Yet, hard propaganda has limitations. When its inconsistency (red dashed lines, upper panel) is less apparent-exposed only to pro-reopen propaganda-its protest-deterrence effect vanishes. Lower panel suggests it's likely due to heightened protest righteousness against local authorities (red dashed).

When respondents are exposed to conflicting hard propaganda messages (solid red bar, upper panel), they become less willing to participate in protests against lockdown. This may be due to the contradictory hard rhetoric further reinforcing the apparent regime strength.

We find that contradictory soft propaganda significantly decreased citizens’ assessment of the government's COVID performance (blue solid line in upper panel), while all pro-reopen messages increased respondents’ revealed support for reopening (dashed lines in lower panel).

We recruited 3,314 online respondents in China in December 2022 and randomly assigned them real pro-Zero-Covid and pro-reopen persuasive and assertive official messages—a realistic scenario when the official stance changed within days amid high policy uncertainty.

In December 2022, Chinese official propaganda on COVID policy made a sharp U-turn. How did these contradictory messages from the policy shift impact citizens’ perceptions? We find "soft" ones lost persuasiveness while "hard" ones more strongly deterred protests.
@psrm.bsky.social

Japanese newspapers today: Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi merge.

Dutch Disease was first problematized in 1977 by @TheEconomist, assuming a “manufacturing primacy” during the Cold War and Oil Crisis. Oil/gas advantages were seen as inferior due to their temporary, windfall nature.

I taught Dutch Disease in my political economy class. My Classical Chinese colleague heard about it and said it’s exactly what ancient Chinese philosopher Guan Zhong (700–645 BC) did: tricking a neighbor state into abandoning agriculture by stimulating non-agricultural demand.

“Ke Wang”(1990), or “Yearning” in English, is a household-name TV series in China with an eye-popping 90.78% ratings. My Grandma got streaming TV and picked it up. She explained she hadn’t watched it because she was busy working. She probably thought she’d never see it again if not for streaming.

Bookstore’s frontend reflects a city’s mental state. Here is one I took from Shenzhen: what stand out are two versions of Camus’s The Stranger, reminding me that everyone in Shenzhen is an immigrant.

Here is a post in Chinese on that: news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/202... Basically LLM training on those jokes are better performing than LLMs trained on materials in major platforms like Weibo because of the former’s originality. Also the BBS’s seasoned moderators are invited to attend AI conference.

I recall the returnee has increased substantially since 2019. Over 1 million in 2021 alone. COVID left a lot voluntary vacancies that used to be foreigners so returnees fill them up and the equilibrium number declined. It’s also mainly a result of rapid rise of 留学生 pre-COVID of course.