Stockmann, D. , & Gallagher, M. E. (2011) Stockmann, D., & Gallagher, M. E. (2011). Remote control: How the media sustain authoritarian rule in china. Comparative Political Studies, 44(4), 436. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/866351461?accountid=37705 Powell

Rational The study looks to identify how media and propaganda is used by the Chinese authoritarian government to sustain its power. It bases its rational off previous studies conducted citing “Lerner (1964)” who argued that when citizens had exposure to mass forms of communication political activism would take place and lead to democratization of a state. This theory grew over time as did technology for producing mass communication such as the TV, Radio and eventually internet. The authors cite a range of studies conducted more recently that make the media plays a significant role during democratization when given the outlet to criticize government there will be an effect on the regimes legitimacy. . Further the link between media and political liberalization is more apparent when citizens are allowed freedom of press like in the United States. The author’s after reviewing the previous studies conducted on the effects of independent media source’s leading to democratization develop the rational to about the adverse effect. In researching China’s authoritarian government’s ability to remain in control (regime stability) of its people through effective through forms of modern censorship.

Hypotheses China’s modernization of censorship and development of positive propaganda allows the nation to convince its citizens not to seek an alternate form of government.

Data and methods Data used to test if Chinese workers were influenced by the effects of mass media focused on testing the relationship of the workers awareness towards mass media and attitude towards labor law. Workers tested had about 10 years of education 10 years representing the mean. Workers that had been employed before Chinese government created a labor contract system (mode). Workers that had no experience with a labor dispute (mode). Workers who had not even received information regarding the labor laws (mode). The survey was conducted with 4,112 ordinary citizens in four cities. To test whether the worker that had more information regarding labor laws and rights would believe them to be more ineffective then that of those less experienced with labor law disputes. To test the attitudes of workers a questionnaire was used asking “whether they thought the labor law was very effective, somewhat effective, not so effective, or not at all effective in protecting workers’ rights.” To create a dependent variable the authors categorized the workers by years of experience.

Figure 1. Relationship Between Attention and Views of the Labor Law Among Media Users Source: Survey of Labor Law Mobilization 2005. a. For detailed results of the ordinal probit regression, see Table A1 in the appendix. For robustness test results, including dummy variables for different cities, (Table A10) as well as the equation of the statistical model (Equation 1) see the online appendix. The results depicted by a line plot graph show that there is some correlation between workers who are informed about labor laws or have had previous experience with labor laws to be more likely to believe these laws in effective but not as strongly as assumed. The effects of positive propaganda on the average citizens was such that the average citizens was susceptible to messaging from the government through outlets like newspaper stories and TV shows that delivered positive imagery of the labor laws while their reality was different. The results are displayed in Figure 1 and demonstrate that the relationship between attention and perceived effectiveness of the labor law for the average worker in the four cities was nonlinear, as expected. At the same time, we did not find evidence for strong resistance among the highly informed. Even when paying much attention to the issue, the average workers in the four cities remained fairly susceptible to positive messages about the labor law.

Conclusion In reflection it is still hard for me to believe this data and findings in the world of mass communication and the World Wide Web the Chinese government has found a way to persuade its citizens that labor laws are effective through displaying them in legal TV shows and newspaper articles. More shocking was even the workers with experience in labor disputes that were unsuccessful their belief that the labor laws were ineffective was still far more insignificant then I had anticipated it to be. I believe reasoning for this may be explained through cultural norms of Chinese citizens and Chinese government and the effectiveness of the Chinese government use of censorship in persuading its citizens to think a certain way.