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  5. Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda

Journal of Economic Perspectives

ISSN 0895-3309 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7965 (Online)

Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda

  • Bei Qin
  • David Strömberg
  • Yanhui Wu
Journal of Economic Perspectives
vol. 31, no. 1, Winter 2017
(pp. 117–40)
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Abstract

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo--the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform--during the 2009-2013 period. Our primary finding is that a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media. For instance, we find millions of posts discussing protests, and these posts are informative in predicting the occurrence of specific events. We find an even larger number of posts with explicit corruption allegations, and that these posts predict future corruption charges of specific individuals. Our findings challenge a popular view that an authoritarian regime would relentlessly censor or even ban social media. Instead, the interaction of an authoritarian government with social media seems more complex.

Citation

Qin, Bei, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu. 2017. "Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31 (1): 117–40. DOI: 10.1257/jep.31.1.117

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • D72 Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
  • L82 Entertainment; Media
  • O14 Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
  • O17 Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
  • P23 Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Factor and Product Markets; Industry Studies; Population
  • P26 Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Political Economy; Property Rights
  • Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
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