Research

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

1. Liu, J., & Fong, C. S. (2026). Discursive channeling: Evidence from newspaper responses to anti-waste incineration protests in China. Chinese Journal of Communication, 1–19. [pdf] [appendix]
   • Keywords: Official Discourse; Collective Action; Channeling; Authoritarianism; Environmental politics; China
   • Abstract:

     Discourse is a critical tool for authoritarian states to control social protests. The literature highlights a hostility–sympathy dichotomy in official discourse, viewing official discourse as either repressing or facilitating protests. In this paper, we propose a more nuanced framework by introducing the concept of discursive channeling. Apart from facilitating protests, official sympathetic discourse can also be used to channel protests—redirecting radical claims into more moderate ones. Drawing on newspapers’ responses to anti-waste incineration protests in China from 2002 to 2021, we identify the early 2010s as a watershed moment. While hostile discourse declined, sympathetic discourse surged—however, its content fundamentally changed. While pre-2010 sympathetic discourse recognized the major claim concerning decision-making on the siting of waste incineration plants, post-2010 sympathetic discourse redirected the focus toward a minor and more moderate claim concerning environmental monitoring and compensation. As a form of indirect repression, this discursive channeling elucidates how authoritarian states mitigate the upward-scale shift in protests and why repression intensified in Xi Jinping’s era without backfiring.
2. Ho, L. K.-K., Fong, C. S., & Wan, T. T. W. (2021). High level of (passive) compliance in a low-trust society: Hong Kong citizens’ response towards the COVID-19 lockdown. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 15(2), 1046–1061. [pdf]
   • Keywords: COVID-19; Public Compliance; Police Legitimacy; Hong Kong
   • Abstract:

     This study examines the phenomenon of high public compliance with COVID-19 lockdown and social distancing regulations in Hong Kong, set against a backdrop of low political trust and a severe crisis of police legitimacy following the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement. Utilizing an original dataset compiled from police enforcement episodes, judicial proceedings, and online discourse on local social media channels, the paper demonstrates that compliance remained remarkably high despite skepticism toward authority. The findings show that citizens' adherence to public health measures was driven primarily by self-regulation, strategic calculation, historical trauma from the 2003 SARS outbreak, and deep distrust of the government's capabilities, leading civil society to act as informal "civilian enforcers". The study conceptualizes this behavior as "passive compliance"—a conditional, issue-specific adherence to rules rooted in shared self-interest for public health rather than normative respect for legal or state authority.
3. Fung, C. K. C., & Fong, C. S. (2020). The 1967 riots and Hong Kong’s tortuous internationalization. East Asia, 37(2), 89–105. [pdf]
   • Keywords: 1967 Riots; External Autonomy; International Status; External Relations of Colonial Hong Kong; HongKong-China-Britain Relationship
   • Abstract:

     The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region enjoys an inexplicable high degree of external autonomy. However, few scholars provide satisfactory answers to the origin and development of it. To fill this gap, this historical case study traces the process of how did Hong Kong develop its external autonomy. It proposes that making Hong Kong externally autonomous was a deliberate but bitter choice of the British to maintain the business confidence of Hong Kong after the 1967 riots. By bolstering up Hong Kong’s international status, not only the British but also the PRC government could enjoy economically, such that it could fend off the possible geopolitical pressure from the PRC government. In the 1970s, wider geopolitical context such as Hong Kong’s decolonization and changing UK-Hong Kong relations facilitated and reinforced the earlier decision of raising Hong Kong international standing so that an unprecedented degree of external autonomy could be developed. This study echoes on recent studies of the 1967 riots by putting the event in a broader international context and proposes some new directions of research regarding the external relations of Hong Kong in the late colonial era.

Book Chapters

1. Fong, C. S., & Yuen, S. (2021). Movement leadership in an era of connective action: A study of Hong Kong’s student-led Umbrella Movement. In L. Cini, D. della Porta, & C. Guzmán-Concha (Eds.), Student movements in late neoliberalism (pp. 133–155). Palgrave Macmillan. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Connective Action; Student Movements; Protest Leadership; Umbrella Movement; Hong Kong
   • Abstract:

     Leadership is a crucial factor that influences the dynamics and outcomes of social movements. This chapter explores student leadership in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and suggests that trajectories of protest in the contemporary era cannot be explained simply by the presence or absence of political opportunities but must be understood through looking at the multifaceted interplays between movement leadership and its digital and spatial milieus over time. As the spontaneous eruption of the Umbrella Movement gave rise to a decentralized protest structure, formal protest leaders had to operate under a connective environment in which participants were no longer simply their obedient followers. The emergence of many informal leaders blurred the boundary of leadership and thinned out the authority of formal leaders. By studying the online and offline interaction of the two student organizations—Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism—with ordinary protesters, we demonstrated how such connective dynamics restrained the leading student organizations to collect mandate of the mass from various protest sites and online communities for making a strategic decision. Our findings show that the formation of movement leadership and their decision-making capacity can be both adversely affected by digitally networked activism.

Working Papers

1. Pollert, I., Desmarais, B., Cifci, M., Fong, C. S., & Gopal, I. Fraud, Fairness, and Framing: How State Legislators Tweet about Elections. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Elections; State Politics; Social Media; Election Integrity; Elite Rhetoric; Partisan Polarization
   • Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Information, Technology & Politics
   • Presented at APSA 2023 and SPPC 2025
   • Abstract:

     The 2020 presidential election triggered an unprecedented volume of elite commentary on election integrity, but state legislators—who hold direct authority over election administration—have received far less scholarly attention than federal officials. Using over 90,355 election-related tweets from 3,235 state legislators in 2020–2021, we model both the volume of election integrity tweets (legislator-week counts, hierarchical negative binomial) and the binary decision to post at least one tweet challenging electoral legitimacy (legislator-level hierarchical linear probability model, with a Firth penalized logistic sensitivity). We find a clean division: Democrats dominate the volume of election-integrity discourse, and engagement received in the previous week predicts next-week posting; but whether a legislator ever posts delegitimizing content is overwhelmingly predicted by party. Republicans are roughly 1.79 times as likely as otherwise-similar Democrats to have posted at least one challenge tweet during the study period. Within the Republican caucus, no measured structural predictor—vote share, state democratic performance, legislative professionalism, or state-level fraud cases—distinguishes challenge-posters from non-posters, an honest null that does not pin down a specific mechanism but that is inconsistent with local electoral incentives being the primary driver. Results are robust across eight alternative specifications. Our findings document how delegitimizing rhetoric has diffused to the state legislative level and clarify what is and is not a plausible mechanism for it.
2. Tavana, D. L., Harris, K., Fong, C. S., & Farmanesh, A.. Who overreports? Regime support and preference falsification in Iran. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Authoritarian Regimes; Preference Falsification; Regime Support; List experiments; Iran
   • Under Review
   • Abstract:

     In authoritarian contexts, individuals often express greater support for the regime in public than they hold in private. This gap—overreporting—is typically treated as a measurement problem rather than a political behavior to be explained. We argue that overreporting deserves greater attention in survey-based studies of regime support and is itself shaped by which social referents are salient to respondents during survey interviews. We develop and test an original theoretical framework that identifies three sources of overreporting: expressive identification, behavioral conformity, and civic resources. Drawing on a pre-registered, nationally representative telephone survey of residents of Iran (N=1,999) with an embedded double list experiment, we estimate regime support from the list experiment at 47 percent—roughly ten percentage points below the 57 percent recorded by direct questioning. Our findings indicate that expressive identification matters most: national pride and religiosity both predict substantial overreporting. Preference falsification in Iran is shaped less by the coercion citizens face from the state than by the identity-based attachments the regime encourages—findings with implications for how scholars measure and interpret regime support in closed societies.
3. Fong, C. S.. Borrowing Credibility to Shape Public Opinion: Western Influencers as Chinese Government Foreign Defenders. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Foreign Propaganda; Influencers; Authoritarianism; Social Media; China
   • Presented at MPSA 2025, APSA 2025, and TPSA 2025
   • Abstract:

     Recent advances in digital communication enable authoritarian regimes to shape the perception of democratic audiences and soften their demands for punitive foreign policies against human rights violations. While state mouthpieces like Russia Today and CGTN actively push state narratives online, their rigid propaganda style and explicit foreign attribution limit both their persuasive appeal and their likelihood of being selected by skeptical audiences. I argue that seemingly independent foreign social media influencers—acting as credible ingroup storytellers—allow autocrats to bypass these institutional barriers. I evaluate this argument through a preregistered survey experiment exposing U.S. respondents (N = 1,044) to pro-Chinese government YouTube videos addressing human rights in Xinjiang, manipulating both primary source origin (state media vs. influencer creation) and intermediary endorser (state media vs. influencer sharing). Results show that while pro-Chinese government narrative content from both sources reduces respondents’ objections to Chinese state actions in Xinjiang, state media endorsement degrades perceived source credibility, reducing overall persuasiveness and discouraging information selection. By identifying influencers as gateways for foreign propaganda across both persuasion and selection stages, this study uncovers a key mechanism of cross-border opinion manipulation.
4. Fong, C. S.. Reflecting the Crowd: How the Presumed Influence of Online Opinion Leaders Addresses Coordination Failures in Autocracies. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Influence of Presumed Influence, Social Media, Online Opinion Leaders, Collective Action Problems, Authoritarianism
   • Abstract:

     While social media aids mobilization by spreading grievances and coordinating dissent, authoritarian governments censor such information and suppress public signals of collective willingness to protest. Citizens' tendency to conceal true preferences to avoid punishment compounds this coordination problem. I argue that online opinion leaders — such as influencers, independent journalists, experts, and activists — mitigate this collective action problem by signaling their online influence and, in turn, the potential for mass persuasion when they endorse the protest. Perceived as knowledgeable and socially influential, these actors raise citizens' expectations that others will participate, thereby increasing individual protest intent. I test this argument using a pre-registered survey experiment that exposes Chinese citizens (N = 2,461) to messages about a hypothetical environmental protest and manipulates two influence signals: influence metrics and sender identity. Influence metrics, such as follower count and number of likes and shares received, signal message reach, while sender identity signals expertise for persuasion. Results show that influence signals increase protest intent by raising expectations of others’ participation, thus helping explain why autocratic governments increasingly co-opt or repress online opinion leaders.
5. Fong, C. S., & Fu, K.-W. Visual as emotions: A (visual) LLM approach to study images and texts of social media messages from the 2019 Hong Kong protest. [pdf]
   • Keywords: Social Media, Protest Emotion, Visual Analysis, Large Language Model
   • Presented at PolMeth 2025; Abstract Accepted at Computational Communication Research
   • Abstract:

     Existing research highlights the role of visual elements in triggering emotions such as anger and solidarity, thereby helping overcome the high repression costs in autocracies. However, large scale studies on visually triggered protest emotions have remained scarce due to methodological challenges in coding these relatively subjective attributes, especially after the rise of social media, which has scaled the problem. The paper proposes using open‑weight multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual analysis capabilities to code protest-related emotions in images. The results show that this LLM approach can achieve near-human-level accuracy in coding social media messages with images from the 2019 Hong Kong protests and can be applied to an alternative dataset of Twitter images related to the Black Lives Matter movement, retrieving a majority of positive cases. Using mid-tier commercial-grade hardware and cloud computing services, these models can typically process thousands of images per day on a single machine. This paper opens the potential of using LLMs to annotate the semantic meanings behind visual elements, which could be applied to study contentious politics and beyond, such as the mobilization effects of images, emotional strategies of protest leaders, framing and misinformation strategies, and themes in online propaganda.

Works in Progress

1. Liu, J., Fong, C. S., & Hu, Y. Implementation matters: Discursive strategies of authoritarian states to prevent upwards scale-shift of social protests.
   • Presented at APSA 2025
2. Fong, C. S., & Yuen, S. Disaggregating repression: A study on the individual effects of repression in Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests.
   • Presented at MPSA 2022