Project Title: The Media and Public (Mis)Perception of Inequality in China

Rising income inequality is a critical global problem that has rapidly accelerated over the past two decades. While income inequality is similarly high in both the United States and China, however, unlike the public in the U.S., most Chinese may be misinformed about inequality because of the Chinese government’s control over news media through political censorship. The proposed project will examine how rising inequality is perceived, publicized, and interpreted in an authoritarian society wherein media and government practices are not independent, but rather inequality perceptions are actively framed in the interests of political power. This project will offer the first large-scale, longitudinal, and computational text analyses of hundreds of millions of articles and posts published by 120 traditional Chinese newspapers, 30 new digital media outlets, and 245 individual social media services over the period of 2000-2018. We will apply cutting edge text mining and machine learning methods to the study of inequality in an era of Big Data given the recent mass digitization of traditional print media and the rise of social media platforms. The methods and analyses employed in the present project will complement those in previous inequality studies based on social surveys, administrative data, and online survey experiments. Compared to research on facts about inequality, research on values, beliefs, and perceptions about inequality is far less. The proposed study will contribute to this topic by showing the roles of government, mass media, and the public in jointly and interactively disseminating and distorting facts about rising inequality in China.