Studying China—As China Stares Back

Lecturing on authoritarian regimes, with a focus on China, Hoover fellows Erin Baggott Carter and Brett L. Carter share an interest in gauging the scope and scale of the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of citizens through innovative research.

But lately, they both say they can feel the weight of the People’s Republic’s surveillance, coercion, and intimidation tactics without even leaving their classrooms.

Teaching at the University of Southern California, both Erin and Brett tackle authoritarian regimes, often interacting with pupils who were raised in countries under authoritarian leadership and who have come to study in America.  

Increasing repression and censorship by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a common topic for scholars, policy makers in Washington, and journalists. But for Chinese nationals, even when studying abroad in California, it’s a risky subject to discuss. Both Brett and Erin have seen the families of students and colleagues back in China visited by state security services after publications, presentations, and even undergraduate papers on topics the CCP regards as sensitive.

Actions like these instill a chill in Chinese nationals studying abroad. No matter where they go, there is the fear that the Party is always listening.

In his own course, The Political Economy of Autocracy, Brett recently developed a midterm project where students were asked to design their own pro-democracy movement and theorize how they would mobilize supporters, as well as campaign and demonstrate against an authoritarian regime.

“A number of students asked me to delete their papers after I read them,” Brett said. All of them were from mainland China.

Building a better poll

For the couple, who frequently collaborate on research to illustrate the scale, scope, and significance of China’s repression and surveillance of its own people, the necessity of their chosen topic seems to grow by the day.

Their work serves as a rare window into the views of ordinary people, living in places where citizens no longer feel safe offering those views to outsiders, or even each other.

In their latest paper, co-produced with University of Southern California PhD student Stephen Schick, Brett and Erin attempt to gauge how often ordinary Chinese citizens falsify their true preferences and opinions in polls, out of fear of regime reprisals or unwanted attention from authorities.

To do so, they allowed respondents to express opinions they knew to be politically sensitive in an indirect way. A treatment group of participants were asked how many of three neutral statements they agreed with, in a list format. A control group of participants were asked how many statements they agreed with, but their list contained the same three neutral statements plus one sensitive statement.

By comparing the average number of statements that each of these groups agreed with, Brett and Erin could measure the share of respondents who agreed with the sensitive statement, without asking anyone directly whether or not they agreed with it. 

In this way, they measured agreement with several sensitive statements:

 

In direct questioning during the exercise, asking simple yes or no questions, upwards of 95 percent of respondents expressed support for the Communist Party.

But using the lists, that support fell to about 60 percent.

The study gave the Carters what they were looking for, Erin said: a tiny window into the thinking of people who typically aren’t allowed to express how they are really thinking.

“Is there a silent cosmopolitan group that is more liberal or less nationalist than what is commonly assumed?” Erin asked. “Exploring those sorts of beliefs next would be really fascinating.”

The propaganda intensifies

In another exercise, the pair collected propaganda published in the People’s Daily, the CCP’s flagship newspaper, from present day back to 1946.

“What we found is that propaganda about Xi [Jinping] has become as effusive as propaganda about Mao during the height of the Cultural Revolution,” Erin said. “To us what that suggests is China has become tremendously more propagandistic and repressive and that’s a call for scholars to try to study China in that light.”

Since 2018, the Carters have co-written more than a dozen journal articles, working papers, and op-eds in major publications, mostly about autocracies, largely but not always about China.

They met at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in the fall of 2012 and started dating the following spring.

Their interests appeared to align, first on authoritarian regimes, and then more narrowly on China, and the rest is history. They collaborate, theorize, and generate research ideas together in between raising their two small children.

“I think that people are intrinsically curiously about what life is like in different parts of the world, how people elsewhere try to press repressive governments for better living standards, for a better life,” Brett said.

“We both think we have a responsibility to tell those stories in as compelling a way as possible.”

But as democracies backslide, repressive regimes are becoming more closed to outsiders, which spells trouble for Brett and Erin, who face increasing obstacles to studying the states they want to research.

“With fewer Western students, researchers, and journalists traveling to China right now, we’re losing an incredibly important on-the-ground understanding of China,” Erin said.

Erin has been traveling to China and Taiwan since her high school years, and she can see the freedom offered to scholars visiting China slowly erode.

“The reality is that you have to conduct yourself differently in China than you used to.”

“One example is that you used to be able to talk freely with your old colleagues at a university. But now they might have to write up a note about what you talked about and submit it to the party committee at the university.”

An increasingly closed society

Erin says she always enjoys watching students from China come to her classes, such as one called The Political Economy of China, eager to finally hear the truth about what happened during monumental events such as the Great Leap Forward or Tiananmen Square, the history of which has been whitewashed by PRC censors.

“These are things they have heard of before, but you can see the seriousness with which they grapple with the primary source documents for the first time.”

In other moments, students share family stories that allow the class to gain perspectives on the life experience of Chinese who struggled through and survived communist rule.

One year, Erin said, a student talked about how her grandmother was able to keep the rest of the family fed through the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s.

Mao’s demands to shift agricultural labor into steel production between 1958 and 1962 led to at least fifteen million deaths, as food output fell drastically because of the state-imposed disruption.

“One of my students shared with the class that her grandmother had been a student at a boarding school in Beijing. Urban areas had more food than rural areas during the famine,” she said. “And this student would save her lunch every day at the boarding school and sneak out every night and walk an hour and a half to her village and give her lunch to her family, and that’s how they survived the famine.”

Brett recounted one of his students revealing that his father attended the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4, 1989, in Beijing.

“Apparently, somehow, he made his peace with the regime over the intervening three and a half decades, but the rest of his family remains resolutely opposed (to the CCP),” Brett said.

At Hoover, Brett and Erin mentor students each year selected through the Hoover Student Fellowship Program. Their focus on China makes them particularly interested in the work of Hoover’s US, China, and the World Program and the Hoover and National Fellow Seminar Series.

Exporting surveillance

In their latest project, Brett and Erin chronicle how the Communist Party, through global telecom firm Huawei, is exporting its surveillance and repression technologies around the world.

Soon to be featured in the journal Perspectives on Politics, their new paper documents instances where Huawei’s “safe city” surveillance system packages are sold to client governments, which in turn use them to track down dissidents and journalists.

“These systems have been used to target repression against dissidents, opposition leaders, journalists in some cases, who are engaging in work that regimes would prefer they didn’t engage in,” Brett said.

Journalists reporting on government malpractice or corruption, activists trying to organize rallies, or just disappointed citizens venting frustrations online can get caught up in this repression.

“There’s been no real systematic evidence that these technologies were used for digital repression—this is the first evidence.”

It’s a practice that’s been documented in a handful of countries, but Erin and Brett say their paper is the one of the first to find systematic evidence of the practice globally.

Considering the Carters’ combined research output, it’s hard not to be dismayed about the global backsliding of democracy, as China appears to be exporting its capabilities for repression to other states.

They both acknowledge the headwinds facing democracy around the globe are fierce and getting stronger almost by the day.

“I think one of the key questions confronting us all is what the world is going to look like as this new geopolitical competition between East and West intensifies,” Brett said.

Part of pushing back on this democratic backsliding will require more research about what free nations can do to encourage democracy, openness, and rights across the globe, and whether current approaches to that practice are actually working.

“I think that focusing more on not just this backsliding but developing a clear sense of what the West can do to prevent it . . . I think that’s a really important area for future work,” Brett said.