Research
Academic Publications & Working Papers
Survey data suggest that a high proportion of Chinese congress delegates sit concurrently in two or more congresses. While dual mandates are not unusual in democracies, the literature has failed to notice their existence in China, let alone theorize or analyze them. We turn to the political science literature on assemblies under authoritarianism to guide our analysis of survey data for 3,008 county congress delegates, half of whom are concurrent ones. We show that dual mandates amplify some voices and not others in ways consistent with two perspectives in the literature. Dual mandates amplify information from citizens at the grassroots upward toward governments: More delegates with deep community roots representing poor, rural, remote districts sit concurrently in county and lower-level congresses. Dual mandates also coopt influential groups posing a potential challenge to ruling party power: They amplify the influence of private entrepreneurs, more of whom sit concurrently in county and prestigious higher-level congresses.
In a substantial literature on trust in government, the impact on trust of governance crises and government efforts to fix its mistakes is understudied and unmeasured. We analyze a cycle of crises and contribute a theory of heterogeneous response to correction efforts. We study this in China, an authoritarian state with high trust in government. We leverage the occurrence of two exogenous shocks—a vaccine crisis and a subsequent government correction effort—with administration of a face-to-face, nationally representative survey in 2018. We theorize that response to government correction efforts depends on prior exposure to similar governance failures. Using days from the crisis as an instrument, we find that: (1) the more salient the crisis, the lower the trust in government; and (2) government correction increases trust for citizens experiencing the 2018 crisis as an isolated occurrence but not for those who experienced a similar crisis and correction in 2016.
“Protest and Repression in China’s Digital Surveillance State,” Under Review.
“Communal Canteens and the “Collective” Memory of China's Great Famine,” Working Paper.
Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labor campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) led to the deaths of as many as 45 million people in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history. Drawing on a corpus of over 300 interviews with survivors of the Famine, I use a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of mass state violence on how people speak about a repressive state that remains in power. Exploiting variation in county-level mortality rates, I find that exposure to state violence impacts how respondents recall their famine experiences: interviewees exposed to more intense levels of state violence do not voice more explicitly negative attitudes towards the state, but do express more implicitly negative attitudes. Furthermore, I use the establishment and subsequent dissolution of communal canteens—a key repressive institution in which the state functioned as the sole distributor of food during a time of extreme scarcity—as an analytical lever to show that while most people are not willing to express grievances directly against a state that perpetrated mass violence, they readily express both implicit and explicit negative political attitudes in the context of a long-dead institution.