Full article with Oxford/Emory's Tony Zirui Yang @tzyang.bsky.social is Open Access here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Propaganda in policy change has limitations. Contradictory soft propaganda fails to persuade citizens to approve of government performance, while excessively one-sided hard propaganda for a new policy may lead citizens to view protests against the previous policy as justified.

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.

Collective action problem.

The summer-kid globalist explanation overlooks Guan Zhong’s deeper statecraft lesson. Losing essential industries (agriculture in 650 BC, manufacturing today) threatens survival. As we face deglobalization and reindustrialization, we should revisit Dutch Disease in Guan Zhong’s light.

In 2014, The Economist clarified Dutch Disease was harmful because commodity prices fluctuate, ignoring supply chain security. www.economist.com/the-economis...

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 searched for similar ideas in Ancient Greece and found none. In Ancient Greece, free trade was natural, exploiting your comparative advantage was the norm. No one like Herodotus coined a “Corinth Disease” for exporting pottery.

This is known as 衡山之谋. Guan Zhong’s thinking was physiocratic in an era of fierce interstate rivalry, where trade could be cut off and war was common. Prudent statesmen should prioritize agriculture for self-sufficiency.

My Grandma must’ve been hearing so many chats among her circles about Ke Wang over the years but could not join in. That’s why she explained herself more than once that she was busy. The moment she found out she can choose what TV plays, she sprint to catch up with the 30 years ago trend.

My interpretation would be people are lonely and wanting belongings.

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.