Publications

Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2026). Does Digital Surveillance Boost Citizen Compliance? Evidence from China

Political Psychology, 2026

Authoritarian regimes increasingly deploy digital surveillance to monitor citizens, but how this affects citizen compliance remains understudied. We argue that, beyond repressing or deterring regime opponents, digital surveillance serves as an instrument of everyday governance that operates through psychological mechanisms rather than direct coercion. Specifically, pervasive monitoring fosters routine compliance with the regime through self-regulation and mutual observation. However, these effects attenuate over time as citizens habituate to surveillance and update risk assessments about noncompliance. We test this argument against empirical evidence from China. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork and employing a quasi-natural experiment enabled by two pilot surveillance projects that coincided with two national social surveys, we reveal digital surveillance’s paradoxical short- and long-term effects: Newly introduced surveillance significantly boosts citizen compliance. Over time, however, this effect diminishes, and even reinforced surveillance cannot sustain the initial surge in compliance. The findings highlight both the potency and the limits of digital surveillance as a tool of authoritarian governance.

Recommended citation: Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2026). "Does Digital Surveillance Boost Citizen Compliance? Evidence from China." Political Psychology, 47, e70170. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70170
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Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2025). When Does Surveillance Trigger Resistance? Public Response to Escalating Digital Control in China.

Journal of Chinese Political Science, 2025

Digital technologies have revolutionized authoritarian states’ capacity for social control through mass surveillance. However, how citizens perceive and react to escalating digital control remains understudied. This research proposes a risk-benefit analytical framework to explain how awareness of state control intentions shapes public reactions to digital surveillance in conjunction with surveillance intrusiveness. Using two independent survey experiments with over 2,000 respondents, we examine the public acceptance of four digital control measures with increasing intrusiveness: CCTV cameras in public areas, CCTV cameras in residential communities, smartphone location tracking, and smartphone usage monitoring. We find that awareness of the state’s mass monitoring and targeted repression intentions significantly decreases public support, especially for more intrusive measures. Our findings suggest that while digital surveillance innovations expand authoritarian states’ control capabilities, technological overreach may backfire by evoking public resistance.

Recommended citation: Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2025). "When Does Surveillance Trigger Resistance? Public Response to Escalating Digital Control in China." Journal of Chinese Political Science, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-025-09918-5
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Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2026). The Social Foundation of Digital Surveillance: A Comparative Analysis of Grassroots Control in China.

Information, Communication & Society (under review), 2026

During China’s zero-COVID campaign, the state mandated a uniform digital surveillance toolkit, yet grassroots communities produced sharply different control outcomes. Drawing on fieldwork in four communities in one southeast Chinese city, we argue that effective social control requires two steps, information collection and on-ground enforcement, and that the digital mandate creates an inherent constraint at each: informational blind spots and algorithmic rigidity. Digital infrastructure enables the tools but cannot resolve either constraint. Community social network strength is the binding condition, supplying the local intelligence and relational trust that close both. Communities with strong networks succeeded regardless of digital capacity; those without failed.

Wang, Z., & Chen, D. (2025). The Price of Sacrifice: Disparities of Revolutionary Capital and Fiscal Bargaining in China

Working Paper, 2025

Why do some localities receive systematically larger discretionary fiscal transfers from the central state, decades after the revolution that created it? We argue that counties with greater revolutionary sacrifice receive retrospective fiscal dividends: the Chinese state rewards historical contributions to its founding through contemporary resource allocation. Using large language models to classify a novel dataset of over 2 million revolutionary martyrs across 2,800 county-level units, we examine how historical sacrifice shapes fiscal distribution and identify two complementary mechanisms. First, period legitimacy: only martyrs who died before 1949, during the CCP’s foundational struggle for state power, generate positive fiscal returns. Deaths after 1949 produce no significant effect, confirming that the state rewards sacrifice tied to its founding narrative, not suffering under its own rule. Second, elite network conversion: counties with at least one martyr of vice-department rank or above show a precise and significant fiscal premium, as surviving revolutionary elites converted wartime networks into durable bureaucratic bargaining leverage. OLS estimates show that a one-log-unit increase in per capita martyr density is associated with a 9.4 percent increase in per capita discretionary transfers (p < 0.01). Instrumental variable estimates using terrain ruggedness and historical precipitation shocks confirm the causal direction. Together, these findings document enduring hierarchies of sacrifice in how revolutionary states allocate resources retrospectively, contributing to debates on the long-run consequences of revolutionary state-building.