Speaker:

Dr Jianjun Yu, Post-Doctoral Fellow
School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University

Date & Time:

Thursday, 17 April 2025
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm (Singapore Time)

Venue:

Zoom

Registration is required:

Please click on: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sQqO92jZTN-sRcTsjNdcEg

Synopsis:

This seminar examines why ‘hard’ propaganda continues to thrive in authoritarian regimes, suggesting that it stems from the use of state media as a tool for bureaucratic management. By publicly documenting officials’ activities, state media enhances the credibility of performance evaluations—especially when leaders lack personal ties with subordinates and need independent verification of their work. However, this documentation function prioritises accurate record-keeping over public persuasion, resulting in contents that often appears rigid and unengaging. The speaker terms this bureaucratic propaganda.

Based on an analysis of 1.4 million WeChat posts from Chinese local governments, findings show that bureaucratic propaganda intensifies during evaluation periods and is more prevalent if leaders lack close connections to subordinates. A difference-in-differences analysis confirms that the absence of personal ties increases reliance on bureaucratic propaganda. These findings suggest that the propaganda serves an administrative—not expressive—purpose, offering new insight into state media, bureaucratic oversight and the political logic of propaganda in authoritarian systems.

About the Speaker:

Dr Yu is a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University. His primary research areas include political communication and government responsiveness in the context of China, as well as the application of computational methods to social science. His work focuses on understanding the evolution of Chinese propaganda and the role of city hotlines in shaping public opinion, using multi-media data—including text, audio and video—to examine interactions between the government and the public.