Digital activism and collective mourning by Chinese netizens during COVID-19

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.

Chinese politics and comparative authoritarianism: institutionalization and adaptation for regime resilience

China's authoritarian regime under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains resilient and responsive to domestic and international threats to its survival, especially considering the inherent instability of other authoritarian regimes. What strategies allow the CCP to stay in power? How do institutions help the CCP to sustain one-party rule, if at all? How does the regime maintain centralized rule over its vast population and territory? Finally, how does the regime respond to the people's demands and dissatisfactions? This review essay discusses how the growing literature of comparative authoritarianism helps (or does not help) us to answer these questions. It discusses three books – one on comparative authoritarianism and two on Chinese politics. In How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse, the authors (i.e., Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz) test various hypotheses exploring the issues regarding the central political processes that shape the policy choices of authoritarian regimes, such as seizing power, consolidation of elites, information gathering, and how dictatorships break down. Are their findings consistent or contradictory with observation of Chinese authoritarian politics? To answer this question, we draw empirical evidence from Bruce Dickson's The Dictator's Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party's Strategy for Survival and Min Ye's The Belt Road and Beyond: State Mobilized Globalization in China, 1998–2018. These books suggest why China's authoritarian regime remains resilient.

Amusing Ourselves to Loyalty? Entertainment, Propaganda, and Regime Resilience in China

Is it possible to form “soft autocracy” that manages citizens by taking away their sense of resistance? This paper suggests that the rise of entertainment media in autocracies enables the rulers to maintain their resilience through a soft approach, thereby avoiding costly heavy-handed measures. Such a soft approach can work because entertainment media, like “fictitious pleasure drugs,” undo audiences’ sophistication so that people are susceptible to autocratic propaganda. By analyzing a Chinese data set, via instrumented regressions, this paper shows that a one standard deviation increase in people’s interest in entertainment media is associated with an increase of almost 20% in both their satisfaction with the current regime and their anti-Western hostility. Furthermore, the findings show a positive relationship between people’s entertainment media interest and their acceptation of indoctrination by state media. In short, entertainment media contribute to China’s regime stability through “amusing ordinary citizens to loyalty.”

Science Mapping: A Scientometric Review on Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources during 1993–2020

Over the past few decades, the wealth of Africa has not made African wealthy. There is a voicing that Africa is cursed, whether richly poor or poorly rich. Sub-Saharan Africa is commonplace for political turbulence, as well as humanitarian and economic misery. In such a catastrophic situa-tion, political economics studies have focused on the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Con-flict Resources in this area. A systematic scientometric analysis of this field would be beneficial but is currently lacking in the academic literature. Using VOSviewer and CiteSpace, this review fills the void by analyzing the 1783 articles published in the WoS SSCI Collection between 1993 and 2020 on the “Resource Curses”, “Dutch Diseases”, and “Conflict Resources”. The author dis-cusses recent papers with disruptive potential, references with the most robust citation explora-tions, and cooperation networks between authors and institutes. Three hotspots were detected: the causes and effects of the Resource curses; the interaction among the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources; the factors that affect rent collection and regime resilience. While the literature on the “Resource curse” and “Dutch Disease” has been around longer, studies on “Conflict Resources” are picking up quickly. Conflict Resources were characterized by active citation exploration keywords and multiple active co-citation clusters, including possibly groundbreaking articles. There is a massive overlap between the three strings of literature, but each one has its emphasis.

Rethinking Authoritarian Resilience and the Coercive Apparatus

A state's coercive apparatus can be strong in some ways and weak in others. Using interview data from security personnel in China, this study expands current conceptualizations of authoritarian durability and coercive capacity to consider a wide range of security activities. While protest response in China is centrally controlled and strong, other types of crime control are decentralized and systematically inadequate in ways that compromise the state's coercive power and may ultimately feed back into protest. Considering security activities beyond protest control exposes cracks in China's authoritarian system of control—an area where it is typically perceived to thrive—and calls into question our understanding of regime resilience as well as our current approach to assessing the role coercive capacity plays in authoritarian resilience elsewhere.