(iPoster) How Curated Transnational Information Shapes Authoritarian Domestic Evaluations

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy I

Abstract

How does the authoritarian public react to information directly published by foreign users within a highly controlled digital environment? Can regimes harness these organic transnational information flows to bolster domestic support? We examine the case of Xiaohongshu (RedNote), a Chinese social media platform where domestic users have engaged in extensive social comparisons with Western users who migrated to the platform following the 2025 TikTok ban. We investigate whether this curated exposure to foreign disillusioned narratives reinforces regime legitimacy by recalibrating the public’s idealized images of the West, or whether it inadvertently introduces critical perspectives regarding domestic governance.
Our study bridges two critical gaps in the literature. First, while research proliferates on authoritarian propaganda and foreign information influence, we argue that the form and source of information are crucial. Although domestic official media frequently employs adversarial framing of Western democracies to uphold the regime's image, these contents often trigger skepticism. This is particularly evident during economic downturns, when the regime's performance-based legitimacy is contested. In the era of digitization and globalization, authoritarian citizens are exposed to a competitive informational environment comprising domestic and foreign, state and grassroots actors. However, empirical evidence on how these heterogeneous sources interact to shape political attitudes remains mixed.
Second, we engage with research on national overconfidence, which reveals that the Chinese public has become increasingly triumphalist amid the surge of national power and pervasive information control. While factual corrections can temper nationalism in experimental settings, the ecological validity of such corrections in real-world interactions remains under-explored. Citizens facing domestic economic anxiety may proactively seek disillusioned narratives from non-official, transnational sources as a credible means to reconcile their own experiences.
We conduct a vignette-based survey experiment centered on the "Kill Line" (Zhanshaxian)—a metaphor popularized on the Chinese Internet to describe the socioeconomic precarity and the absence of a social safety net in the United States. Participants were randomly assigned to a control group or one of five treatment conditions that manipulated the source and framing of U.S. socioeconomic information. One treatment presented direct information via a standard news format. The remaining four treatments presented the same information within an interactive social-media context, varying the dialogue: an "Affirmative" group where foreign users confirm U.S. precarity, and three "Competitive Framing" groups involving "meritocratic" rebuttals (attributing poverty to individual failure), "whataboutism" defenses (comparing U.S. issues to Chinese domestic problems), and "epistemic rejection" (denouncing the concept as fake propaganda).
Our findings reveal that direct information about foreign systemic distress delivered through the news format fails to persuade the public. However, when validated by foreign peers in a social-media setting, such information significantly leads users to evaluate China’s socioeconomic performance more favorably. Crucially, this effect is contingent on framing: meritocratic rebuttals create cognitive friction that preserves a more favorable view of the U.S., while interactions involving "whataboutism" and "epistemic rejection" significantly heighten government trust and hawkish nationalist sentiments, suggesting a strong defensive psychological motivation.
This study makes three contributions. First, it enriches the discussion of public misperception in International Relations, by shifting from abstract factual corrections to the real-world, interactive social comparison. Second, it advances literature on authoritarian information politics by demonstrating how regimes can "outsource" propaganda to organic transnational flows. Finally, it highlights a digital-age paradox: while cross-border peer interaction is traditionally expected to facilitate political liberalization, its strategic curation, combined with the public's defensive psychological mechanisms, can actually entrench authoritarian resilience.

Authors

• Xingyu Zhou, Ohio State University

• Yinzhi Lin, Peking University