Aligning with the Party: Variation of Party Influence on Chinese Universities through Annual Information Disclosure Reports

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics of Education (Table 4)

Abstract

This project examines how the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological presence manifests in Chinese universities through annual information disclosure reports from 2022–2024. Drawing on 729 publicly available reports from mainland Chinese universities, we construct a novel dataset and introduce a structure-aware text segmentation strategy that treats report sections as units of analysis, rather than arbitrary fixed-length text windows. This approach preserves the institutional logic of bureaucratic reporting and improves the construct validity of ideological measurement.
We manually annotate a subset of text segments with high intercoder reliability and then train a supervised classifier that identifies party-aligned ideological content. Using the model’s predictions, we test whether geographic proximity to political centers and institutional hierarchy structure variation in ideological disclosure. Contrary to theoretical expectations, we find no statistically significant differences in predicted party influence across regions or university tiers. Party-aligned language appears broadly standardized across institutions, suggesting that ideological disclosure functions as a routinized bureaucratic practice rather than a selectively intensified form of political control.
Methodologically, the paper contributes to text-as-data research in authoritarian politics by demonstrating how document structure can be leveraged to improve the measurement of political influence in bureaucratic texts.

Authors

• Yuchen Guo, UC San Diego

• Boxuan Yu, University of California, San Diego