Charles Chang
Biographic Data
| ID | 3837174 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Chang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Chang |
| SIGNATURE | CHANG C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke Kunshan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6518-9014 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The physical and virtual presence of the local state and citizens’ life satisfaction in urbanising China
China’s rapid and ongoing urbanisation has led to the expansion of the local state. The state, traditionally exhibited as physical institutions of government, has emerged virtually in recent years based on intricate network infrastructure systems, such as social media platforms. Scholars contend that a strong physical state infrastructure enhances government function and can increase citizens’ life satisfaction; in contrast, the state’s virtual p…
The Art of Self-Criticism
In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyz…
The Reach of the State
We conceptualize the reach of the state by examining how the physical presence of the state helps the state project its power by signaling state interests and strength. We present a new measurement strategy to capture the territorial reach of the state using points-of-interest data provided by location-based service companies. Our measure exhibits several advantages: (1) it draws on firm-produced or crowd-sourced (rather than government-produced)…
State infrastructure and neighborhood well-being in urbanizing China
202404 bcch
Information Credibility under Authoritarian Rule
Do citizens under authoritarian rule trust government information? To answer this question, I compared citizen statements and movement trajectories from smartphone social media communication in real-time with precise timestamps and locations in response to the government's press releases during the Kunming railway station attack in southwestern China in 2014. I find that while outward engagement with government information may increase as the gov…
Political Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States
We theorize and measure a situational self-censorship that varies across spatial-temporal political contexts. Schelling’s insight that distinctive times and places function as focal points has generated a literature explaining how activists coordinate for protest in authoritarian states. Our population of interest is not activists but ordinary citizens, who, we assume, are risk-averse and prefer to avoid trouble. Focal points rally activists for …
Standing by
How do authoritarian states organize their coercive institutions over space? We argue that autocrats maximize the utility of their limited coercive resources by clustering them with perceived threats in society, i.e., segments of the population that are ideologically distant and have mobilizational potential. We test this proposition using a dataset that covers the universe of police stations (N = 147,428) and religious sites (N = 115,394) in Chi…
A Data Driven Approach to Study the Social and Political Statuses of Urban Communities in Kunming
This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to add…
Using Word Order in Political Text Classification with Long Short-term Memory Models
Political scientists often wish to classify documents based on their content to measure variables, such as the ideology of political speeches or whether documents describe a Militarized Interstate Dispute. Simple classifiers often serve well in these tasks. However, if words occurring early in a document alter the meaning of words occurring later in the document, using a more complicated model that can incorporate these time-dependent relationshi…
The Law and Religious Market Theory
In the social scientific study of religion, the economic approach rose up in the 1980s, stirred up exciting debates in the 1990s, and championed a paradigm shift, which was spectacularly accomplished around the turn of the century. The old paradigm of secularization waned and the new paradigm of vitality and diversity waxed. In recent years, however, the social scientific study of religion in the West seems to have lost steam, as there is no long…
Toward an Understanding of Heritage Prosody
In previous work examining heritage language phonology, heritage speakers have often patterned differently from native speakers and late-onset second language (L2) learners with respect to overall accent and segmentals. The current study extended this line of inquiry to suprasegmentals, comparing the properties of lexical tones produced by heritage, native, and L2 speakers of Mandarin living in the U.S. We hypothesized that heritage speakers woul…
General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language
Using computers in early childhood classrooms
To better prepare early childhood teachers for computer use, more information about their current skills and classroom practices is needed. Sampling from a large metropolitan public school system in the USA, the study surveyed 297 state pre-kindergarten teachers, gathering information about their attitudes, skills, and instructional methods related to computer use. Statistically significant relationships indicate that attitudes, skills, and pract…
Political Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States
We theorize and measure a situational self-censorship that varies across spatial-temporal political contexts. Schelling’s insight that distinctive times and places function as focal points has generated a literature explaining how activists coordinate for protest in authoritarian states. Our population of interest is not activists but ordinary citizens, who, we assume, are risk-averse and prefer to avoid trouble. Focal points rally activists for …
Using Word Order in Political Text Classification with Long Short-term Memory Models
Political scientists often wish to classify documents based on their content to measure variables, such as the ideology of political speeches or whether documents describe a Militarized Interstate Dispute. Simple classifiers often serve well in these tasks. However, if words occurring early in a document alter the meaning of words occurring later in the document, using a more complicated model that can incorporate these time-dependent relationshi…
Information Credibility under Authoritarian Rule
Do citizens under authoritarian rule trust government information? To answer this question, I compared citizen statements and movement trajectories from smartphone social media communication in real-time with precise timestamps and locations in response to the government's press releases during the Kunming railway station attack in southwestern China in 2014. I find that while outward engagement with government information may increase as the gov…
The Reach of the State
We conceptualize the reach of the state by examining how the physical presence of the state helps the state project its power by signaling state interests and strength. We present a new measurement strategy to capture the territorial reach of the state using points-of-interest data provided by location-based service companies. Our measure exhibits several advantages: (1) it draws on firm-produced or crowd-sourced (rather than government-produced)…
State infrastructure and neighborhood well-being in urbanizing China
202404 bcch
The Art of Self-Criticism
In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyz…
Using computers in early childhood classrooms
To better prepare early childhood teachers for computer use, more information about their current skills and classroom practices is needed. Sampling from a large metropolitan public school system in the USA, the study surveyed 297 state pre-kindergarten teachers, gathering information about their attitudes, skills, and instructional methods related to computer use. Statistically significant relationships indicate that attitudes, skills, and pract…
Using computers in early childhood classrooms
To better prepare early childhood teachers for computer use, more information about their current skills and classroom practices is needed. Sampling from a large metropolitan public school system in the USA, the study surveyed 297 state pre-kindergarten teachers, gathering information about their attitudes, skills, and instructional methods related to computer use. Statistically significant relationships indicate that attitudes, skills, and pract…
General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language
Toward an Understanding of Heritage Prosody
In previous work examining heritage language phonology, heritage speakers have often patterned differently from native speakers and late-onset second language (L2) learners with respect to overall accent and segmentals. The current study extended this line of inquiry to suprasegmentals, comparing the properties of lexical tones produced by heritage, native, and L2 speakers of Mandarin living in the U.S. We hypothesized that heritage speakers woul…
The Law and Religious Market Theory
In the social scientific study of religion, the economic approach rose up in the 1980s, stirred up exciting debates in the 1990s, and championed a paradigm shift, which was spectacularly accomplished around the turn of the century. The old paradigm of secularization waned and the new paradigm of vitality and diversity waxed. In recent years, however, the social scientific study of religion in the West seems to have lost steam, as there is no long…
A Data Driven Approach to Study the Social and Political Statuses of Urban Communities in Kunming
This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to add…
Using Word Order in Political Text Classification with Long Short-term Memory Models
Political scientists often wish to classify documents based on their content to measure variables, such as the ideology of political speeches or whether documents describe a Militarized Interstate Dispute. Simple classifiers often serve well in these tasks. However, if words occurring early in a document alter the meaning of words occurring later in the document, using a more complicated model that can incorporate these time-dependent relationshi…
Information Credibility under Authoritarian Rule
Do citizens under authoritarian rule trust government information? To answer this question, I compared citizen statements and movement trajectories from smartphone social media communication in real-time with precise timestamps and locations in response to the government's press releases during the Kunming railway station attack in southwestern China in 2014. I find that while outward engagement with government information may increase as the gov…
Political Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States
We theorize and measure a situational self-censorship that varies across spatial-temporal political contexts. Schelling’s insight that distinctive times and places function as focal points has generated a literature explaining how activists coordinate for protest in authoritarian states. Our population of interest is not activists but ordinary citizens, who, we assume, are risk-averse and prefer to avoid trouble. Focal points rally activists for …
Standing by
How do authoritarian states organize their coercive institutions over space? We argue that autocrats maximize the utility of their limited coercive resources by clustering them with perceived threats in society, i.e., segments of the population that are ideologically distant and have mobilizational potential. We test this proposition using a dataset that covers the universe of police stations (N = 147,428) and religious sites (N = 115,394) in Chi…
State infrastructure and neighborhood well-being in urbanizing China
202404 bcch
The Art of Self-Criticism
In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyz…
The Reach of the State
We conceptualize the reach of the state by examining how the physical presence of the state helps the state project its power by signaling state interests and strength. We present a new measurement strategy to capture the territorial reach of the state using points-of-interest data provided by location-based service companies. Our measure exhibits several advantages: (1) it draws on firm-produced or crowd-sourced (rather than government-produced)…
The physical and virtual presence of the local state and citizens’ life satisfaction in urbanising China
China’s rapid and ongoing urbanisation has led to the expansion of the local state. The state, traditionally exhibited as physical institutions of government, has emerged virtually in recent years based on intricate network infrastructure systems, such as social media platforms. Scholars contend that a strong physical state infrastructure enhances government function and can increase citizens’ life satisfaction; in contrast, the state’s virtual p…
Political science (8 works) · China (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works)