Censorship Outside the Great Firewall: Flooding X/Twitter with Pornography for Political Suppression

Speaker: Tongtong Zhang, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Stanford Internet Observatory

How do authoritarian rulers suppress criticism on social media platforms which they cannot directly control? In this paper, we find that off-putting pornographic content is disproportionately inundating the X/Twitter accounts of critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. We assess the possibility that the regime strategically uses this explicit content to discourage people from accessing information it wishes to suppress. Using an original dataset of 142 randomly sampled Chinese-language pornography accounts on X/Twitter, we show that during fall 2023, these accounts acted in a coordinated network to post waves of explicit images and videos as tweet replies to CCP critics. Some anti-CCP media accounts (less than 1 million followers) receive over 1,000 pornographic comments within a week, whereas pro-CCP media (over 10 million followers) receive fewer than 4 such comments a week. When a tweet is opened or shared, this explicit content appears directly beneath the text, which likely discourages users from reading or sharing the targeted tweets. While previous research has established that the CCP regime crowds out criticism by flooding domestic platforms with positive and cheerleading messages, our findings suggest that on platforms that operate beyond its borders, the regime may use censorship strategies that are domestically illegal—spamming explicit content to create strategic distraction.
 

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Graduate Students Practical Workshop

Research Roadmap: Fieldwork Finances 101

All you need to know about research budgets, contracts, and paying for fieldwork expenses

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:00 pm Pacific Time
Gunn SIEPR Building, Doll 320

About the Speakers
 

Stephen Luby, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Populatin Health by Courtesy at Stanford University

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Stephen Luby is a professor of medicine and a professor of epidemiology and population health by courtesy at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His previous positions include directing the Centre for Communicable Diseases at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research in Bangladesh, conducting research and teaching epidemiology at the Aga Khan University in Karachi in Pakistan, and working as an epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Alexis Medina, Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions

Alexis Medina is the Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. She has extensive experience in international program management, including overseeing the design and development of field projects, coordinating data collection and analysis, and navigating bureaucracies on both sides of the Pacific.

Large-Scale Datasets & Analysis in China

A Practical Workshop for Graduate Students

Friday, December 15, 2023 | 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Pacific Time
Encina Hall East, Goldman Room E409

Preparing an IRB

A Practical Workshop for Graduate Students

Monday, November 6, 2023 | 11:30 am - 12:30 pm Pacific Time
Encina Hall East, Goldman Room E409

Graduate Students Practical Workshop

Research Roadmap: Budgeting for Fieldwork

Wednesday, October 18, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:00 pm Pacific Time
Gunn SIEPR Building, Doll 320

About the Speakers
 

Grant Miller, Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine

Grant Miller is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Alexis Medina, Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions

Alexis Medina is the Associate Director of Research Programs at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. She has extensive experience in international program management, including overseeing the design and development of field projects, coordinating data collection and analysis, and navigating bureaucracies on both sides of the Pacific.

Legal Education as Empowerment:  Chinese Females Going to Law Schools and Their Gendered Battle

Speaker: Hongyun Yu, Master of the Science of Law Student, Stanford Law School

In the gender ratio of newly enrolled undergraduate law students and barred lawyers in China, the number of women has approximately doubled that of men. How has this female-dominated trend formed, and how does it impact legal education, the legal profession, and legal knowledge? Utilizing field evidence from three law schools in China, this research attempts to interpret the gender transformations and dynamics within Chinese law schools, especially focusing on the process of female empowerment. Women enter this knowledge field and professional culture, traditionally seen as male-dominated and even discriminatory, because of gendered motivations. They construct their gender advantages while successfully challenging the labor gender division that suggests "women are unsuited for studying law" and the stereotype that they lack "legal rationality." Males exhibit two types of responses: the "cynical" and the "bystander," with the latter occasionally gaining an advantageous minority status in female-dominated law schools. The female-dominated structure also influences the "safe harbor" effect in law schools for gender minority and diverse gender students. This study transcends discrimination and male-centric power models, offering a pathway through which women shape legal education, transform the legal profession, and generate legal knowledge.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Unintended Consequences of Goodwill: Examining Spillover Effects in Targeted Supplementary Education Interventions

Speaker: Yujuan Gao, Ph.D. Candidate in Food and Resource Economics, University of Florida

Targeted supplementary education interventions are typically provided to students in low-resourced areas with the intention to narrow educational inequality. However, when such programs are implemented within classrooms, student social interactions may cause spillover effects. This paper presents a novel multi-treatment field experiment that investigates the spillover effects of targeted supplementary computer-assisted learning (CAL) and traditional paper-pencil workbook education interventions among 130 boarding schools in rural China. We also discuss the possible channels by which programs may have spillover effects on non-targeted peers' academic outcomes. We find that the paper-pencil workbook program has a negative spillover effect on untargeted non-boarding students’ school performance, but no spillover effect is detected in the CAL group. Our network interference results suggest that the negative spillover effects of the workbook program most strongly affect non-boarding students who have close-boarding peers in the same classroom. This phenomenon can be attributed to a perceived unfair treatment between boarding and non-boarding students, resulting in a lack of motivation for academic engagement among untargeted non-boarding students.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Politics, Morals, Complaints: Moral Judgments and Discretions in the Chinese Municipal Government

Speaker: Tianhao Hou, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University

What motivates bureaucratic decision-making in China? In contrast to the earlier theories of incentive mechanisms and “muddling through”, I argue that local officials in the Chinese regime also mobilize moral judgments to wield discretionary power in completing their tasks. With a five-month ethnography and additional interviews, I examine the Public Complaints and Proposals Bureau in two municipal governments as a case study. Qualitative analysis shows that, even in a field with strong bureaucratic pressure, there are numerous occasions where cadres do not merely follow regulations, policies, or laws, or are driven by the maximization of rational interests. Instead, I observe that there is a moral persistence of collectivism – local officials evaluate the “reasonableness” of cases based on 1) motivation and deservingness, 2) collective benefits, and 3) honesty and compliance in the selection for escalation, which typically results in substantial treatment. This study contributes to the literature on Chinese bureaucracy by drawing attention to the relevance of morality and appropriateness in rational organizations.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

How AI Affects Bureaucratic Control in Autocracies: A New Theory and Evidence from China

Speaker: Jason Luo, PhD Candidate in Political Science, Stanford University

Does the adoption of emerging information technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) always enhance centralized control in authoritarian regimes? In this talk, I introduce a new theory of how state adoption of emerging information technologies affects principal-agent dynamics within bureaucracies, and how it consequently strengthens or weakens centralized control in autocracies. Empirically, I show that China’s unexpectedly decentralized procurement and management of AI technologies in government operations has amplified pre-existing information asymmetries between the central government and localities, and increased the likelihood of local governments strategically evading central control. Methodologically, I draw on an original dataset of over 31 million central and local government procurement documents from 2002 to 2022. Leveraging a 2015 reporting policy change and a robust design including DiD and event study, I construct the first-of-its-kind measures of local strategic actions aimed at evading central oversight. I find that local state investment in AI technologies is significantly associated with more local evasions afterwards, compared with a range of other local-level political and economic factors. This finding challenges the conventional wisdom, showing that the adoption of AI in authoritarian regimes can paradoxically weaken centralized control, particularly when interests of the principals and agents diverge, and when control over technology rests with the local state.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Do Skills Beget Skills During Early Childhood? Evidence from a Cluster-randomized Parenting Experiment in Rural China

Speaker: Boya Wang, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Rural Education Action Program

This study utilizes data from a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a two-year, center-based parenting training program to investigate the technology of skill formation among 6 to 24 months (N = 1,666) in rural China. Results show that weekly parenting training on child psychosocial stimulation can significantly improve child cognitive skills by 0.11 SD and 0.18 SD after one and two years of intervention, respectively. The positive impact persisted for 2.5 years after program completion (0.13 SD). We find evidence of solid self- and cross-productivity in the formation of cognitive and noncognitive skills. In addition, analysis of children with high versus low early capability formation suggests dynamic complementarity between early cognitive skills and later productivity of investments in cognitive skills. Strong cognitive skill formation during the first two years of life also bolsters the persistence of good noncognitive skills during the third year of life. We find no evidence of dynamic complementarity between early noncognitive skill formation and the productivity of later parental investments in children’s skills. Hence, investment in cognitive skill formation during the first two years of life (e.g., via engagement in interactive caregiver-child play or story-telling activities) is key to enhance productivity of later investments and to bolster further human capital formation.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.