Constructing State Legitimacy in China: Public Opinion, Douyin(TikTok), and Police Propaganda

In China, party-state propaganda is thriving on social media. Central government leaders have reinvigorated the old state propaganda machine by engaging in new, innovative public relations campaigns that shape public opinion and promote state legitimacy. Some of these efforts come from unexpected agencies, most notably the police. Recently, the Ministry of Public Security has stepped up efforts to ease perceptions about the organization’s contentious relationship with the public, and policing groups are now pioneering state propaganda, one viral Douyin (TikTok) video at a time. This paper employs a mixed methods approach to understand public perceptions of police propaganda efforts on social media. It combines natural language processing to analyze public comments on Douyin videos with an original online survey experiment that exposes respondents to similar types of police propaganda. To understand how users respond to propaganda on social media, sentiment analysis is used to assess comments posted to 500 widely viewed videos collected from a stratified sample of 50 police Douyin accounts over a one-year period in 2021. The results show more positive comments are posted to humorous propaganda content than traditional propaganda videos that showcase the strength of security forces. Because some comments are censored, the paper then compares the results to online survey responses provided by participants who were shown similar content and asked to rate their confidence in local police forces. Finally, the paper triangulates the quantitative analysis with a limited number of interviews and focus groups conducted by the author in 2019. The findings shed light on how members of the Chinese public respond to different types of police propaganda and how exposure to propaganda tracks with perceptions of local security forces. I argue that police Douyin accounts provide valuable information about the type of propaganda we should expect to see from the state going forward and represents a new push on the part of public security leaders to build legitimacy of the organization and, ultimately, the regime.