China’s success story of the past three decades is seen as an anomaly. Market-based reforms have generated an economic system that can hardly be described as socialist anymore, but the Communist Party of China remains in power. Although social unrest is on the rise, the CCP enjoys the consent of the overwhelming majority of its people. Most agree that China’s economic performance is the key to solving this apparent puzzle, but how can extraordinary high rates of public support be maintained in a country where income inequality is so extreme?
We believe that the answer to this question lies in the responsiveness of China’s authoritarian one-party regime to popular demands and grievances, a capability that has so far been attributed only to democratic regimes. We further believe that the rapid improvement of e-participation, the opportunity to evaluate public services on the Internet, has greatly facilitated regime responsiveness. A little studied aspect in online engagement is that citizens in China frequently use the Internet to criticize the government's performance in providing public goods without, however, demanding a regime change. Such information is vital to authoritarian rulers, because regime stability in authoritarian regimes frequently hinges on "performance legitimation", i.e. increasing the material well-being of the people. Local authorities in China are actively seeking such information, and even publish complaints and the government’s responses online to ensure people that they are taken seriously. We hypothesize that online criticism is used to monitor local officials, formulate policies, and thereby improve regime performance. We suggest, however, that as the government increasingly calibrates public policy towards satisfying the demand of China’s netizens, the "technologically illiterate" are forced to express their demands in public protests and other forms of social unrest.
The project applies a mix of three methods, whose strengths complement each other very well. The first is automated information extraction. Rich empirical data exists for the three core variables of the project, but it is unstructured. Supervised machine learning will help us to classify this data. This allows us to map trends across space and time, and to provide first cautious hints regarding the relationship between the variables of interest. Fine-grained analysis to this extent has been completely impossible in previous research. Second, to address the widely recognized problem of most “big data” analysis being atheoretical, we conduct non-participant field studies. In a third step, the theoretical model derived from the field studies and the exploratory data analysis will be tested with the help of advanced statistical methods.
China is considered one of the most advanced autocracies with respect to managing the Internet. This allows us to explore processes that have not yet taken place in other authoritarian regimes. The project sheds light on the intended and unintended consequences of enhanced e-participation in China by exploring which social interests China’s rulers incorporate into public policy making, and how these decisions influence the propensity of particular social groups to voice their demands by either participating online or taking to the streets. On a practical level, China’s global importance makes it necessary to assess its stability, especially now that economic growth is slowing. China is the world’s largest trading nation and is on its way to becoming a regional hegemon, and a major regime crisis would have global implications. It is worth noting that China’s per capita income and Internet access rate are similar to those of Egypt and Tunisia, both of which experienced regime breakdowns after massive social uprisings in 2010.
