Jennifer Pan (Stanford University)

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or “stability”? This book project shows how China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. Novel datasets and a variety of methodologies show how this distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. The project traces the transformation of China's approach to enforcing order at the turn of the 21st century and identifies the phenomenon of seepage whereby one policy—in this case, quelling dissent—alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government.