I Know What You Mean: Information Compensation in an Authoritarian Country

Abstract

How do people address information deficiency caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that there exists an internally oriented information compensation approach through which people can glean extra information from official messages domestically. This approach does not violate state regulations directly and allows people to retrieve information not explicitly publicized by the government. We delineate the circumstances of internally oriented information compensation using the case of China. We conduct trend and text analysis on the data of millions of individual-level actions of Chinese Internet search engines and social media users during a large anticorruption campaign that conspicuously claimed to crack down on influential corrupt leaders without naming who exactly. We show that some Chinese netizens were able to identify the unnamed high-ranking officials targeted by the campaign based on negative official reports about their family members. Some of the netizens even correctly predicted the downfall of the officials months before the government’s announcements. As the existing literature is increasingly concerned about the threat of digital authoritarianism on throttling the free flow of information, our findings indicate that some authoritarian citizens, instead of passively accepting the government’s information control, acquired their own arts of information self-salvation. This, though not directly challenging the government, constitutes an everyday politics under digital authoritarianism.