Why do authoritarian regimes charge political opponents with non-political crimes when they can levy charges directly related to opponents' political activism?

On October 3, 2024, Stanford Professor of Communication, Jennifer Pan, presented her recent research answering this question. Professor Pan and her research collaborators used experimental and observational data from China and found that, “disguising repression by charging opponents with non-political crimes undermines the moral authority of opponents, minimizing backlash and mobilization while increasing public support for repression.”

On November 15, 2023 Albert Park, Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), joined SIEPR, SCCEI, and the King Center for a timely discussion on China’s Economy and Asia’s Rise.

Dr. Park shared insights on the economic prospects for Asia and China, geopolitical fragmentation, and China’s regional importance. Beginning with Asia and China’s economic prospects, Dr. Park noted that Asia continues to be the most dynamic region in the world, however, within the region dynamism is shifting from China to other countries and China’s growth has dropped below the growth rate for the region at-large. He also highlighted how China’s weak property sector is contributing negatively to its growth, but despite the economic decline, the country is not close to a recession.

Dr. Park expanded on how Asia’s regional economic integration has continued to deepen and that there isn’t significant evidence of a shift away from China. Trade is fairly steady in Asia, and China’s role in global value chains has increased - making them even more important globally, despite talks of the U.S. decoupling from China. Dr. Park concluded his talk by emphasizing that forcing countries to decouple often hurts the less-powerful, poorer countries the most. He encouraged the U.S. and China to not force countries to choose sides, arguing that this will benefit the poorer countries and reduce global cost overall.

To hear Dr. Albert Park’s full talk, watch the recording here:

On September 28, 2023 Yasheng Huang, International Program Professor in Chinese Economy and Business and Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, joined SCCEI and Stanford Libraries as the guest lecturer for the 2023 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture. After introductions from Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Associate University Librarian, and Jennifer Choo, Strategic Policy Advisor at SCCEI, Professor Huang began his lecture speaking on the rise and fall of technology in Chinese history.

Professor Huang shared insights from his empirical study on inventiveness in Chinese history and its implications for today’s China. Using data from the Chinese Historical Invention Dataset (CHID), Huang identified three eras of technological inventiveness in China:

1. The peak era: 4th century BCE to 6th century (1,000 years)
2. The first decline: 6th century to 13th century (700 years)
3. The second decline: 13th century to 20th century (700 years).

His findings support the storyline that China was once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. China led Europe in metallurgy, ship construction, navigation techniques, and many other fields, often by several centuries. But China’s technological development stalled, stagnated, and eventually collapsed and its early technological leadership did not set the country on a modernization path. Huang devoted the rest of the lecture to looking at the reason for the peak and major decline of inventiveness in China.

Huang highlights the correlation between the political ideology and economic development during each era and the coordinating degree of inventiveness. His overarching argument is that, “China had vibrant technological development when China was more free, when there was more competition – ideological competition and political competition.” He found that Chinese technological decline was correlated, and potentially causally linked with, the rise of empires, political unitariness, and ideological conformity. Huang suggests that from the sixth century to present day, China has continued down a path of political unitariness and ideological conformity, thus hindering technological advancements in present day China.