(iPoster) The Poorman’s Toy: Understanding Digital Governance from Anti-Scam Video in China

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Migration and Citizenship & Political Beliefs and Democratic Legitimacy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Beliefs and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

Conventional wisdom tends to assume that economically advanced areas with superior technological and bureaucratic infrastructure are leaders of digital governance. However, is this always the case? In this paper, we challenge the presumption by studying how Chinese local public security agencies employ Douyin, a popular short-video platform in China, especially among youngsters and low-income population, to communicate anti–scam messages to the public.
We construct a novel dataset of nearly 50,000 short videos produced by verified municipal police accounts across all provincial capitals and centrally administered municipalities in mainland China. Using an originally designed video-based large language model (vLLM) pipeline, we systematically classify video content and identify over 7,000 anti–scam videos within the full corpus. Unlike text-based approaches, the vLLM enables us to capture non-textual communicative features embedded in video while situating anti-fraud communication within the broader distribution of public security messaging. We then link these patterns to city-level socioeconomic indicators to compare communication intensity, timing, and framing across localities.
We find that patterns of digital communication do not always align with conventional expectations about local state capacity. In the anti-scam domain, less-developed cities (so-called third and fourth tier cities in China) often display levels of engagement comparable to or even exceeding those of economically-developed first tier cities. Many inland cities are active producers of anti-scam videos. We argue that making and posting education videos on public platforms are relatively less costly than usual public goods provision that requires “hardcore” infrastructure. Thus, local governments that are more fiscally constrained have more incentives to utilize the digital platform as a tool to provide the less costly “virtual public goods” and increase their bureaucratic capacity.
This paper contributes to research on authoritarian digital governance by identifying conditions under which digital platforms redistribute communicative capacity across localities. It also opens new methodological avenues for the large-scale study of administrative communication in video-centric digital environments.

Authors

• Jiangnan Zhu, The University of Hong Kong

• Minjun Yuan, National University of Singapore

• Unregistered Participant