I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. I study comparative politics and political behavior. Specifically, I am interested in authoritarian politics, government censorship, propaganda, popular protest, and political repression. Methodologically, I use a wide range of research methods, including formal modeling, randomized experiments, and computational methods (text-as-data and audio-as-data). I have regional expertise in East and Southeast Asia.
My recent paper on censorship in China proposes a new way of understanding censorship and authoritarian control. My study highlights the normalization of coercive policies, such as censorship, as a powerful channel through which authoritarian regimes achieve social control. My dissertation project builds on this censorship paper and studies public support for government censorship in China from multiple different angles. Apart from censorship, I also have projects in progress concerning propaganda, emotions, and public opinion toward the use of force in China and other authoritarian regimes.
In 2021, I received my A.M. degree in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining Washington University, I received an LL.B. degree in Law from Renmin University of China in 2018.
[1] Yang, Tony Zirui. "Normalization of Censorship: Evidence from China" Under Review
Abstract
Previous research claims that public awareness of censorship will lead to backlash against the regime. However, surveys consistently find that Chinese citizens are apathetic toward or even supportive of government censorship. To explain this puzzle, I argue that citizens are subject to a process of normalization. Specifically, individuals become desensitized to censorship when the range of censored content expands beyond politically threatening topics like government criticism and collective action to other seemingly harmless non-political issues. Using a dataset of 15,872 censored articles on WeChat and an original survey experiment in China, I show that (1) a majority of censored articles are unrelated to politically threatening topics, and (2) respondents exposed to the censorship of both political and non-political content display less backlash toward the regime and its censorship policy than those who were only exposed to political censorship. My findings highlight how normalization of repressive policies contributes to authoritarian control.
Graduate Level
PolSci 505 Game Theory I, PhD (Keith Schnakenberg), Fall 2020
Undergraduate Level
PolSci 363 Quantitative Political Methodology (Ted Enamorado), Spring 2022
PolSci 326 Latin American Politics (Guillermo Rosas), Fall 2021
PolSci 106 Introduction to Political Theory (Clarissa Hayward), Spring 2021
PolSci 102 Introduction to Comparative Politics (Guillermo Rosas), Spring 2020
PolSci 3103 Political Psychology (Taylor Carlson), Fall 2019
PolSci 3561 Understanding Political Protest and Violence (Sunita Parikh), Spring 2020