Research shows that government-controlled media is an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion. Does government-controlled media remain effective when it is required to support changes in positions that autocrats take on issues? Existing theories do not provide a clear answer to this question, but we often observe authoritarian governments using government media to frame policies in new ways when significant changes in policy positions are required. By conducting an experiment that exposes respondents to government-controlled media—in the form of TV news segments—on issues where the regime substantially changed its policy positions, we find that by framing the same issue differently, government-controlled media moves respondents to adopt policy positions closer to the ones espoused by the regime regardless of individual predisposition. This result holds for domestic and foreign policy issues, for direct and composite measures of attitudes, and persists up to 48 hours after exposure.

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Why do some firms face more environmental regulatory actions than others? We present a theory focusing on firm-fixed asset intensity. High fixed asset intensity makes a firm less mobile. A less mobile firm cannot present a credible exit threat, making it more susceptible to stringent enforcement. Analysis of key-monitored firms in Jiangsu province, China of 2012-2014 shows that higher fixed asset intensity is associated with more pollution levies and a higher chance of receiving a punitive action. This result holds in a battery of robustness checks and an instrumental variable analysis. Furthermore, our 2018 online survey of Chinese firm managers shows that those from high fixed asset intensity firms indeed consider their firms less mobile and they pay more environment-related operating costs. Finally, data from 2004 Chinese Firm-Level Industrial Survey demonstrate that fixed asset intensity is positively associated with pollution levies in a national sample of 201,926 manufacturing firms.

Fighting corruption is often seen as a crucial step toward building better institutions, but how it affects political selection remains less well understood. This article argues that in systems where corruption functions as an informal incentive for government to attract talent, anticorruption initiatives that curb rent-seeking opportunities may unintentionally weaken both the quality and the representativeness of the bureaucracy. The authors test this argument in China using an original nationwide survey of government officials and an identification strategy that exploits exogenous variations in enforcement levels created by the recent anticorruption campaign. The study finds that intensified enforcement has generated two potentially negative selection effects: a deterrence effect that lowers the average ability of newly recruited bureaucrats, and a compositional effect that discourages the entry of lower-class individuals in favor of those who are affluent and well connected. These findings highlight important hidden human capital costs of corruption elimination in developing countries.

This study investigates the audience of state-media broadcasts (SMBs) among Chinese Internet users-a missing link for understanding political communications in the high-choice media environment of modern countries. Using a "least likely case" strategy and a nationwide online survey, we created an audience profile of contemporary viewers among Chinese Internet users of Xinwen Lianbo (XWLB), the primary SMB program in China. We further examined the motivations driving viewers to watch the program, finding that external factors, such as media inequality, historical inertia, and family bundling, do not greatly alter people's watching behaviors. Instead, internal motivations, such as the pursuit of authentic information and psychological gratification, significantly increase the frequency with which viewers watch XWLB. These effects remain robust even after controlling for potential model biases and political desirability. Keywords State Media • Active Audience • Political Communication • Xinwen Lianbo • ChinaState-media broadcasts (SMBs), i.e., public news programs produced by government-owned media companies, play an indispensable role in government-to-citizen communications in modern countries. SMBs are the mouthpiece of the government and the primary platform for rulers to exhibit their achievements and promote the * Zijie Shao