Dongshu Liu

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at City University of Hong Kong

How does violence and repression during a protest affect online public attitudes? The literature provides mixed findings, indicating that repression can both deter and mobilize the public. How does the public react to state repression and protesters’ violence? How does the public perception of protesters’ violence affect public attitudes towards st...

China's ambitious plan for reducing carbon emissions may have a significant impact on its economy and impose an increased cost burden on the public. Conventionally, governments endure political costs when implementing unpopular policies. How can China achieve its goal without causing political risks? In this paper, we argue that China can promote i...

Why do authoritarian regimes utilize online subcultures that contradict mainstream ideology in their propaganda? This paper argues that subcultural discourse is employed by these regimes to persuade younger generations to increase their support (persuasion proposition). Additionally, it can be used to mobilize supporters to provide favorable commen...

Decentralization is believed to ensure better environmental governance. However, recent studies have shown that some governments recentralize local enforcement to increase the effectiveness of policy implementation. Under what conditions is recentralization the better option for environmental enforcement? This study attempts to differentiate two po...

Autocrats selectively tolerate political criticism, which may erode regime support. The literature suggests that regimes contain criticism by encouraging more supportive voices, but the mechanisms remain unclear. We theorize two mechanisms: winning more supporters (persuasion) or mobilizing existing supporters to speak out (mobilization). These mec...

Research on contentious politics suggests that when protesters use violence, public opinion often turns against them, unless the observers already view the protesters as extremists. This creates an "asymmetric liability," where moderate protest movements are held to a higher standard of civility than more extreme ones. Based on a survey experiment...

How can autocrats boost public support for wars? Previous studies have suggested that in democracies, the public changes its war attitude either through rational cost-benefit calculations or simply by following cues from political elites. This article argues that autocrats can follow a similar logic to manipulate public support for war via national...

How do racial and gender stereotypes affect immigration attitudes? Studies on this topic have focused primarily on developed rather than developing countries. To close the gap, we explore the phenomenon in China, a developing economy that is evolving from a source of emigration to a destination of immigration with its citizens having little direct...

Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates’ po...

Civic activism is increasingly popular for authoritarian regimes to ensure local compliance and improve local governance, but it also places pressure on local officials. How do local officials respond to such pressures? With a unique dataset of city-level environmental investigations and public interest litigation in China, we conduct a generalized...

Increasingly salient in democratic politics are the divides among political parties regarding how they mobilize support between ethnic majorities and minorities. Why, then, do some members of a minority group support political parties seemingly antithetical to the interests of minority groups? We draw on group conflict theory to suggest that a part...

The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand-the demand for marriage-also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population face...

In recent years, China has attempted to expand its international power by initiating projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This paper scrutinizes the potential obstacles to China's expansion from a public opinion perspective. It argues that domestic public opinion may pose two challenges. First, xenophobic sentiments stimulate opposi...

Nongovernmental organizations are important in policy processes, but most studies supporting this argument are conducted in democracies. This article, therefore, focuses on China's environmental policy to discuss how environmental NGOs (eNGOs) conduct policy advocacy in authoritarian contexts. Based on interviews with eNGOs and scholars in China, I...

Authoritarian regimes face a dilemma in punishing dissidents. They need extralegal punishments to ensure social stability, but they also want to legalize punishment decisions to sustain an image of adherence to the rule of law. These contradictory goals present an agency problem: local officials must selectively implement the competing goals of the...

This article examines two competing theories explaining the effects of political satire on citizens in an authoritarian context. The “activism” proposition argues that political satire works as a form of resistance to erode people’s support for the regime and encourages collective action. The “cynicism” proposition argues that while satire discoura...