How Crisis Attribution Shapes Autocrats' Co-opting Tactic: China's COVID Testing

• In Event: Subnational Comparative Political Economy

Abstract

Authoritarian governments often employ the strategy of preferential resource distribution to gain favour with certain civilian groups during external crises like natural disasters or economic downturns. However, how do they adjust their co-optation strategy if the crisis is perceived to be caused by their own actions? This study updates existing co-optation theories by proposing that when crisis responsibility becomes attributable to the government, it will maintain the distribution of genuine benefits to the civilian group with the highest rent-extraction value, while shifting from offering performative benefits to genuine benefits to the “ideologically favoured” group according to the regime’s ideological narrative to boost its legitimacy. Our theory is empirically supported by an analysis of the preferential allocation of COVID-19 testing resources across different economic classes in N city, a Chinese metropolis and economic powerhouse with high income disparity, before and after the sudden outbreak of popular protests against the zero-COVID policies in October 2022. Using a novel dataset of the queuing status at N city’s over 7000 COVID testing sites and a spatial border analysis approach across N city’s 4698 neighbourhoods, we compare testing site density and government responsiveness to site crowdedness across testing sites in the rich, the middleclass, and the poor neighbourhoods. We find that prior to the protest, in which government policies were viewed as a greater threat than the pandemic itself, the government offered genuine benefits to the rich, performative benefits to the poor, and the lowest level of resources to the middle class. After the protest broke out, the government provided genuine benefits to both the rich and the poor, without raising benefits to the middle class. These results are supplemented by a text analysis of N city government documents on COVID-19, showing the government’s inclination to publicize their resource preferences to the poor both before and after the protest outburst.

Author

• Jingyang Rui, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor