Book

  • Yan WANG. Pension policy and governmentality in China: Manufacturing public compliance. 2022. LSE Press. Available here
    Book Blurb Economic growth is often a disruptive social process - so how has the Chinese state been able to maintain compliance from its people while at the same time pushing ahead an exceptionally rapid social and economic transformation? This book explores the question via detailed analysis of the trajectories, policy rationale, and effects of China’s pension reforms, demonstrating how statecraft shapes the ways that citizens ascribe credit and responsibility for pensions protection across themselves, the state and other actors. The book shows that China’s governmentality for manufacturing compliance is hybrid, organic, and dynamic. The targeted allocation of benefits, policy experimentation, propaganda and knowledge construction, and many other approaches are used to shape public expectations and to justify state rule. An original contribution to the study of legitimation in modern states, the analysis particularly highlights that when active counter-conduct (such as resistance) is confined, individuals may choose cognitive rebellion and falsify their public compliance.

Articles

  • Yan WANG. Building deservingness and fairness with discourse: How states construct the social legitimacy of pension schemes. forthcoming. Critical Policy Studies. Available here
    Abstract How do modern states legitimise and frame their redistributive social policies in communicating with society to promote policy changes? What kind of ‘structures of incentives’ are being promoted in their narratives? This article takes the pension reform in China in the 1990s and the 2000s as an example, using text data on corresponding official propaganda to investigate the Chinese state’s ideological repertories in framing and crafting the social legitimacy of its then-new pension designs. The results from Quantitative Text Analysis of official discourse demonstrate that the rationale for reconstructing public expectations of the redistribution of pension benefits and the allocation of welfare responsibility between the government and individuals mainly focuses on the reiteration of the principles of: ‘contribution and rewards’ and ‘rights and obligations.’ The state also built images of deserving and undeserving social groups by reconstructing the notion of fairness, blurring the distinction between merit and equity, and ultimately reshaping individual subjectivity as a self-regulated and self-motivated ‘socialised self’.
  • Xufeng ZHU, Yan WANG. Policy Experimentation as Communication with the Public: Social Policy, Shared Responsibility, and Regime Support in China. 2023. The China Quarterly. Available here
    Abstract Traditional wisdom on policy experimentation has mainly focused on central-local relations. However, scholars have paid little attention to the interaction between policy experimentation and the public. We argue that policy experimentation can be adopted by decision makers as a communication instrument with the public, facilitating the building of a social consensus regarding controversial policies. We evaluate the effects of the Chinese government’s efforts in promoting shared responsibility between the state and the individuals for the urban pension system with policy experimentation on public’s regime support. Evidence from two rounds of a nationwide survey conducted before and after the policy experiment indicates that the implementation of policy experiment has significantly contributed to citizens’ acceptance of individual welfare responsibility. Moreover, the image building of governmental responsibility via official news with varied intensity across local regions immediately consolidates the political trust of residents while posing threats to government credibility in the long run.
  • Yan WANG, Ting LUO. Politicizing for the idol: China’s idol fandom nationalism in pandemic. 2023. Information, Communication, & Society. Available here
    Abstract Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemicrelated discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean Kpop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China.
  • Xiaonan WANG, Yan WANG. Too Cynical: How Stock Market in China Dismissed Anticorruption Signals. 2022. Journal of Chinese Political Science. Available here
    Abstract Political leaders in China regularly launch anti-corruption campaigns to win public support. But how are anti-corruption signals perceived? We use event study to examine the case of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign – an unprecedented effort in China to fight corruption. Contrary to expectations, we find that for the firms with connected officials later investigated, the initial anti-corruption signals – speeches from the top leadership and earlier crackdowns on other senior officials – did not decrease their stock prices. We argue that the perceived high costs of following through and repeated campaigns in the past paradoxically nurtured cynicism. We exploit the case of Zhou Yongkang and Ling Jihua – the two officials who were alleged to be involved in the power struggle and whose downfall had circulated widely since 2012. We find that when the targets of earlier crackdowns were connected to Zhou or Ling, the stock prices of the firms went down only if their connected and later investigated officials were in the same faction; the stock prices of the other firms, however, went up. We interpret the results as investors’ misperceptions of the campaign in the beginning. Our findings suggest that even real efforts in campaign-style enforcement can be dismissed.
  • Yan WANG. Pragmatism or politicism: Local officials’ decision making in policy experimentation. 2022. SSRN Available here
    Abstract It has been widely recognized that local bureaucrats are crucial actors in policy process. In policy experimentation—a popular policy instrument in social welfare areas—which heavily relies on negotiation and interaction between different sectors, local bureaucrats are the main actors that initiate the experiment plan, propose policy innovation, and implement the pilot schemes. Then what do they value when deciding on local social policies, and why would they prefer some policy-experiment schemes over others? In this research, we use two unique studies with survey experiments on municipal- and county-level government officials in China and investigate their rationale and attention allocation on social policy preferences, as well as their decision making on policy experiments. Our results show that although the instruction and support from the upper-level governments are as vital as the local initiatives, local officials are more practical than political in many scenarios of local social policy making, where under similar conditions they react more strongly to societal demands. This pragmatism is especially true in deciding the preferred pilot scheme—they place more value on financial support, local conditions, and risk environment, while the political load of the pilot schemes have relatively less leverage in changing their preference. More importantly, such a pattern is consistent across different administrative types and regional subgroups of local officials.

Book Chapters

  • Yan WANG, Yuxi Zhang. Contesting for Consensus: Social sentiment towards fellow citizens’ COVID-related behavior in China. 2023. forthcoming: in Book ”Pandemic Narratives in China and the World: Technology, Society, and Nations”, edited by Bingchun Meng, Guobin Yang, and Elaine Yuan. Available here
    Abstract COVID-19 has shifted how citizens interact profoundly. Private life is frequently dis- played in the public space and individuals are held to account should their exercise of liberty enlarges COVID-19 transmission risks. We are interested in the evolving dynam- ics among fellow citizens, especially when and how individuals react to others’ COVID-19 related actions and behavior. An extensive data set of Sina Weibo posts consisting of more than four million COVID-19 related posts provides us with a lens to answer the questions. By estimating the general sentiment of Weibo posts from January to Decem- ber 2020, as well as two in-depth case studies, we capture the information flows and discussion volumes in the public space. Combining the machine learning approach with discourse analysis, we find that the psycho-social cycle model identified in past public health emergencies and other societies during the COVID-19 pandemic also occurred in China, although demonstrating unique timing and sequence characteristics that are linked to China’s epidemic situation and policies. The all-society solidarity built at the begin- ning of 2020 was later challenged, and potentially eroded by the process of moralizing fellow citizens’ COVID-related behavior via blaming, discriminating, and scapegoating. As society lives under the pandemic for longer, fellow citizens have become more aware of problems associated with unbounded public scrutiny of private life. Such awareness and reflection, herein, encourages discussion and consensus building efforts.

    Online Appendix
    A blog about the paper

Working Papers

  • Ting LUO, Yan WANG. The art of storytelling: Pro-regime narratives on Chinese social media and the official opinion leaders. Working paper.
    Abstract The Chinese government under Xi Jinping has taken an active role in shaping and leading online discussions in cyberspace in order to occupy the battlefield of online public opinion. While much is known about the strategies and tactics used by various online actors to promote pro-regime messages, we know little about how narratives are constructed in these messages. In this paper, we propose the theoretical framework of event-based narratives and the detailed storytelling in the pro-regime messages promoted by key opinion leaders on Chinese social media platform. We drew a random sample of all Weibo verified users and collected all posts posed by them between January and May 2022, yielding a total of over three million posts by government accounts, organizations, enterprises, media, and celebrities. With linguistic algorithm that captures the action, the agent performing that action, and the patient being acted upon, we unravel the storytelling and meaning construction of subject-object-action network of four trending topics related to four key social-economic events at the time — the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Shanghai Lockdown, and the chained mother likely to be a victim of human trafficking found in Jiangsu Province. In each of these events the state plays varied roles of either initiative or responsive, and the tactics the state involve influencing the public opinion are distinctive. The elements, strategies, and beliefs including focusing on the rational data and positive energy in Shanghai Lockdown, wind down the public discussions and focus on the local problems in the Fengxian Events. There are also highlights of national pride and an entertaining glory in Winter Olympics, and redirect the discussions to the evil US, and rationales for Russia’s move in Russia-Ukraine war. We also present the different narratives across government, media, and celebrities’ accounts, as well as the diffusion pattern of some key narratives. Our work shed new light on how online opinion leaders construct the narratives and stories in various scenarios, as well as the relationship between the state, platforms, and the public in discipling public opinion and constructing pro-regime mainstream consensus in authoritarian regimes.
  • Yan WANG. Truth or dare: Falsification in manufactured consent. Under Review.
    Abstract Despite state’s well-designed statecraft in shaping public opinions, the risks for the authorities of falsified compliance from the people are present in many post-communist countries. In this paper I ask: is the reported high compliance of the public from all kinds of survey results regarding state representations in China sincere or just falsification? If falsified, how do citizens disentangle the reported consent from their private attitudes? I combine observation and in-depth interviews to unlock the black box and explore the power relationship between state and individual by highlighting ordinary people’s subjectivity and its involution affected by the governmentality of the current authority. The data shows that, falsified compliance does exist among the Chinese regarding the current political system and the authorities, but it is a mixture of intentional falsification and cognitive dissonance. Moreover, individual’s political opinion presents a smooth transformation between the public face and the private face. The interaction between people’s personal experience and the existing cultural, historical and educational factors that have socialised their ideas deeply shapes the presentation of manufactured compliance in authoritarian regimes.

Work in Progress

  • Cleavage map and the focal issues: the attitudinal divisions in cyberspace on re-distributive social welfare
    Abstract This project is among the first to conceptualize attitudinal social cleavages in cyberspace and theorize their manifestations and transformations. The disagreements among different social groups regarding redistributive issues are highly visible in cyberspace, where people debate and argue about the necessity, legitimacy, and feasibility of social security, tax cuts, strikes, among many other topics. Yet, little work has been done to depict and conceptualize online attitudinal divisions that do not align entirely with demographic stratification, partisan stances, or self-reported political attitudes from surveys. This work takes debates on social media and public forums (Reddit and Twitter, with Twitter data credit to 24hrs Twitter Team) as examples, combines state-of-the-art digital tracing methods and experiments, and investigates the presentation, evolution, and variations of online attitudinal divisions related to redistributive social issues. It contributes to the existing knowledge of this crucial social phenomenon, as well as to potential efforts aimed at bridging social cleavages in public opinion. Moreover, the investigation into the difference between cyberspace social cleavage and self-reported attitudes contributes to the methodological inquiry of measurement bias in public opinion and social attitudes.
  • Rebuild pandemic preparedness with the society: the public-expert dynamics in the UK and China
    Abstract Existing research on the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the crucial role of trust between the scientific community and the public. This trust is vital for persuading individuals to adhere to mobility-restricting public policies and take up vaccination, thereby strengthening society's preparedness against public health crises. While existing research paid attention to the role of experts when studying topics such as vaccination communication, a theoretical framework is yet to be developed to understand the varying public-expert dynamics across societies that are potentially malleable during normal times. Meanwhile, relatively little is known regarding how different factors have shaped the dynamics, in particular, the public’s opinion toward experts. This work draws on two in-depth case studies on England and China to illustrate the public-expert dynamics and their longitudinal changes in each country in the 21st Century. We examine how past (realized or unrealized) public health crises, as well as the institutional environment, have contributed to the development of such dynamics over time. Empirically, we combine both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the descriptive narratives of the historical development of public-expert dynamics in the two cases, we employ the process-tracing method, following the inductive theory-building logic. Data are collected from a wide range of sources, including the archives of official policy documents, parliamentary debates, MP interviews and press conferences, news articles, social media data, and so on. To further unpack the distinct patterns of doctor-patient trust in China and the UK, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we use evidence from existing multi-wave surveys (ISSP) and archives, demonstrating that the patterns exhibit significant stability over time in both countries, withstanding the pandemic's impact. Our evidence provides a robust empirical foundation for unpacking how institutional features of healthcare systems have contributed to such cross-country differences, and with continuous work, we investigate the causal explanations from contextualized past incidents.

  • Health communication and social media: the health shelf on Youtube

  • Digitized grieving and online funerals

Research Grants

  • 2024-2025 Humanities Strategic Civic Engagement Fund (Co-I), University of Manchester
  • 2024 Small Grant (PI), University of Manchester, School of Social Sciences.
  • 2021-2023 Small Research Grants (Co-I), British Academy.
  • 2020-2021 Research Infrastructure and Investment Fund (RIIF), LSE Methodology.