Xi Said

• In Event: Comparative Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Autocratic leaders frequently give public speeches. Do these speeches have any predictive power on government policies? To address this question, we examine the public speeches of one of the world’s most powerful autocratic leaders – Xi Jinping. We evaluate three hypotheses. The propaganda hypothesis states that autocrat’s speeches include only indoctrinatory messages without any associations with government policies. The camouflage hypothesis means that the speeches are used to pacify opposition before announcing a policy that is the opposite of what the leader indicates. The signaling hypothesis states that speeches signal future directions of government policies. Using an original dataset of over 300 Xi’s speeches since 2012, we develop a coding scheme to analyze the topics and their salience in these speeches. We then construct a time-series dataset of Xi’s speeches and central government policies to evaluate these hypotheses. Our findings will deepen our understanding of the verbal display of authoritarian politics.

Authors

• Yuhua Wang, Harvard University

• Ziyi Wu, Independent

• Siyao ZHENG, Tsinghua University