Shengqiao Lin

AbstractGovernments around the world need internal discipline to ensure the implementation of policies and delivery of governance outputs, and this need is more severe in authoritarian systems that govern top-down and without bottom-up electoral pressures. Conventional wisdom suggests that autocrats rely on punishment to discipline subordinates who fail to obey orders, but we argue that public disclosure of such malfeasance can also be effective, even when unaccompanied by punishment. In the case of internal misinformation—the tampering of government data and statistics by local agents to distort central authorities' decisions—we find that the Chinese government successfully adopted public disclosure to combat the manipulation of local GDP numbers by lower-level governments. Our evidence indicates that publicly disclosing a prior act of falsification reduced future manipulation and did so at various levels of local governments, even as officials implicated by the disclosure faced no career setbacks. Hinting at downstream impacts, such disclosure also improved confidence among economic actors, evidenced by increased business activity in localities involved in public disclosures.

AbstractHow does political tension influence the trade strategies of multinational corporations (MNCs)? We examine two firm-level linkages to adversarial regions—supply-chain connectedness and investment origin—and argue that tension prompts firms to de-risk supply-chain exposure, while home connections dampen such adjustments. Studying the 2002 mainland China–Taiwan tension through MNCs operating in China, synthetic-control and difference-in-differences estimates show a roughly 8% relative reduction in MNCs' imports from Taiwan despite overall growth. The effect is strongest for firms most reliant on Taiwanese suppliers, with less diversified supply chains, and engaged in final goods rather than processing; Taiwan-invested firms appear less affected than non-Taiwan-invested ones.

AbstractHow do economic sanctions affect the political attitudes of people working in targeted industries within sanctioned countries—do they erode or bolster support for incumbent governments? We argue that sanctions can increase support for the leader through "rally-round-the-flag" and "vote-buying" mechanisms. Leveraging Beijing's abrupt restriction on cross-strait tourism as a natural experiment, and using quarterly surveys in Taiwan (2017–2019), difference-in-differences and matching estimates show tourism workers' support for the incumbent rose after the sanction—driven mainly by prior opponents of the incumbent and by workers receiving more government subsidies. Similar patterns appear for Beijing's sanction on Taiwanese agricultural products.

AbstractWhy do some firms in authoritarian regimes actively respond to government policy initiatives while others resist? This article argues that firm-level political risk is the primary motivator, since responding helps firms defend their property rights in weak institutional environments. Using China's 2015 Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign and a text-as-data measure of political risk built from 418,480 investor–firm Q&As, difference-in-differences models show that higher risk increases firms' poverty-reduction spending—especially among firms lacking preexisting political connections. Firms that responded also received more lenient regulatory treatment, in both the size of fines and the likelihood of punishment.

Awarded the Franklin L. Burdette / Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper at the APSA 2023 Annual Meeting.

AbstractCounty–township cadres in China act as intermediaries between a strong state and the public, directly overseeing public services. Departing from accounts that treat external political pressure as paramount, this study combines intrinsic service motivation with structural external pressures to explain cadres' responsiveness. Using an original quota-sampling survey of local cadres across 10 Chinese cities, it finds that service motivation—together with mass media and top-down political pressure—shapes responsiveness at both individual and organizational levels, and channels top-down pressure into organizational responsive activity.

AbstractDrawing on a nine-city cell-phone survey conducted in 2019, this paper examines which groups more strongly support armed unification with Taiwan and why. Politically, economically, and socially privileged groups, and those with stronger national pride and more understanding of Taiwan, were more supportive, while residents of two coastal cities (Xiamen and Guangzhou) were less so. Education and an unfavorable view of the Taiwanese government were the most powerful contributing factors. Proposed mechanisms include both top-down forces (political indoctrination and propaganda) and bottom-up ones (interest and identity considerations shaped by a city's proximity to Taiwan).

Reprinted in The Taiwan Question in Xi Jinping's Era, Routledge 2024.

Featured in The Economist, The Diplomat, Initium Media, and Taiwan Insight.

AbstractThis paper proposes a nationalism-oriented causal model, using an interest–identity framework, to explain the voting choices of different social groups, applied to Taiwan's 2016 presidential election across groups defined by generation, class, and ethnicity. It finds generational, class-based, and ethnic differences in voting behavior, and shows that the election was largely one of identity politics centered on national identity and democratic identification—making Beijing's "interest card" less effective. This explains why Beijing's divide-and-conquer economic policy divided Taiwanese voters but failed to prevent the pro-independence candidate from winning.

AbstractHow do governments extract fiscal revenue through selective enforcement? Although fines-for-revenue strategies appear in anecdotal accounts, theoretical understanding and systematic evidence of when and how they operate remain limited. This article argues that fiscal shortfalls induce local governments to raise off-budget revenue through administrative fines while limiting backlash by targeting small and medium firms over individuals, concentrating on high-discretion regulatory domains, and substituting fines for more disruptive sanctions. We evaluate these implications with a new dataset of administrative penalty decisions from Chinese cities (2015–2021), using both shift-share instrument and regression discontinuity designs. Fiscal distress increases both the frequency and amounts of firm-level penalties, especially in discretionary domains. Text analysis based on large language models reveals vaguer legal reasoning and harsher language under stress, particularly toward small and medium-sized enterprises. Finally, although strategic, such fines-for-revenue enforcement still deters new business entry.

AbstractHow does state ownership influence corporate compliance? Existing studies offer two opposing views: state connections may invite regulatory forbearance and encourage noncompliance, or may promote greater compliance due to political control. We argue that both dynamics coexist, and the net effect depends on the strength of state ties. Using China's Cybersecurity Law as a natural experiment, we probe this debate, empirically drawing on two original datasets: (1) an app–month panel tracking the security performance of China's top 5% most downloaded mobile apps and (2) the national business registration database covering all Chinese firms. Our difference-in-differences analyses reveal a nonlinear relationship: firms with strong state ties quickly complied with regulatory requirements by reducing security loopholes, and weakly connected firms showed lower compliance than purely private ones. Further analysis suggests regulatory compliance is driven by a dual mechanism: constraint by political control from above and reinforcement by firm-level risk management from within.

AbstractWhen does political risk make costly political ties valuable? I propose partnership as assurance: regulatory risk endogenously generates firms' demand for state equity ties. Although state investors impose managerial costs, crackdowns raise the costs of operating without state connections, leading firms to seek state capital for regulatory information and political endorsement. Exploiting China's 2020 crackdown on Internet and IT industries, difference-in-differences estimation of all disclosed equity investments (2016–2022) reveals a 4.5 percentage point increase in state participation. Analysis of listed firms links the crackdown to increased regulatory risk and state participation, using a text-as-data indicator from over one million Q&As in investor–firm meetings. Mechanism tests reveal three linked responses: enforcement pressure facilitates state entry among punished firms, expansion concentrates in subsectors with greatest uncertainty driven by local state investors, and private capital withdrawal drives later compositional change. These findings identify a demand-side mechanism complementing supply-side accounts of state capitalism.

AbstractWhen states punish foreign firms during international disputes, enforcement often depends on subnational implementation. Yet why does it vary so sharply across localities? We argue that subnational governments exploit geopolitical crises as distributive openings, boycotting firms from adversarial countries to signal political loyalty while redirecting government purchases toward locally embedded producers. Using China's 2012 anti-Japan crisis and nationwide vehicle registration data, we show that government demand for Japanese vehicles fell by 25 percent and remained depressed through 2013, while consumer boycotts were smaller and short-lived. The government boycott was strongest where cities had auto-industry ambitions or politically insecure leaders. Cities with locally embedded automakers redirected demand toward these producers, either shielding local Japanese brands or supporting non-Japanese competitors. These patterns appear exclusively in organizational purchases, not consumer demand, suggesting that government purchasing is a durable but overlooked instrument of subnational economic statecraft.