https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2829-3971
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ABSTRACT
Authoritarian governments talk about democracy frequently. Why do they do so? What does the term democracy mean in an authoritarian political language? This research uses a computer-assisted text analytical approach illustrating how an authoritarian government strategically manipulates the discourse about democracy to benefit itself. By analysing over a million political articles published in People's Daily over five decades, the study shows a refocusing framing strategy, in which the Chinese government defines democracy not with regime justification but with national policy priorities while denoting democracy most frequently alongside the fundamental values. With this strategy, the framed discourse appear to be consistent with the fundamental values in Western democracies but work for the preservation of the authoritarian regime.
Acknowledgment
The author especially thanks Frederick Solt and Caroline Tolbert at the University of Iowa for their invaluable help in data collection and manuscript improvement. He also thanks Wenfang Tang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Benjamin Bagozzi at the University of Delaware, Desmond Wallace at Alfred University, and Margaret (Molly) Roberts at the University of California, San Diego, for helpful comments and support of this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Notes
1 Petrov, “From Managed Democracy to Sovereign Democracy”; Brewer-Cariàs, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela.
2 Hu, “Popular Understanding of Democracy in Contemporary China.”
3 Chu, Nathan, and Shin, How East Asians View Democracy.
4 Sing, “Explaining Support for Democracy in East Asia”; Jiang, Asian Values and Communitarian Democracy; Zhang, “Toward the Rule of Law”; Lu and Shi, “The Battle of Ideas and Discourses Before Democratic Transition.”
5 Chan, “Hong Kong, Singapore, and ‘Asian Values’”; Shen and Tsui, “Revisiting the Asian Values Thesis”; Jiang, Leeman, and Fu, “Networked Framing.”
6 Schatz and Maltseva, “Kazakhstan’s Authoritarian ‘Persuasion’.”
7 Epstein, “Legitimacy, Institutionalization, and Opposition in Exclusionary Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Regimes.”
8 Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience.”
9 Gries, China’s New Nationalism.
10 Tang and Iyengar, Political Communication in China.
11 See King, Pan, and Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression”; Huang, Boranbay, and Huang, “Media, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience”; King, Pan, and Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument” among others.
12 Chong and Druckman, “Framing Public Opinion in Competitive Democracies”; Walgrave, “Political Agenda-Setting”; Lewis, “Blogging Zhanaozen.”
13 Bishop, Qi Lai!; Ji, Linguistic Engineering.
14 Khan, Haunted by Chaos; Although the elites’ view competitions might not be publicly recorded, one can still observe their policy outcomes, in terms of promoting vis-a-vis stagnating institutional experiments Zheng, Will China Become Democratic?; Shirk, China.
15 Wang, “Zhongguorenb Gengzhong Minzhu Shizhi Erfei Xingshi (中国人更重民主实质而非形式)”; Zhang, Zhongguoren Xiangyao Shenmeyang de Minzhu (中国人想要什么样民主); Lu and Shi, “The Battle of Ideas and Discourses Before Democratic Transition.”
16 Zheng, Zhongguo Moshi: Jingyan Yu Kunju (中国模式: 经验与困局).
17 Shi, The Cultural Logic of Politics in Mainland China and Taiwan; Guang, “Elusive Democracy.”
18 Chang, Chu, and Tsai, “Confucianism and Democratic Values in Three Chinese Societies”; Chang and Chu, “The Stagnated Development of Liberal Democratic Values”; Yao, “Zhongguo Minzhu de Kunjing (中国民主化的困境)”; Peng, “Democracy and Chinese Political Discourses.”
19 Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset”; Timmons, “How the New York Times Is Eluding Censors in China.”
20 Chang and Chu, “Weiquan Renxing Yu Minzhu Chizi”; Hu, “Popular Understanding of Democracy in Contemporary China.”
21 Joshi and Xu, “What Do Chinese Really Think About Democracy and India.”
22 Schatz and Maltseva, “Kazakhstan’s Authoritarian ’Persuasion’.”
23 Although these two dimensions seem the opposite sides of the same coin (especially when regarding the authoritarian regime simply as the opposite of liberal democracy), the subsequent discussion shows that a strategy can take both into account simultaneously.
24 This article focuses on the normative liberal values, such as freedom, equality, and fairness, rather than institutional beliefs of competitive elections, rule of law, human rights protection, etc., since the meanings of the latter are also likely (if not more) to be manipulated by the government as well. Accordingly, using these institutional beliefs to understand democracy in the Chinese political language may rise serious concern of endogeneity. On the contrary, the normative values may not have been affected by the manipulation process that much. The ideological master of the Chinese government, Karl Marx, clearly defined these concepts with a close relationship with the normative values in the modern theory of liberal democracy (see Selucky, Marxism, Socialism, Freedom) that the Chinese government largely follows. In this sense, studying the relationship between the concept of democracy and these liberal values produce less risk of endogeneity and more reliable information about the distance between the concept of liberal democracy and the Chinese version of democracy.
25 Dasgupta and Beard, “Community Driven Development, Collective Action and Elite Capture in Indonesia”; Snider and Faris, “The Arab Spring.”
26 Lu and Shi, “The Battle of Ideas and Discourses Before Democratic Transition.”
27 Feng, “Democracy, Political Stability and Economic Growth, China.”
28 Hall, Perceptual and Associative Learning.
29 Grimmer and Stewart, “Text as Data.”
30 Wu, “Command Communication,” 195.
31 Li, “Xi Jinping yu Renmin Ribao: Shenqing Kuayue Bange Shiji de Wangshi (习近平与人民日报—深情跨越半个世纪的往事).”
32 Stockmann, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China; Tsai and Kao, “Secret Codes of Political Propaganda.”
33 Tsai and Kao, “Secret Codes of Political Propaganda.”
34 See also Chu and Chu, “Parties in Conflict.”
35 Wu, “Command Communication.”
36 Teiwes, “Normal Politics with Chinese Characteristics.”
37 Wu, “The Revival of Confucianism and the CCP’s Struggle for Cultural Leadership”; Edelstein and Liu, “Anti-Americanism in Red China’s People’s Daily”; Sun, “People’s Daily, China and Japan.”
38 Since the official People’s Daily Dataset only offers the image version and forbids web scrapping, the data of this study was collected from a third-party forum gathering all the texts of People’s Daily articles from 1946 to 2003 which was later shut down. The article amount has been verified by the cross-checking with the official dataset. I used the data from all the years to train the text-analysis model to improve the reliability. For the hypothesis test, I used the data starting from 1949, the year CCP founded the People’s Republic of China.
39 See the details of article selection in Table 1 and Online Appendix I.
40 A country’s national policy priority covers various aspects of the political and social life of a country and may change over time. This research uses three most consistent and important national policy priorities (economic development, national security, and social and political stability) to indicate the national policy priority Yan. See “Where Have All the People Gone?”; Chen, “China at the Tipping Point?”.
41 Yang and Wang, “Harmony Creates Power.”
42 Liu, “Creating an Appropriate Circumstance for Entrepreneurship.”
43 Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Models.”
44 Mohr and Bogdanov, “Introduction—Topic Models.”
45 Lucas et al., “Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics.”
46 Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley, “stm”; These estimates are deliberately calculated on each year’s newspaper corpus based on both methodological and operational considerations. Methodologically, it is an appropriate scale to measure long-term, consistent framing strategy. The existing literature has well documented the dynamic of the definition of democracy in different periods of the Chinese political history (see, e.g., Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma). This study instead focuses on the consistent patterns in the definition as a reflection of the framing strategy of the Chinese government. The strategy must be comprised of concepts with definitions not dramatically changed during a period in order to continuously affect Chinese citizens’ perception of democracy. From the view of readers, they might read an article about democracy in January of a year and completely forget it in December. However, as the official media addresses democracy consistently following the strategy, the readers will be continually exposed to the articles framing democracy in a certain way over months and years. Their understanding will be gradually influenced. To achieve this goal, though, usually requires a long period, such as over years. (See e.g., Schatz and Maltseva, “Kazakhstan's Authoritarian ‘Persuasion'”.) Operationally, to conduct a comparative analysis over time requires successfully identifying the concepts and discourses of interest in each time point. After trials, the yearly corpus is the smallest unit for identifying the most of the concepts of interest and construct continual political language networks for the later analyses.
47 Özgür, Özgür, and Güngör, “Text Categorization with Class-Based and Corpus-Based Keyword Selection.”
48 Each aspect of national priority has three keywords.
49 Roberts et al., “Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses,” 1068.
50 Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen.
51 While performing differently at the within-in discourse level, the universal-value strategy has the same expectation at the cross-discourse level, although for a different strategic goal of being consistent with liberal values.
52 See the keyword list in Online Appendix I.
53 Gelman, “Scaling Regression Inputs by Dividing by Two Standard Deviations.”
54 Lu and Shi, “The Battle of Ideas and Discourses Before Democratic Transition.”
55 Huang, “The Pathology of Hard Propaganda”; Chu and Huang, “Solving an Asian Puzzle.”
56 Gueorguiev, Shao, and Crabtree, “Blurring the Lines.”
57 Repnikova and Fang, “Authoritarian Participatory Persuasion 2.0”; Qin, Strömberg, and Wu, “Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media?”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yue Hu
Yue Hu is an Assistant Professor from the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University. His research interest primarily lies in political communication, democratization, inequality, and language policy. He is particularly interested in the strategies of authoritarian governments to conduct government-to-citizen communications and how they affect the democratization of the countries. Apart from the primary interests, he also researches economic and social inequality and political methodology with special interest in survey experimentation, spatial analysis, network analysis, and data visualization.