Image Credit: Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline: Big Family No. 3, via Imgur
Publications
The Autocrat’s Moral-Legal Dilemma: Popular Morality and Legal Institutions in China (with Iza Ding) Comparative Political Studies, 2020. [link]
"Speaking Bitterness" in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere. Verso/ANU Press, 2019. [link]
Frame Alignment and Environmental Advocacy: The Influence of NGO Strategies on Policy Outcomes in China (with Fanxu Zeng and Jia Dai) Environmental Politics, 2018. [link]
Book
Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State
University of Michigan Press, Fall 2022 [link]
How do states establish and maintain authority over the populations and territories they claim to govern? How do they eliminate internal rivals and create new collective identities that build solidarity between the state and the governed? This book manuscript examines how the Chinese Party-state mass mobilized violence against local elites shortly after taking power and the implications of this mobilization process for the entrenchment of its authority. My central argument is that the Party-state established and deepened its authority over society through the use of moral appeals aimed at discrediting local elites and legitimizing mass violence against them. In doing so, it delineated new moral boundaries that separated the “oppressive” landlord class from the “righteous” masses, which became crucial mobilization identities after the campaign: the Party-state called on the “the masses” to participate in repeated economic, political, and repressive mobilization while “class enemies” became the outgroup to be mobilized against.
Despite abundant research in social psychology demonstrating the importance of morality in conditioning individuals’ propensities to use violence, social scientists have neglected to explore the processes by which political actors mobilize citizens to overcome the significant moral-emotional barriers to using violence. I argue that political actors can leverage popular morality to alter social boundaries and elicit powerful emotional responses that can justify and mobilize collective violence, a process I term moral mobilization. I illustrate this process by examining the Chinese Communist Party’s mobilization of collective violence in the first few years after the revolution (1949-1953). During these campaigns of mass violence, the Party succeeded in mobilizing communities to engage in violent “class struggle” against millions of so-called “landlords” and “counterrevolutionaries,” despite the absence of salient pre-existing class cleavages. I argue that the Chinese Communist Party mobilized collective violence against these “class enemies” by emphasizing and sensationalizing the alleged moral transgressions of a subset of the landed elite and other members of the community, while simultaneously emphasizing the virtue and victimhood of the masses. Specifically, the Party galvanized collective violence by: 1) delineating a new symbolic boundary between the “oppressed masses” and the “oppressive” and “evil” landlords and counterrevolutionaries; and 2) staging the public performance of certain individuals’ supposed moral turpitude to elicit outrage against transgressors and cultivate empathy for the transgressed.
In addition, I argue that, for the Party, the moral mobilization of collective violence in the early 1950s was fundamentally a state-building effort aimed at the symbolic and physical destruction of elites associated with the old order and the strengthening of solidarity between the nascent state and the local communities. Contrary to conventional arguments that see state repression mainly as a method of eliminating political threats, I argue that the Party saw public participation in retributive violence as a means of psychologically transforming the peasantry and building solidarity between them and the Party. Significantly, the successful mobilization of collective violence politicized the masses and facilitated further mobilization—e.g. economic mobilization, military mobilization, state repression, etc. Employing a mixed methods approach, I use archival and documentary evidence, oral histories, and an original hand-coded historical dataset of county-level violence to illustrate and explain the process of violent mobilization and the conditions for its success, regional variation in the targets of violence, and the ramifications of this mobilization for other state-building efforts.
Working Papers
How Sensational Content and Outgroup Cues Strengthen Support for Violence and Anti-Muslim Policies (with Blake Miller)
Existing research has acknowledged online information as a source of violent and discriminatory behavior. However, this research has primarily focused on its diffusion rather than its substantive effects. This study examines what kind of information drives violence and discrimination, testing the effects of sensationalization, outgroup cues, and public opinion perception on support for violence and anti-Muslim policies. We test this with an online survey experiment via a realistic, interactive website treatment detailing a homicide story in small-town America. We find that sensationalist language increased individuals’ support for violence by provoking feelings of anger and fear while identifying the suspect in the homicide as a Muslim refugee, versus specifying no outgroup affiliation, increased support for anti-Muslim policies. Lastly, perceived public support for violence increased the likelihood of upvoting or writing violent comments. This study contributes to our understanding of the effects of sensational news and public debate on online content moderation.
Red Memory: Communist Nostalgia and Political Attitudes in Contemporary China (with Iza Ding)
Despite the material hardships of communism, nostalgia persists in post-communist societies. What explains this persistence, and what are the implications of such nostalgia for present-day politics? We examine the formation of political memory and its relationship with individual attitudes toward contemporary government policies in China, focusing on Chinese citizens’
memories of the Maoist era (1949-1976). On the basis of 66 semi-structured interviews in both coastal and inland areas, we find that nostalgia is a reaction to the profound spiritual disillusionment many Chinese citizens feel over the complex social challenges arising during China’s economic reform. Nostalgia can coexist with trauma where respondents draw a clear distinction between the spiritual and material elements of the Maoist past. We further find that individuals’ memories and assessments of the Maoist era are correlated with their attitudes towards contemporary public policies, such as Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. This research informs a broader discussion of how political memory influences how citizens evaluate contemporary politics.
Moral-Emotional Content and Patterns of Violent Expression and Hate Speech in Online User Comments (with Blake Miller)
What kinds of content are most associated with violent expression and hate speech? We hypothesize that articles rich in moral-emotional content are more likely to provoke outrage against targeted individuals and outgroups, which in turn increases individuals’ propensity to use or support violent and hateful expression against them. We use a text analysis of populations of articles and user comments scraped from 72 online media sources that use the Disqus platform to measure correlations between moral-emotional content and user comments that express a desire for violence or contain some kind of attack on an individual or group. Using a novel typology for classifying violent and hateful speech, we annotated a sample of over 12,000 user comments and used this human-annotated corpus to train classification models to classify over 300 million user comments. We find support for our hypothesis that content that contains both moral and emotional rhetoric is significantly more likely to be associated with higher proportions of violent expression. Within comments, we find that user comments containing calls for violence are significantly more likely to contain dehumanizing and demonizing language, target groups as opposed to individuals, and include references to an ingroup identity.
The Autocrat’s Moral-Legal Dilemma: Popular Morality and Legal Institutions in China (with Iza Ding) Comparative Political Studies, 2020. [link]
"Speaking Bitterness" in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere. Verso/ANU Press, 2019. [link]
Frame Alignment and Environmental Advocacy: The Influence of NGO Strategies on Policy Outcomes in China (with Fanxu Zeng and Jia Dai) Environmental Politics, 2018. [link]
Book
Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State
University of Michigan Press, Fall 2022 [link]
How do states establish and maintain authority over the populations and territories they claim to govern? How do they eliminate internal rivals and create new collective identities that build solidarity between the state and the governed? This book manuscript examines how the Chinese Party-state mass mobilized violence against local elites shortly after taking power and the implications of this mobilization process for the entrenchment of its authority. My central argument is that the Party-state established and deepened its authority over society through the use of moral appeals aimed at discrediting local elites and legitimizing mass violence against them. In doing so, it delineated new moral boundaries that separated the “oppressive” landlord class from the “righteous” masses, which became crucial mobilization identities after the campaign: the Party-state called on the “the masses” to participate in repeated economic, political, and repressive mobilization while “class enemies” became the outgroup to be mobilized against.
Despite abundant research in social psychology demonstrating the importance of morality in conditioning individuals’ propensities to use violence, social scientists have neglected to explore the processes by which political actors mobilize citizens to overcome the significant moral-emotional barriers to using violence. I argue that political actors can leverage popular morality to alter social boundaries and elicit powerful emotional responses that can justify and mobilize collective violence, a process I term moral mobilization. I illustrate this process by examining the Chinese Communist Party’s mobilization of collective violence in the first few years after the revolution (1949-1953). During these campaigns of mass violence, the Party succeeded in mobilizing communities to engage in violent “class struggle” against millions of so-called “landlords” and “counterrevolutionaries,” despite the absence of salient pre-existing class cleavages. I argue that the Chinese Communist Party mobilized collective violence against these “class enemies” by emphasizing and sensationalizing the alleged moral transgressions of a subset of the landed elite and other members of the community, while simultaneously emphasizing the virtue and victimhood of the masses. Specifically, the Party galvanized collective violence by: 1) delineating a new symbolic boundary between the “oppressed masses” and the “oppressive” and “evil” landlords and counterrevolutionaries; and 2) staging the public performance of certain individuals’ supposed moral turpitude to elicit outrage against transgressors and cultivate empathy for the transgressed.
In addition, I argue that, for the Party, the moral mobilization of collective violence in the early 1950s was fundamentally a state-building effort aimed at the symbolic and physical destruction of elites associated with the old order and the strengthening of solidarity between the nascent state and the local communities. Contrary to conventional arguments that see state repression mainly as a method of eliminating political threats, I argue that the Party saw public participation in retributive violence as a means of psychologically transforming the peasantry and building solidarity between them and the Party. Significantly, the successful mobilization of collective violence politicized the masses and facilitated further mobilization—e.g. economic mobilization, military mobilization, state repression, etc. Employing a mixed methods approach, I use archival and documentary evidence, oral histories, and an original hand-coded historical dataset of county-level violence to illustrate and explain the process of violent mobilization and the conditions for its success, regional variation in the targets of violence, and the ramifications of this mobilization for other state-building efforts.
Working Papers
How Sensational Content and Outgroup Cues Strengthen Support for Violence and Anti-Muslim Policies (with Blake Miller)
Existing research has acknowledged online information as a source of violent and discriminatory behavior. However, this research has primarily focused on its diffusion rather than its substantive effects. This study examines what kind of information drives violence and discrimination, testing the effects of sensationalization, outgroup cues, and public opinion perception on support for violence and anti-Muslim policies. We test this with an online survey experiment via a realistic, interactive website treatment detailing a homicide story in small-town America. We find that sensationalist language increased individuals’ support for violence by provoking feelings of anger and fear while identifying the suspect in the homicide as a Muslim refugee, versus specifying no outgroup affiliation, increased support for anti-Muslim policies. Lastly, perceived public support for violence increased the likelihood of upvoting or writing violent comments. This study contributes to our understanding of the effects of sensational news and public debate on online content moderation.
Red Memory: Communist Nostalgia and Political Attitudes in Contemporary China (with Iza Ding)
Despite the material hardships of communism, nostalgia persists in post-communist societies. What explains this persistence, and what are the implications of such nostalgia for present-day politics? We examine the formation of political memory and its relationship with individual attitudes toward contemporary government policies in China, focusing on Chinese citizens’
memories of the Maoist era (1949-1976). On the basis of 66 semi-structured interviews in both coastal and inland areas, we find that nostalgia is a reaction to the profound spiritual disillusionment many Chinese citizens feel over the complex social challenges arising during China’s economic reform. Nostalgia can coexist with trauma where respondents draw a clear distinction between the spiritual and material elements of the Maoist past. We further find that individuals’ memories and assessments of the Maoist era are correlated with their attitudes towards contemporary public policies, such as Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. This research informs a broader discussion of how political memory influences how citizens evaluate contemporary politics.
Moral-Emotional Content and Patterns of Violent Expression and Hate Speech in Online User Comments (with Blake Miller)
What kinds of content are most associated with violent expression and hate speech? We hypothesize that articles rich in moral-emotional content are more likely to provoke outrage against targeted individuals and outgroups, which in turn increases individuals’ propensity to use or support violent and hateful expression against them. We use a text analysis of populations of articles and user comments scraped from 72 online media sources that use the Disqus platform to measure correlations between moral-emotional content and user comments that express a desire for violence or contain some kind of attack on an individual or group. Using a novel typology for classifying violent and hateful speech, we annotated a sample of over 12,000 user comments and used this human-annotated corpus to train classification models to classify over 300 million user comments. We find support for our hypothesis that content that contains both moral and emotional rhetoric is significantly more likely to be associated with higher proportions of violent expression. Within comments, we find that user comments containing calls for violence are significantly more likely to contain dehumanizing and demonizing language, target groups as opposed to individuals, and include references to an ingroup identity.