Build the Wall and Deplete Their Attention: How the Chinese Government’s Strategic Information Control Shapes Public Opinion and Maintains Regime Support

Abstract

Although China bans Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, its own social media landscape has grown strong and evolves quickly. As of 2020, over 70% of the Chinese population were online. McKinsey reports China has become the largest social-media market in the World. Yet the Chinese authoritarian regime remains stable, as opposed to the unrest and protests of the Arab World in the early 2010s. More strikingly, studies of public opinion in China consistently show the Chinese public retains high levels of support for the regime.Why do a prosperous Internet and a resilient, popular authoritarian regime go hand in hand in China? What role do the Internet play in the surprisingly high popular support that the state has received? How does the Chinese government use information control strategies to shape public opinion and gain support? These are the research questions that this dissertation addresses. It investigates the outcomes of the Chinese government’s information control, and through what mechanisms these strategies boost the regime’s authoritarian resilience. This research proposes a unified theoretical framework in which the outcomes of propaganda and censorship are examined together. It argues that a two-pronged control system is implemented in China, which effectively creates information environments that suit the interests of the regime. First, large platforms and opinion leaders who play an important role in the production and dissemination of information are carefully managed by multiple strategies, including coercion, fear-induced self-censorship, and cooptation. Consequently, they are more likely to produce and disseminate information favoring the state rather than information against the state. Second, average citizens or Internet users, as consumers of information, live in distorted information environments where pro-regime information can be accessed at very low costs and even unavoidable, while the costs of accessing anti-regime content are high. Third, due to the hierarchical structure of communication, the state’s tight grip on the upstream/center of information produced by the influentials rewards it with a disproportionate leverage on the downstream/periphery consisting of average citizens, or the major consumers of information. Working together, these strategies have done quite a good job in maintaining “signal-to-noise” ratios that benefit the government. I argue that in a digital age when information overload is a salient issue to users, these strategies are unexpectedly effective in flooding average citizens’ information environments with pro-regime content, consuming and depleting their attention, and depriving their opportunity costs in accessing anti-regime information, thus help the state shape public opinion and gain support from the Chinese public.