How Racist Rhetoric Increases Chinese Overseas Students’ Support for Authoritarian Rule

How Racist Rhetoric Increases Chinese Overseas Students' Support for Authoritarian Rule

Friday, November 13, 2020

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

The Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power held an event on How Racist Rhetoric Increases Chinese Overseas Students' Support for Authoritarian Rule with Jennifer Pan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Yiqing Xu, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University on Friday, November 13, 2020 at 10:00 AM PT.

The cross-border flow of people for educational exchange in Western democracies is seen as a way to transfer democratic values to non-democratic regions of the world. What happens when students studying in the West encounter racism? Based on an experiment among hundreds of Chinese first-year undergraduates in the United States, we show that seeing racist, anti-Chinese rhetoric interferes with the transfer of democratic values. Chinese students who study in the United States are more predisposed to favor liberal democracy than their peers in China. However, anti-Chinese racism significantly reduces their belief that political reform is desirable for China and increases their support for authoritarian rule. These effects are most pronounced among students who are more likely to reject Chinese nationalism. Encountering non-racist criticisms of the Chinese government does not increase support for authoritarianism. Our results are not explained by relative evaluations of the handling of Covid-19 by the US and Chinese governments.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research resides at the intersection of political communication and authoritarian politics, showing how authoritarian governments try to control society, how the public responds, and when and why each is successful. Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020), shows how China’s pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program for repressive purposes.

Yiqing Xu is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research covers political methodology, Chinese politics, and their intersection. He received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016), an MA in Economics from the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University (2010) and a BA in Economics (2007) from Fudan University. He has won several professional awards, including the best article award from the American Journal of Political Science in 2016 and the Miller Prize for the best work appearing in Political Analysis in 2017.