influential Chinese celebrities, primarily those popular with the younger generations, to more broadly promote its political agenda by leveraging celebrity influence on social media. Together, these papers use innovative research methods and novel data sources to paint a nuanced and complex picture of the Chinese state’s current approach to social media.

Sub Unit

• Division 40: Information Technology, & Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• The Logic of Informational Repression in China - Blake Miller, London School of Economics and Political Science

• The Evolution of Propaganda in the Digital Age - Yingdan Lu, Stanford University; Jennifer Pan, Stanford University; Xu Xu, Princeton University; Yiqing Xu, Stanford University

• Who Follows the Party? Celebrities’ Political Signaling on Social Media in China - Dan Chen, University of Richmond; Gengsong Gao, University of Richmond

Chair

• Haifeng Huang University of California, Merced

Discussants

• Haifeng Huang University of California, Merced

• Alexandra Arons Siegel University of Coloardo Boulder