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Over the past two decades, maintaining political order has been the Chinese regime's primary goal. This text shows how China's preoccupation with 'stability' (political order) seeps into unrelated policies in previously unexplained ways. This 'seepage' has affected China's Dibao program, the world's largest welfare program of its kind. For the first time ever, this work shows how seepage works, what motivates it, what its effects are, and how seepage can backfire, ironically leading to protests and discontent. Jennifer Pan explores the primacy of political order and challenges how we think about welfare, institutional change, repression, surveillance, and collective action.

Over the past two decades, maintaining political order has been the Chinese regime's primary goal. This text shows how China's preoccupation with 'stability' (political order) seeps into unrelated policies in previously unexplained ways. This 'seepage' has affected China's Dibao program, the world's largest welfare program of its kind. For the first time ever, this work shows how seepage works, what motivates it, what its effects are, and how seepage can backfire, ironically leading to protests and discontent. Jennifer Pan explores the primacy of political order and challenges how we think about welfare, institutional change, repression, surveillance, and collective action.

The Chinese regime has launched a number of online government transparency initiatives to increase the volume of publicly available information about the activities of lower-level governments. By analyzing online content produced by local government officials to fulfill these transparency requirements—a random sample of 1.92 million county-level government web pages—this paper shows how websites are commandeered by local-level officials to construct their public image. The majority of content on government websites emphasizes either the competence or benevolence of county executives, depending on where leaders are in the political tenure cycle. Early tenure county executives project images of benevolence by emphasizing their attentiveness and concern toward citizens. Late tenure executives project images of competence by highlighting their achievements. These findings shift the nature of debates concerning the role of the Internet in authoritarian regimes from a focus on regime–society interactions to an examination of dynamics among regime insiders. By focusing on communication and the flow of information between upper-level leaders and lower-level regime agents, this paper reveals how the Internet becomes a vehicle of self-promotion for local politicians.

Late last year former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly visited Brown University to deliver a lecture on "proactive policing," a tepid euphemism for a stop-and-frisk policy that primarily targeted black and Latino youth. Lying in wait was a group of students who had assembled to protest Kelly and his policies and who booed and shouted until the commissioner decided to leave the podium. When the students' victory reached the social justice media circuits, the left divided. Many celebrated the protests; others believed the shout-down was a low blow and undermined efforts to curtail police abuses.

In January Billfold writer Paulette Perhach reminded us that life under capitalism is better when you have money. In her widely shared essay, "A Story of a Fuck Off Fund," she contrasted two possible futures for a young woman entering the workforce. In one version, "you"—her missive was delivered in second person in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks—fritter away your income, rack up debt, and are subsequently left without the means to escape a lecherous boss and an abusive boyfriend. In the second, you have had the foresight to live humbly and direct the bulk of your income into a personal savings account (the "fuck off fund"). You are rewarded with the freedom to walk away.

For thirty years, the Chinese internet has been characterized by engagement between citizens and the government, and between the Chinese internet and the global internet. In this commentary, we formalize the concept of disengagement: the unwillingness to participate in digital activity. We review the origins of disengagement, its association with other social trends, and evaluate the possibility of its emergence. We argue that disengagement may have profound social, political, and economic consequences for the country. Finally, we call for future scholarship with renewed focus on disengagement and its consequences.

Abstract
What happens to international media reporting when governments expel foreign journalists? Countries around the world expel foreign reporters, yet there is no consensus about the effects of such expulsions. We argue there are three possible outcomes of expulsion: a chilling effect, resilience, and backlash. Using China as a case study, we evaluate these competing theories by collecting a novel dataset of foreign news stories about China and applying time-series causal inference methods to measure the effects of expulsion on information origination, composition, and reach after March 2020, when the Chinese government expelled a large number of foreign correspondents. Results show that expelled media organizations did not experience a chilling effect or backlash on reporting and may have changed their production processes to account for expulsion. These findings suggest that news organizations can remain resilient to the impact of extraordinary events which target the organization and disrupt internal production processes.

AbstractChina after Mao is typically characterized as a country where economic opportunities are based on merit instead of ideological conformity. However, the salience of ideology has grown under the rule of Xi Jinping. Using a large-scale resume audit experiment and a conjoint survey experiment of hiring managers in China, we find that firms in China do not reward job candidates for expressing conformity to the ideology of the regime, but job candidates who express support for Western democracy are less employable. Results suggest that firms in innovative industries designated as strategically important by the Chinese regime (e.g., artificial intelligence) penalize support for Western democracy by the largest magnitude while the remaining firms in innovative industries do not penalize political non-conformity.