Talk title:  Newspaper, Post Office, and Protest: How Do Political Information Diffusion and Social Interactions Affect Collective Action in Late Imperial China?

Time: 10AM-11AM, Friday, November 25, CST.

Zoom ID: 996 5257 4907

Passcode: 2022

Guest speaker: Dr. Boxiao Zhang, Assistant Professor at School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China

Bio: Boxiao Zhang, is an assistant professor at Renmin University, School of Applied Economics. He received a Ph.D. in economics at UCLA in 2022. He works at the intersection of economic history, labor economics, and regional economics, with interests in China’s development and industrialization.

Abstract: This paper exploits a novel historical natural experiment to investigate how advances in communication infrastructure lead to collective actions (protests) through the channels of information diffusion in news media and social interactions. The postal system’s rapid construction in 1903-1910 in China let newspapers spread information directly to an increasing portion of the population for the first time. The change in information diffusion coincided with intensive media attention on revolutionary activities before the Revolution of 1911. The major newspapers in large cities intensively reported revolutionary activities, and the reports were diffused to villages nationwide through the postal system. I find that the construction of more post offices in a place led to more protests in the years with more reports about revolutionary activities in newspapers. I further disentangle the roles of direct information diffusion and social interactions. I define a village network based on the village’s location, the walking time between villages, and the village’s dialect group. I build and estimate a game-theoretical model based on the village network. As political information directly changed the villages which had post offices nearby and could receive information, I also find a strong peer effect: a village was affected by its expectation of its neighbors’ actions. The peer effect spread the direct impact of political information through social interactions.

The Event is organized by DKU Environmental Economics Research Group, with the Environmental Research Center and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China