(iPoster) When the State Breaks a Bond: China’s Hallyu Ban and Public Opinion

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Public Opinion 1 & Diverse Perspectives on South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Public Opinion 1

Abstract

While existing literature on authoritarian control focuses heavily on the censorship of political information, the political consequences of state interventions into everyday cultural life remain underexplored. This paper leverages China’s 2016 de facto ban on South Korean popular culture—the “Hallyu ban”—as a quasi-natural experiment to examine how disrupting deep-seated cultural attachments reshapes mass political attitudes. Prior to 2016, Korean cultural products were deeply embedded in lifestyles of millions of Chinese citizens, especially among young, urban, and female audiences. Does the sudden deprivation of these valued cultural goods rally citizens around the flag, or does it trigger a backlash that erodes political trust?
I propose a mechanism of “Identity Disruption.” When the state forcibly severs transnational cultural ties, it violates the private lifestyle choices of culturally embedded citizens, creating cognitive dissonance between lived experience and state narratives. To test this, I employ a multi-method design combining large-scale digital trace data, natural language processing (NLP), and causal inference strategies. First, I construct a novel city-level index of pre-ban cultural exposure using Weibo activity, search intensity, and concert geolocation. Second, utilizing a difference-in-differences (DID) framework, I analyze political sentiments quantified via fine-tuned BERT models. Crucially, this design disentangles the specific backlash against censorship from the general nationalist reaction to the THAAD missile deployment. Finally, an individual-level panel analysis of “K-pop fans” validates the mechanism.
Preliminary findings indicate a counter-intuitive “backlash effect.” Unlike the general population, individuals and cities with stronger pre-existing ties to Korean culture exhibited increased political disengagement and negative sentiment toward official narratives following the ban. These effects are particularly pronounced among young women, a demographic historically viewed as less politically active. This study contributes to the APSA theme of “Democracy under Threat” by demonstrating that subcultural identities can form a resilient buffer against state-imposed homogeneity, highlighting the domestic political costs of using culture as a weapon of statecraft.

Authors

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