Discipline by Design: How China's NSSF Reshapes Political Science

Authoritarian regimes govern not only through coercion and propaganda, but also by shaping the institutions that define “legitimate” knowledge. Yet research on authoritarian idea control has emphasized visible tools like censorship and media propaganda, leaving underexamined a quieter mechanism with long-run effects: steering scholarship through research funding and administrative discipline classification. Using China’s National Social Science Fund (NSSF)—a state program embedded in Party governance and, since 2018, administered by an institution affiliated with the Central Propaganda Department—we analyze how the regime reshapes political science. We build a project-level dataset of nearly thirty years of funded NSSF grants (year, program category, disciplinary code, and project titles) and trace both structural patterns and leadership-era shifts. We show that political science occupies a stable lower-middle position in the NSSF portfolio—contained rather than prioritized or eliminated. Structural topic models reveal that funded “political science” centers on governance and administration (public services, evaluation, local governance, institutional reform, risk management) more than contestation-focused themes (party competition, democratization, contentious politics). Democracy-related vocabulary persists, but is recoded within narratives of “socialist democracy,” “civilization,” and critiques of “Western liberalism,” aligning concepts such as democracy, citizenship, and liberalism with regime-legitimating frames. These tendencies intensify under Xi Jinping, with significant growth in themes of national security, risk prevention, and frontier/ethnic governance, consistent with a stronger security- and Party-centered orientation. This study provides a longitudinal account of authoritarian “discipline engineering,” showing how knowledge control operates through positive incentives and institutional design—not only through repression—and how the survival of liberal-democratic vocabulary can mask deeper transformations in what can be studied and how.