Dongshu Liu
Biographic Data
| ID | 3731390 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dongshu Liu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dongshu |
| FAMILY NAME | Liu |
| SIGNATURE | LIU D |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2435-3233 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Tolerating violence: Public Opinion of Anti-Government Protests and State Repression
Propaganda with Subculture: A Resource for Internet Control in China
Nationalist propaganda and support for war in an authoritarian context: Evidence from China
How can autocrats boost public support for wars? Previous studies have suggested that in democracies, the public changes its war attitude either through rational cost–benefit calculations or simply by following cues from political elites. This article argues that autocrats can follow a similar logic to manipulate public support for war via nationalist propaganda. Based on two online survey experiments with textual and musical propaganda materials…
Suppression by Mobilization: How Information Control Strategies Contain Political Criticism in Autocracies
Autocrats selectively tolerate political criticism, which may erode regime support. The literature suggests that regimes contain criticism by encouraging more supportive voices, but the mechanisms remain unclear. We theorize two mechanisms: winning more supporters (persuasion) or mobilizing existing supporters to speak out (mobilization). These mechanisms can be created by censoring evidence that supports criticism and adopting propaganda to arou…
Persuading the public: Nationalist propaganda and support for costly environmental policies in China
China’s ambitious plan for reducing carbon emissions may have a significant impact on its economy and impose an increased cost burden on the public. Conventionally, governments endure political costs when implementing unpopular policies. How can China achieve its goal without causing political risks? In this paper, we argue that China can promote its costly carbon policy through nationalist propaganda that points to international competition. Usi…
Double standard: Chinese public opinion on the Hong Kong protests
Research on social movements suggests that when protesters use violence, public opinion often turns against them, unless the observers already view the protesters as extremists. This creates what we refer to as an “asymmetric liability,” where by moderate protest movements are held to a higher standard of civility than more extreme ones. Based on a survey experiment surrounding the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, we show that violence undercuts Chine…
Cooptation without opposition: Government response in the authoritarian legislature in China
Cooptation is widely applied to study authoritarian legislatures, but it is often used to identify and placate the opposition groups. For one-party authoritarian regimes in which the hardcore opposition groups are not represented in the legislature, do autocrats still display dynamics of cooptation when responding to the delegates? Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegate proposals in China, this article finds that the Chines…
Policy Influence of Delegates in Authoritarian Legislatures: Evidence from China
Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates’ policy proposals in China, this paper proposes a new distributive theory of authoritarian legislature …
Resisting public monitoring in authoritarian regimes: Evidence from local environmental litigation in China
Civic activism is increasingly popular for authoritarian regimes to ensure local compliance and improve local governance, but it also places pressure on local officials. How do local officials respond to such pressures? With a unique dataset of city‐level environmental investigations and public interest litigation in China, we conduct a generalized difference‐in‐difference analysis and find that public interest litigation, a new legal channel for…
Racial and gender stereotypes in immigration attitudes: Evidence from China
How do racial and gender stereotypes affect immigration attitudes? Studies on this topic have focused primarily on developed rather than developing countries. To close the gap, we explore the phenomenon in China, a developing economy that is evolving from a source of emigration to a destination of immigration with its citizens having little direct experience with immigrants. Via two waves of survey experiments with over 4,000 respondents, we find…
How does marriage demand stimulate support for immigration in Asia
The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand–the demand for marriage–also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population faces a shortage of women in the marriage market. The respondents were assigned to four groups, namely, …
Minority Versus Minority: Partisanship and Inter-Group Competitions Among Asian Americans
Increasingly salient in democratic politics are the divides among political parties regarding how they mobilize supports between ethnic majorities and minorities. Why, then, do some members of a minority group support political parties that seem antithetical to the interests of minority groups? We draw on group conflict theory to suggest that a partial explanation rests on perceived competition within minority groups. We test this theory by focus…
Public Opinion Backlash against China’s International Expansion
In recent years, China has attempted to expand its international power by initiating projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article scrutinizes the potential obstacles to China’s expansion from a public opinion perspective. It argues that domestic public opinion may pose two challenges. First, xenophobic sentiments stimulate opposition to the inflow of foreigners and encourage social conflict. Second, the biased distribution of…
Advocacy channels and political resource dependence in authoritarianism: Nongovernmental organizations and environmental policies in China
Nongovernmental organizations are important in policy processes, but most studies supporting this argument are conducted in democracies. This article, therefore, focuses on China's environmental policy to discuss how environmental NGOs (eNGOs) conduct policy advocacy in authoritarian contexts. Based on interviews with eNGOs and scholars in China, I provide a typology to describe policy advocacy channels based on their formality and consistency an…
Punish the Dissidents: The Selective Implementation of Stability Preservation in China
Authoritarian regimes face a dilemma in punishing dissidents. They need extralegal punishments to ensure social stability, but they also want to legalize punishment decisions to sustain an image of adherence to the rule of law. These contradictory goals present an agency problem: local officials must selectively implement the competing goals of the central government. By analyzing data on 1408 dissidents in China from 2007 to 2014, this article a…
The Road to Cynicism: The Political Consequences of Online Satire Exposure in China
This article examines two competing theories explaining the effects of political satire on citizens in an authoritarian context. The “activism” proposition argues that political satire works as a form of resistance to erode people’s support for the regime and encourages collective action. The “cynicism” proposition argues that while satire discourages regime support, it also discourages political participation. Our online survey experiment on you…
The Road to Cynicism: The Political Consequences of Online Satire Exposure in China
This article examines two competing theories explaining the effects of political satire on citizens in an authoritarian context. The “activism” proposition argues that political satire works as a form of resistance to erode people’s support for the regime and encourages collective action. The “cynicism” proposition argues that while satire discourages regime support, it also discourages political participation. Our online survey experiment on you…
Advocacy channels and political resource dependence in authoritarianism: Nongovernmental organizations and environmental policies in China
Nongovernmental organizations are important in policy processes, but most studies supporting this argument are conducted in democracies. This article, therefore, focuses on China's environmental policy to discuss how environmental NGOs (eNGOs) conduct policy advocacy in authoritarian contexts. Based on interviews with eNGOs and scholars in China, I provide a typology to describe policy advocacy channels based on their formality and consistency an…
Punish the Dissidents: The Selective Implementation of Stability Preservation in China
Authoritarian regimes face a dilemma in punishing dissidents. They need extralegal punishments to ensure social stability, but they also want to legalize punishment decisions to sustain an image of adherence to the rule of law. These contradictory goals present an agency problem: local officials must selectively implement the competing goals of the central government. By analyzing data on 1408 dissidents in China from 2007 to 2014, this article a…
Public Opinion Backlash against China’s International Expansion
In recent years, China has attempted to expand its international power by initiating projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article scrutinizes the potential obstacles to China’s expansion from a public opinion perspective. It argues that domestic public opinion may pose two challenges. First, xenophobic sentiments stimulate opposition to the inflow of foreigners and encourage social conflict. Second, the biased distribution of…
Resisting public monitoring in authoritarian regimes: Evidence from local environmental litigation in China
Civic activism is increasingly popular for authoritarian regimes to ensure local compliance and improve local governance, but it also places pressure on local officials. How do local officials respond to such pressures? With a unique dataset of city‐level environmental investigations and public interest litigation in China, we conduct a generalized difference‐in‐difference analysis and find that public interest litigation, a new legal channel for…
Nationalist propaganda and support for war in an authoritarian context: Evidence from China
How can autocrats boost public support for wars? Previous studies have suggested that in democracies, the public changes its war attitude either through rational cost–benefit calculations or simply by following cues from political elites. This article argues that autocrats can follow a similar logic to manipulate public support for war via nationalist propaganda. Based on two online survey experiments with textual and musical propaganda materials…
Policy Influence of Delegates in Authoritarian Legislatures: Evidence from China
Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates’ policy proposals in China, this paper proposes a new distributive theory of authoritarian legislature …
Tolerating violence: Public Opinion of Anti-Government Protests and State Repression
Propaganda with Subculture: A Resource for Internet Control in China
Double standard: Chinese public opinion on the Hong Kong protests
Research on social movements suggests that when protesters use violence, public opinion often turns against them, unless the observers already view the protesters as extremists. This creates what we refer to as an “asymmetric liability,” where by moderate protest movements are held to a higher standard of civility than more extreme ones. Based on a survey experiment surrounding the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, we show that violence undercuts Chine…
Cooptation without opposition: Government response in the authoritarian legislature in China
Cooptation is widely applied to study authoritarian legislatures, but it is often used to identify and placate the opposition groups. For one-party authoritarian regimes in which the hardcore opposition groups are not represented in the legislature, do autocrats still display dynamics of cooptation when responding to the delegates? Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegate proposals in China, this article finds that the Chines…
Minority Versus Minority: Partisanship and Inter-Group Competitions Among Asian Americans
Increasingly salient in democratic politics are the divides among political parties regarding how they mobilize supports between ethnic majorities and minorities. Why, then, do some members of a minority group support political parties that seem antithetical to the interests of minority groups? We draw on group conflict theory to suggest that a partial explanation rests on perceived competition within minority groups. We test this theory by focus…
Suppression by Mobilization: How Information Control Strategies Contain Political Criticism in Autocracies
Autocrats selectively tolerate political criticism, which may erode regime support. The literature suggests that regimes contain criticism by encouraging more supportive voices, but the mechanisms remain unclear. We theorize two mechanisms: winning more supporters (persuasion) or mobilizing existing supporters to speak out (mobilization). These mechanisms can be created by censoring evidence that supports criticism and adopting propaganda to arou…
Racial and gender stereotypes in immigration attitudes: Evidence from China
How do racial and gender stereotypes affect immigration attitudes? Studies on this topic have focused primarily on developed rather than developing countries. To close the gap, we explore the phenomenon in China, a developing economy that is evolving from a source of emigration to a destination of immigration with its citizens having little direct experience with immigrants. Via two waves of survey experiments with over 4,000 respondents, we find…
How does marriage demand stimulate support for immigration in Asia
The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand–the demand for marriage–also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population faces a shortage of women in the marriage market. The respondents were assigned to four groups, namely, …
Punish the Dissidents: The Selective Implementation of Stability Preservation in China
Authoritarian regimes face a dilemma in punishing dissidents. They need extralegal punishments to ensure social stability, but they also want to legalize punishment decisions to sustain an image of adherence to the rule of law. These contradictory goals present an agency problem: local officials must selectively implement the competing goals of the central government. By analyzing data on 1408 dissidents in China from 2007 to 2014, this article a…
The Road to Cynicism: The Political Consequences of Online Satire Exposure in China
This article examines two competing theories explaining the effects of political satire on citizens in an authoritarian context. The “activism” proposition argues that political satire works as a form of resistance to erode people’s support for the regime and encourages collective action. The “cynicism” proposition argues that while satire discourages regime support, it also discourages political participation. Our online survey experiment on you…
Advocacy channels and political resource dependence in authoritarianism: Nongovernmental organizations and environmental policies in China
Nongovernmental organizations are important in policy processes, but most studies supporting this argument are conducted in democracies. This article, therefore, focuses on China's environmental policy to discuss how environmental NGOs (eNGOs) conduct policy advocacy in authoritarian contexts. Based on interviews with eNGOs and scholars in China, I provide a typology to describe policy advocacy channels based on their formality and consistency an…
Public Opinion Backlash against China’s International Expansion
In recent years, China has attempted to expand its international power by initiating projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article scrutinizes the potential obstacles to China’s expansion from a public opinion perspective. It argues that domestic public opinion may pose two challenges. First, xenophobic sentiments stimulate opposition to the inflow of foreigners and encourage social conflict. Second, the biased distribution of…
Minority Versus Minority: Partisanship and Inter-Group Competitions Among Asian Americans
Increasingly salient in democratic politics are the divides among political parties regarding how they mobilize supports between ethnic majorities and minorities. Why, then, do some members of a minority group support political parties that seem antithetical to the interests of minority groups? We draw on group conflict theory to suggest that a partial explanation rests on perceived competition within minority groups. We test this theory by focus…
Double standard: Chinese public opinion on the Hong Kong protests
Research on social movements suggests that when protesters use violence, public opinion often turns against them, unless the observers already view the protesters as extremists. This creates what we refer to as an “asymmetric liability,” where by moderate protest movements are held to a higher standard of civility than more extreme ones. Based on a survey experiment surrounding the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, we show that violence undercuts Chine…
Cooptation without opposition: Government response in the authoritarian legislature in China
Cooptation is widely applied to study authoritarian legislatures, but it is often used to identify and placate the opposition groups. For one-party authoritarian regimes in which the hardcore opposition groups are not represented in the legislature, do autocrats still display dynamics of cooptation when responding to the delegates? Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegate proposals in China, this article finds that the Chines…
Policy Influence of Delegates in Authoritarian Legislatures: Evidence from China
Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates’ policy proposals in China, this paper proposes a new distributive theory of authoritarian legislature …
Resisting public monitoring in authoritarian regimes: Evidence from local environmental litigation in China
Civic activism is increasingly popular for authoritarian regimes to ensure local compliance and improve local governance, but it also places pressure on local officials. How do local officials respond to such pressures? With a unique dataset of city‐level environmental investigations and public interest litigation in China, we conduct a generalized difference‐in‐difference analysis and find that public interest litigation, a new legal channel for…
Racial and gender stereotypes in immigration attitudes: Evidence from China
How do racial and gender stereotypes affect immigration attitudes? Studies on this topic have focused primarily on developed rather than developing countries. To close the gap, we explore the phenomenon in China, a developing economy that is evolving from a source of emigration to a destination of immigration with its citizens having little direct experience with immigrants. Via two waves of survey experiments with over 4,000 respondents, we find…
How does marriage demand stimulate support for immigration in Asia
The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand–the demand for marriage–also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population faces a shortage of women in the marriage market. The respondents were assigned to four groups, namely, …
Nationalist propaganda and support for war in an authoritarian context: Evidence from China
How can autocrats boost public support for wars? Previous studies have suggested that in democracies, the public changes its war attitude either through rational cost–benefit calculations or simply by following cues from political elites. This article argues that autocrats can follow a similar logic to manipulate public support for war via nationalist propaganda. Based on two online survey experiments with textual and musical propaganda materials…
Suppression by Mobilization: How Information Control Strategies Contain Political Criticism in Autocracies
Autocrats selectively tolerate political criticism, which may erode regime support. The literature suggests that regimes contain criticism by encouraging more supportive voices, but the mechanisms remain unclear. We theorize two mechanisms: winning more supporters (persuasion) or mobilizing existing supporters to speak out (mobilization). These mechanisms can be created by censoring evidence that supports criticism and adopting propaganda to arou…
Persuading the public: Nationalist propaganda and support for costly environmental policies in China
China’s ambitious plan for reducing carbon emissions may have a significant impact on its economy and impose an increased cost burden on the public. Conventionally, governments endure political costs when implementing unpopular policies. How can China achieve its goal without causing political risks? In this paper, we argue that China can promote its costly carbon policy through nationalist propaganda that points to international competition. Usi…
Tolerating violence: Public Opinion of Anti-Government Protests and State Repression
Propaganda with Subculture: A Resource for Internet Control in China
Political science (16 works) · Law (14 works) · China (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Authoritarianism (7 works)