Muyao
Hang

Autocrats often discredit domestic protests as foreign conspiracies. How does such rhetoric influence public responses to the protest? Existing literature suggests such propaganda in autocracies may work through two different mechanisms: the soft propaganda literature suggests it changes public behavior through persuasion, by shifting public identification with protesters; on the other hand, the hard propaganda literature suggests such propaganda should work through intimidation, by raising an individual’s expected cost of supporting the protest. Using a pre-registered survey experiment conducted among 2800 Chinese adults, I find that foreign interference narratives do both, depending on the audience: the narrative persuades those who already support the regime’s policy position, making them not only more tolerant of repression but also more willing to criticize protesters voluntarily. Among those who share grievances with protesters, the narrative works through intimidation: although these individuals express less support for the protest, they become marginally more supportive of the protest when expressing preferences privately. Further analysis also finds that the foreign interference narrative does not resonate with them. Grievance-holders are less likely to perceive foreign interference as credible or to use that to explain their preferences, which also suggests the effect is due to preference falsification. The result emphasizes the importance of prior attitude in affecting propaganda’s effectiveness and mechanisms.

Do individuals from authoritarian regimes become more supportive of democracy once they personally experience life under democracy? A large literature assumes that exposure to democratic institutions and norms fosters pro-democratic attitudes among those directly exposed to them, yet evidence on individual-level political learning remains limited. This paper challenges the assumption that exposure alone changes political preferences. I argue that rather than operating as a form of political socialization, overseas education mainly provides an opportunity for citizens from autocracies to learn about democratic governance performance. Whether such updating is positive or negative has a large impact on their democratic attitudes. Using an original cross-sectional survey and a longitudinal survey of approximately 650 Chinese international students across twelve democratic host countries, I find that Chinese overseas students do not become more pro-democratic after studying in democracies. I further show that this null result reflects positive and negative governance evaluation updates cancelling each other out: both directions of updating are prevalent and of similar magnitude. Among those who perceive democracies as performing better than China in governance — including economic growth, public goods provision, and crime control — support for democracy is higher, and vice versa. These findings clarify the micro-level mechanisms linking international education to political attitudes and highlight the limits of democratic socialization through exposure alone.

Logical fallacies are often embedded in misinformation to mislead the public and manipulate opinion. We introduce a refined, “vaccine-like” intervention: a series of AI-generated short videos that train individuals to recognize and resist three logical fallacies commonly found in misinformation—false causality, hasty generalization, and personal attack. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment (N = 2,416) in China in August 2025. Results show that participants exposed to the logical fallacy training were less likely to endorse related misinformation overall, with particularly strong effects among nationalist participants and those with lower cognitive reflection ability. Our study extends external validity to an understudied authoritarian context.