In recent years, Chinese private companies have improved a lot in corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance, especially in the philanthropic area. However, private companies' awareness and performance of social responsibility still have a big disparity with SOEs. And private companies' policy of social responsibility is subjective and preferential. To explain this contradiction, this paper tries to introduce political connection and, based on stakeholder salience theory, to test how political connection changes managers' perception of stakeholders' relative importance and cause changes in stakeholders' satisfaction level of social responsibility requirement. The result shows that (1) political connection has positive influence on private companies' CSR; (2) companies with political connection are significantly better than the ones without political connection in society-oriented and customers-oriented responsibility; (3) two kinds of companies have no significant difference in investors-oriented responsibility; (4) as for government-oriented and employee-oriented responsibility, companies with political connection are worse than ones without political connection. These findings are significant for China's future construction of competition system and private companies' choice of stakeholders and future investment.

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Despite the prevalence of anti-government rumors in authoritarian countries, little is currently known about their effects on citizens’ attitudes toward the government, and whether the authorities can effectively combat rumors. With an experimental procedure embedded in two surveys about Chinese internet users’ information exposure, this study finds that rumors decrease citizens’ trust in the government and support of the regime. Moreover, individuals from diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds are similarly susceptible to thinly evidenced rumors. Rebuttals generally reduce people’s belief in the specific content of rumors, but often do not recover political trust unless the government brings forth solid and vivid evidence to back its refutation or win the endorsement of public figures broadly perceived to be independent. But because such high-quality and strong rebuttals are hard to come by, rumors will erode political support in an authoritarian state. These findings have rich implications for studies of rumors and misinformation in general, and authoritarian information politics in particular.

Authoritarian governments often impose crude and heavy-handed propaganda messages on society. Is such hard propaganda effective in sustaining authoritarian rule? With an original survey experiment featuring messages from China's ongoing propaganda campaign, this study finds that hard propaganda can backfire and worsen citizens' opinions of the regime, while at the same time signaling the state's power and reducing citizens' willingness to protest. Thus, hard propaganda can deter dissent and help maintain regime stability in the short term, but it can also decrease regime legitimacy and aggravate the government's long-term prospects, especially when its power and control capacity do not keep up with propaganda.

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