Constructing State Legitimacy: Public Opinion, Douyin, and Police Propaganda

• In Event: Trust the Police? How Attitudes about the Police and Their Violence Are Made

Abstract

In China, party-state propaganda remains the essential vehicle for shaping public perceptions of state legitimacy, and central government leaders are reinvigorating the old state propaganda machine by engaging in new, innovative public relations campaigns. Recently, the Ministry of Public Security, the organization in charge of policing in China, has stepped up efforts to ease perceptions about the organization’s contentious relationship with the public.

This paper employs a mixed methods approach to understand public perceptions of police propaganda efforts on social media. It combines natural language processing to analyze public comments on Douyin (TikTok) videos with an original online survey experiment that exposes respondents to similar types of police propaganda. To understand how users respond to propaganda on social media, sentiment analysis is used to assess 120,000 comments posted to six major types of police propaganda on Douyin. The results show more positive comments are posted to humorous propaganda content than traditional propaganda videos that showcase the strength of security forces. Because some comments may be censored, the paper then compares the results to online survey responses provided by participants who were shown similar content and asked to rate their confidence in local police forces. Finally, the paper triangulates the quantitative analysis with a limited number of interviews and focus groups conducted by the author in 2019. The findings shed light on how members of the Chinese public respond to different types of police propaganda and how exposure to propaganda tracks with perceptions of local security forces.

Author

• Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University