Ting Luo

Manchester Metropolitan University | MMU · Department of History, Politics & Philosophy

Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms...

Researchers have begun to examine whether centralized or decentralized (or federal) political systems have better handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we probe beneath the surface of China’s political system to examine the balance between centralized and decentralized authority in China’s handling of the pandemic. We show that after the SA...

This paper proposes a novel instrument – the political position generator - for measuring individuals’ political ties, or personal, affective connections to state officials and other political actors. It adopts and adapts the more general position generator framework in social capital research to capture three key dimensions of political ties – upp...

Social media companies rely on user agreements as one means to manage content produced by users. While much has been written on user agreements and community standards of U.S.-based social media, surprisingly little is known about Chinese user agreements and their implications. We compare terms of services as well as privacy policies of WeChat and...

Discussion is often celebrated as a critical element of public opinion and political participation. Recently, scholars have suggested that the design and features of specific online platforms shape what is politically expressed online and how. Building on these findings and drawing on 112 semi-structured qualitative interviews with information tech...

Despite the burgeoning comparative literature on authoritarian elections, less is known about the dynamics of competition in authoritarian subnational elections where opposition is not allowed to organize into parties. Local elections without partisan competition in single-party authoritarian regimes provide considerable advantages to the incumbent...

Why does online public opinion emerge in some social media more easily than in others? Building on research on authoritarian deliberation, we describe spaces for political discussion in Chinese cyberspace in terms of interactivity, which results in different forms of political discussion. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative expert interviews wit...

The rise of new media scholars has sparked a vivid discussion about the role of social media in authoritarian regimes, some arguing that social media undermine authoritarian regimes, while others believe they can be manipulated to strengthen authoritarian rule. Most of these studies draw conclusions based on the content produced by active Internet...