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This paper addresses the organization of Chinese nationalist movements in 2008. I focus on online facilitation of offline activism for Chinese nationalists. The paper articulates the framing, organizing, financing, recruiting as well as reconfirming effect of cyberspace on social movement. First, the Internet plays a remarkable role in mobilizing collective action across boarders. The BBS forums broadcasts protest appeals and boycotting actions, provides follow-ups and feedbacks, and financially supports upcoming protests. Second, Cyberspace has recruiting effect among the politically inactive population, having engaged a large number of female Chinese. Finally, high technology diffuses nationalist emotions at a global base. The imagined “patriotic community” reconsolidates the nationalist identity in the overseas Chinese community. The data was collected through web-based surveys and content analysis of postings. The research enriches academic understanding of how virtual communities transform public opinion into a new form of globalized cultural trend for a cross-sectional ethnic community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a group-based analysis of Chinese public opinion towards policy legitimacy. I address how people's collective memories of economic development between the hometown and the rival city cause conflicting feelings towards the rival group and the central authorities. I focus on the data collected from web surveys and content analysis, for the cases of Tianjin vs. Beijing and Chengdu vs. Chongqing. I argue that the public remains complicated feelings in accordance with their judgment of relative economic status across rival cities during the recent history. I name this as “memory effect hypothesis.” People's city identity is hereby consolidated through social narratives and historical memories of the economic vicissitudes. Due to social comparisons, the relatively disadvantaged groups maintain a strong feeling of relative deprivation. The sense of deprivation is aggravated when people believe their disadvantage is caused by policy injustice from the central government. The constructed city identity becomes a significant predictor of people's positions towards the legitimacy of the administrative hierarchy and government policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of an effort to understand the changing political landscape of China, this study uses data from the most recent wave of World Values Surveys, conducted on a national representative sample of China in 2001, to examine citizen’s trust on the government. I find that, while thinking of government, citizens in China have two very distinctive sets of objects. Their trust on the national institutions (the Communist Party, the parliament, and the national government) is significantly higher than that on the institutions that they deal with in their daily life (mainly the police and the government bureaucracy). I contend that these two sets of institution represent the state in two forms: one abstract and the other concrete. I then examine the factors that affect individual’s trust on both forms of state. Most importantly, people with a democratic outlook----that is, people who value individual liberty and participation in governance, among others----tend to hold lower trust on the government. And this relationship holds firmly even after controlling other factors, such as level of education, interest in politics, and financial well-being as well as overall life satisfaction. On the contrary, people who follow news more frequently appear to hold higher level of trust on the national institutions (the abstract state) than others, but not on the concrete state. This finding has many important implications for the prospect of political change in China, which I discuss in the paper. (238 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to understand transformations in higher education in the People’s Republic of China over the past 6 decades. This paper applies Mitchell and Mitchell’s (2003) political economic framework as a way of looking at the association between public perception of higher education and its standing in society. Mitchell and Mitchell argue that the purpose of education and who benefits from it can contribute to a variety of understandings regarding education as an economic good. The authors suggest that education as a construct varies from being characterized as a durable good, direct service, human capital investment, or cultural legacy. Using both qualitative and quantitative analyses, we examine if all four constructs are present in key periods of China’s modern history. We will look at four major transition periods: (1) emergence and establishment of Communism from 1949 to 1966; (2) the decade-long cultural revolution, from 1966-1978; (3) emergence of “reform and opening” policies from 1978 to 1991; and (4) acceleration of market mechanisms, from 1992 to present. The paper critiques the robustness of Mitchell and Mitchell’s political economic model for non-democratic forms of governance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do government officials in a totalitarian state take into account public opinion when they make policies? Drawing on a field survey of 116 villages in rural China conducted by the authors in 2005, we analyzed whether the implementation of village election institutions, as administered by local government, was a system that was influenced by the public opinion of villagers. We found that if more villagers believed a certain electoral institution was ideal, the probability increased that such an electoral institution would be implemented in practical village elections, even in totalitarian China, where local officials are not elected by villagers but are appointed by the higher authorities. In addition, the degree of congruence between the implemented institutions and the ideal institutions that most villagers hold as an ideal became greater as the proportion of most villagers increased. The impact of public opinion was further augmented in places where village residents once initiated collective actions against local officials and also in places where there are farmer organizations immune to the interference of local government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My project examines the efforts of the Chinese government, particularly in education and propaganda, and its effects on nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments in youth. Is nationalism a result of independent mobilization and thinking on the part of the ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines China's and Japan's popularity campaigns toward Southeast Asia, a vital neighbor to both. It contextualizes soft power campaign in democratic and non-democratic settings and discusses their similarities and differences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the phenomenon and psychological causes of relative deprivation held byurban Chinese people during the era of high-speed economic development. Using two rival cities,Beijing and Tianjin as cases, I applied relative deprivation theory to explain the rivalry of thepeople between the disadvantaged and the advantaged cities. In this case, people's consciousnessof deprivation is more fraternalist, affective, and procedural, than egoistic, cognitive, andoutcome oriented. I also established a hypothesis, "memory effect-and-situational attributionhypothesis," in order to account for the fact that people in disadvantaged cities tend to take thebest time of their home-city as the "reference point" of expectation, and therefore have thefeelings of loss if they are relatively backward in development. In turn, they may attribute theirbackwardness to external factors such as policy bias from the central government as well assuppression from rival cities, rather than to their own deficiencies. Moreover, this causalattribution may be related with the characteristic relationship between policy distribution andChina's political administrative system. This project uses content analysis and web-based surveyto collect people's opinion from Internet forums. I hope to emphasize that Internet discussion, asa newly-rising communications medium, is an important approach to study mass people'sopinion toward socio-economic and political development in China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using interviews with both masses and agents of institutions, this paper explores the processes in which institutional trust originates, develops, gains momentum, and reaches threshold of the diffusing effects in Chinese local political environment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against conventional wisdom, I propose that the impact of public opinion on high salience issues in authoritarian regimes is akin to that of public opinion on low salience issues with a diffuse constituency in democratic regimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author finds that Taiwanese have a weak sense of extended deterrence, but they are willing to choose independence than to remain status quo across the Taiwan Strait were they attacked by China. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]