“TELL CHINA’S STORY WELL”: MEDIA MANIPULATION AND TRUST IN XI’S CHINA

Abstract

How do Chinese citizens determine whether to trust what they read? Studies of media trust in China have frequently relied on surveys or direct questioning to gauge perceptions of the relative trustworthiness of government mouthpieces and commercial media. I argue that these methods are susceptible to measurement inaccuracy due to social desirability bias and vagueness in the way that ‘trust’ is defined. I devise and deploy an original online survey experiment to Chinese internet users, randomly assigning participants one of four articles and sources. In lieu of direct questioning, I use behavioral measures of trust, namely information discounting and respondents’ willingness to share their assigned article with different recipients, to infer trust in different sources and topics.

I find that trust is primarily mediated by the political sensitivity of assigned news article topics. For topics of low political sensitivity, trust in government mouthpieces and independent media is comparable. However, for highly politically sensitive topics, trust in independent sources is significantly higher than trust in government mouthpieces. With regards to sharing, willingness to share is comparable across all sources for topics of low political sensitivity. But for highly politically sensitive topics, citizens are much more willing to share articles from independent newspapers than from government mouthpieces. The exception is social media: for highly politically sensitive topics, even though social media is considered to be an independent source, citizens are less willing to share their article on social media if the article was attributed to social media to begin with. These findings complicate the existing scholarly literature on media trust in China, revealing that relative trust in government mouthpieces and commercial newspapers is not constant, and in fact depends strongly on the political sensitivity of the news being reported.