Political Compliance, Gender, and 鈥渢he China Case鈥
How do the representatives of authoritarian governments working abroad behave in the absence of explicit rules of behavior? To examine this question, new SPA Assistant Professor Tongtong Zhang, with coauthors Yingjie Fan and Jennifer Pan, has just published 鈥Gender and Political Compliance Under Authoritarian Rule,鈥 in the journal Comparative Political Studies.
Zhang, a political scientist, studies authoritarian institutions and their impact on political behavior, especially in the context of China. She says the breadth and depth of expertise on SPA鈥檚 faculty made it the obvious environment in which to launch her career.
鈥淭here is a strong community of scholars at [17吃瓜在线] studying political institutions and their interplay with behavior, in the U.S. and [across] the developed and developing world, including other authoritarian countries, like those in Africa and Middle East,鈥 said Zhang. 鈥淭hey provide a good comparison with the China case.鈥
Zhang also lauded 17吃瓜在线鈥檚 and SPA鈥檚 generosity of support for junior faculty research, including RA matching programs, library resources for data acquisition and data management, and the efforts of the Office for Faculty Research (including the installation of a supercomputer and workshops on their use).
The current paper, Zhang鈥檚 first on China鈥檚 overseas governance, supports her larger research agenda by examining how authoritarian rulers obtain conformity over those they dominate, inside and outside of their borders. Zhang and colleagues focused on teachers working for the Confucius Institute (CI), operated by Hanban (an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education), which provides Chinese language and cultural instruction across the globe.
鈥淐I teachers have been the subject of host-country policy debates, with concerns that their offerings may be spreading the Chinese government's censorship and propaganda to young students,鈥 said Zhang.
CI teachers, though not state officials, are hired by the Chinese government to promote the nation鈥檚 language, culture, and arts around the world. The authors interviewed 25 CI teachers of Chinese language, calligraphy, and Chinese Kung Fu in primary and secondary schools, colleges, and non-credit community workshops across North and South America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. They also read Hanban-issued training materials and internal policy documents and observed CI teachers鈥 training sessions in person.
Analysis of these qualitative data indicated that, in fact, the Chinese government does not prescribe specific political behavior to CI teachers; rather, it sets broad objectives, like 鈥渄efend the national interest鈥 and 鈥渃reate a positive image of China.鈥
鈥淭here's no regulation that says you need to say 鈥榵鈥 when you are being asked about Xinjiang or Taiwan, or that you need to censor such topics in classrooms,鈥 said Zhang. 鈥淚n their day-to-day classroom activity, it's up to the teachers themselves to decide whether they should censor certain topics or allow for open discussion.鈥
Further, quantitative analysis of a global survey experiment revealed that men and women teachers use divergent behaviors to express their political compliance to the Chinese regime's goals. Male teachers, Zhang explained, comply by defending the party line. When asked, for example, how they handle classroom discussion about Taiwan sovereignty, men teachers strongly asserted that Taiwan belongs to the People's Republic of China and censored further discussion on this topic.
In contrast, the authors found that women teachers (the majority of the CI workforce) comply with the regime's goals by encouraging uncensored discussions on Taiwan sovereignty, with the same intention: to nudge host country students towards the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)鈥檚 viewpoints.
鈥淥ur findings suggest that these gendered strategies of political compliance are rooted in differing socialization experiences,鈥 said Zhang. 鈥淚n any patrilineal society, men and women face divergent expectations of how they should interact with others: in general, men are socially encouraged to be more assertive, while women are expected to be more agreeable, nurturing, and communicative.鈥 While pursuing the same goals of promoting the CCP鈥檚 views, she explained, women teachers show a willingness to 1) understand why host country students think otherwise and 2) discuss in a more open-minded way.
This gendered behavioral divergence did not extend to other individual-level characteristics, like age, CCP membership, or educational level, highlighting the need for a serious examination of gender socialization and political behavior under authoritarian rule.
鈥淭he authoritarian politics literature rarely talks about gender, maybe because people conventionally think that the regime regulates every behavior of individual citizens, so gender doesn't matter,鈥 said Zhang.
She hopes that these findings add nuance to popular media conceptions of the Confucius Institute as a driver of censorship and propaganda. These training practices suggest a level of flexibility, allowing individual teachers to decide how best to serve the interests of the regime.
鈥淲e don't find that teachers are forcefully exporting Chinese government propaganda,鈥 she said. 鈥淔or example, in their month of training, only one lecture focuses on politics; all others focused on languages, culture, and how to be an effective teacher.鈥
The authors hope that their findings can illuminate future studies on differing compliance strategies between women and men among domestic teachers and street-level bureaucrats inside China, as well as provide a base for studying gender-based political compliance in other authoritarian states.