The Impacts of International Norm Violations

The evidence from the sociology, economics, and psychology literature is that norm violations are contagious.Footnote ³ Observing others break norms makes people realize that norms could be violated without punishment (Becker Reference Becker1968) and re-evaluate whether the norms are even appropriate (Cialdini et al. Reference Cialdini, Reno and Kallgren1990). In this case, people (partly) base their views about a norm on the behaviour of others, and whether others – particularly high-status others – respect that norm is a cue for whether it is worth respecting (Cialdini and Goldstein Reference Cialdini and Goldstein2004; Diekmann et al. Reference Diekmann, Przepiorka and Rauhut2015). And on the individual level at least, we know that when people hear about others’ discriminatory beliefs or see them discriminating against ethnic minorities, they become more likely to do the same themselves (Blanchard et al. Reference Blanchard, Crandall, Brigham and Ann Vaughn1994; Stangor et al. Reference Stangor, Sechrist and Jost2001; Spörlein and Schlueter Reference Spörlein and Schlueter2020; Álvarez-Benjumea Reference Álvarez-Benjumea2023).

This feeds into an assumption of the contestation literature, which is that when actors see an international norm being violated by other states, they will perceive it to be less legitimate – and so become less likely to respect it (Panke and Petersohn Reference Panke and Petersohn2012; McKeown Reference McKeown2009; Hurd Reference Hurd2007; Chow and Levin Reference Chow and Levin2024; Carnegie and Carson Reference Carnegie and Carson2018). Indeed, for some scholars, the only way that norms erode is if they are not respected (Onuf Reference Onuf1994; Panke and Petersohn Reference Panke and Petersohn2012; McKeown Reference McKeown2009; Hurd Reference Hurd2007). Onuf (Reference Onuf1994, 18) argues that ‘every time agents choose not to follow a rule, they change the rule by weakening it and in so doing they may well contribute to the constitution of some new rule’.

If this argument is correct, then information about high-profile violations of international norms should reduce support and respect for those norms. And if minority rights norms are broken by the USA, a high-status leader of the liberal international order and proponent of minority rights after the First World War (Fink Reference Fink2000), then the effect on the legitimacy of those norms should be even stronger. McKeown argues that American contestations of the norm against torture brought about a ‘crisis of legitimacy in the international norm’ (McKeown Reference McKeown2009, 5), and other governments used American abuses to justify their own use of torture (Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Mora and Schmidt2016; Schmidt and Sikkink Reference Schmidt and Sikkink2019). Chow and Levin find that referencing US human rights violations significantly diminishes American citizens’ criticism of other states’ behaviour, arguing that their actions ‘reshape Americans’ views on whether other countries’ actions were norm violating’ (Reference Chow and Levin2024, 109).

Some scholars have argued, however, that states’ contestations may end up strengthening international norms. When a state expresses a public challenge to a norm, the subsequent reaction from civil society and the international community helps others reach a shared understanding of that norm (Wiener Reference Wiener2014; Badescu and Wiess Reference Badescu and Weiss2010; Deitelhoff and Zimmerman Reference Deitelhoff and Zimmermann2019). So, while America’s use of torture did worsen human rights amongst those countries who had joined in US-led counterterrorism programmes (Schmidt and Sikkink Reference Schmidt and Sikkink2019), it also made other countries come out and publicly reiterate their commitment to the norm against torture, clarifying where it did and did not apply (Keating Reference Keating2014), arguably increasing the norm’s robustness in the long term.

This suggests that there may be a difference between the immediate license that norm violations give to some people or states to go on and break the norms themselves and the longer-term impacts those violations have on wider public internalisation of that norm.

Norm salience

Rosert (Reference Rosert2019) argues that the salience of a norm is a critical factor behind its success. People’s preferences about policy issues are inconsistent and often determined by whatever is at the front of their minds at a given time (Zaller Reference Zaller1992) – something that the news cycle has a crucial role in. Research on agenda setting has shown that the level of media coverage can significantly affect how concerned people are about a particular issue (Dearing and Rogers Reference Dearing, Rogers and Rogers1996; McCombs and Reynolds Reference McCombs and Reynolds2009), from crime (Romer et al. Reference Romer, Hall Jamieson and Aday2003) to the European Union (Peter Reference Peter2003) and, importantly for this study, racism (Wang Reference Wang2000). People are much more likely to care about issues that are salient to them, and therefore more likely to become norm entrepreneurs – and mobilize behind norm entrepreneurs – on salient issues (Rosert Reference Rosert2019). The more information that is publicly available about a norm at any given time, then the more likely that people will develop common knowledge around what their peers think about the norm (Chwe Reference Chwe2001; Morris and Shin Reference Morris and Song Shin2002), making it easier for them to coordinate and mobilize around it (McAdams Reference McAdams and Smits2000).

As we have seen, prominent violations of international norms – like the George Floyd killing or the CIA torture revelations – often receive worldwide coverage, pushing issues like racial discrimination or torture to the front pages of newspapers around the world for weeks, in a way they rarely are in the normal news cycle. Unlike when individuals observe their peers cheating (Hill et al. Reference Hill, Maruyama and Viceisza2012) or see hate speech online (Álvarez-Benjumea Reference Álvarez-Benjumea2023), what makes prominent international violations distinctive is that they are often accompanied by a news cycle filled with mass domestic and international criticism, debates, protests, and deep examination of the norm and its consequences. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, for example, Google searches and tweets about racism (Thelwall and Thelwall Reference Thelwall and Thelwall2021) rose to unprecedented levels,Footnote ⁴ criticism poured in from international leaders and organisations (Hernandez and Mueller Reference Hernandez and Mueller2020), and debates surged around the world over norms towards racial equality, minority rights, and police brutality (Hassan and Noack Reference Hassan and Noack2021). Even following US attempts to contest norms around torture (McKeown Reference McKeown2009), as Figure 1 shows, over the month following the Abu Ghraib revelations in 2004, Arab attention to the issue reached extraordinarily high levels. It was the high-profile violation of these norms of torture and racial equality that made them more salient than at any other point before or afterwards.

Figure 1.

Weekly Google search trends for تعذيب (Arabic for ‘torture’) around the world, from 2004-2024. The scale is a relative measure of search volume over time from 0–100, whereby a volume of 10 is a tenth of the volume of 100. The ‘peak’ date encompasses the full five weeks from 25 April – 30 May 2004. The Abu Ghraib abuses hit the news on 28 April.

This all suggests that when norms like these are made so salient, then instead of a contagion of violations, we may see a rise in awareness and support among observers around the world (Opp Reference Opp2012; Mäs and Opp Reference Mäs and Opp2016). Rosert (Reference Rosert2019) shows that the reason the norm against the use of napalm became so strong was because its devastating use in the Korean War made the norm so salient that it was taken on by anti-war campaigners and stayed on their agenda even after the war ended. One feature of the global George Floyd protests was how they took on not just police brutality in Minneapolis, but respect for norms around racial and ethnic equality in their own locality. Amidst the dramatic global rise in tweets about racism in early June 2020, only 12 per cent of tweets referenced George Floyd or Black Lives Matter, with most talking more generally about systemic racism and discrimination (Thelwall and Thelwall Reference Thelwall and Thelwall2021). In the aftermath, people in Houston, Texas – the other side of the country – became 12 percentage points less likely to say that race relations in their own town were ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ (Olin Reference Olin2021). Protestors in Australia called on local leaders to defend the rights of Indigenous communities; protestors in France sought to highlight the death in police custody of one of their own, Adama Traoré; and Belgian demonstrators called on the country to face up to its colonial legacy. According to the ACLED database of protests, in May/June 2020 there were at least 800 global protests related to George Floyd. At least 85 per cent of these involved some kind of protest at racial injustice in their own country. Local activist groups around the world sought to co-opt their own public’s heightened attention towards what was going on in the USA to launch protests about issues of racial justice and police brutality at home (Mohdin et al. Reference Mohdin, Swann and Bannock2020).

The George Floyd case does highlight an important scope condition: the presence of a negative global or local response to the norm violation – and highlights the difference between violations and contestation. The norm of racial equality is a strong one (Búzás Reference Búzás2018) that has not been explicitly contested by the USA, and the global reaction to prominent instances of American racism has – in general – been highly critical (Dudziak Reference Dudziak2011). As such, global coverage of these violations has not just increased the salience of the norms of racial equality to people, but also the salience of the globally critical response.

But prominent norm violations may not always meet such a widespread negative reaction, and some countries will be far less critical of those violations than others. Strong allies of the violator may try to defend or justify its behaviour, for example, or the norm itself may be locally contested, with some local actors openly welcoming the violator’s challenges to the norm. Carnegie and Carson (Reference Carnegie and Carson2018) argue that norms may be weakened when actors see that violators have not been punished sufficiently by the international community, while Adler-Nissen (Reference Adler-Nissen2014) posits the same when states shamed for their norm violations choose to actively contest that stigmatisation. Implicit in both arguments is the idea that violations may be more likely to weaken norms when there are actors who openly accept or justify those violations.

For watching foreign publics, this kind of acceptance or justification is normally less prevalent, however. If human rights violations are prominent in international news, it is invariably because they are being widely criticised by foreign leaders, journalists, or civil society. Rarely are a country’s violations of human rights celebrated around the world, especially violations of strong norms like the ones around racial equality discussed in this study. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that the argument may not necessarily hold in countries where the local media narrative is more accepting of the norm violations.

Authoritarian states

In authoritarian states, especially those that are geopolitical rivals of the US, I argue that the media narrative is not only likely to be highly critical, but that the impacts of American human rights violations may be especially strong.

Regimes like the Chinese Communist Party rarely allow news of any human rights violations at home, and heavily censor discussions of ethnicity, religion, and minority rights, particularly over issues like Xinjiang and Tibet (Brady Reference Brady2012; Tai Reference Tai2014). Repnikova (Reference Repnikova2017, 81) cites one Chinese journalist’s account that there are ‘some clearly outlawed topics, such as…the issues concerning contentious minorities’. There is a stark difference here with the attention that Chinese media has given to racial and ethnic issues in the USA. Through the summer of 2020, for example, Chinese newspapers featured hundreds of news stories and editorials about George Floyd’s killing and the subsequent protests (Bandurski Reference Bandurski2020), making highly salient the normally taboo topics of racial equality, respect for ethnic minorities, and police brutality. And like the rest of the world, in China, there was an outpouring of sympathy and outrage for George Floyd on social media (Daxue 2020), with extraordinary levels of internet searches for ‘racism’ and ‘ethnic minorities’.Footnote ⁵

And in China, state media articles about US human rights violations are indeed invariably critical. In contrast to the way that human rights in China is talked about,Footnote ⁶ Chinese state media reports about the USA have highlighted the individual and social suffering caused and played up the need to respect international norms and values of racial equality and justice. After George Floyd, for example, state media protested ‘the painful struggle of American minorities under the weight of racial discrimination’ (Beijing Youth Daily 2020), how ‘in America, racial discrimination has the most unbearably dark history and scars’ (Xinhua 2020a), discrimination that violated ‘the general consensus of the international community’ (Xinhua 2020b). Even two years later, state media was continuing its criticism, with an article under the leadership’s official pen name ‘Zhong Sheng’ (钟声) entitled: ‘Minorities ‘Can’t Breathe’: Racism Runs Through the US Political System’ (People’s Daily 2022).

As such, in authoritarian states like China, mass reporting of prominent American human rights violations significantly increases the salience of human rights norms and brings rare cues from the state that those norms should be respected. This may not just increase public support for those norms, but even open up space for discussion of domestic issues that would have otherwise seemed impossible. Mokhtari (Reference Mokhtari2009) gives a superb example of these dynamics in the Middle East after revelations of US troops’ torture of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib in 2004. She notes how the revelations provoked an impassioned outcry from autocrats across the region – autocrats who had been using very similar techniques against their own citizens (and suppressing any criticism of their actions). But in this case, the widespread state-sanctioned media and public outrage at American violations opened up space for citizens in Jordan, Yemen, and beyond to discuss and criticize those same violations at home. Local activists across the region took advantage of the increased public attention to human rights and the space to discuss the issues more freely to put pressure on their own governments, calling for the abolition of torture as well as other rights abuses. Mokhtari quotes one news commentator (Reference Mokhtari2009, 157) saying:

Why then, given these dangers and given their control over information, would authoritarian regimes allow their citizens to hear about these violations? It may be that the violations are just too high-profile to be censored – given the scale of international coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, it would be hard to hide the protests from the population. But as we have discussed, Abu Ghraib, George Floyd, and indeed many other far less publicised human rights issues in the USA have been front-page news in authoritarian states across the Middle East, Russia, and China, often for weeks, and often accompanied by extensive criticism from government officials. There appears to be a strategy behind the coverage of these abuses.

Geopolitics

One explanation is geopolitical – for states like Russia and China at least, the USA is a geopolitical rival, and an accusation of human rights abuse is a useful tool to denigrate and delegitimize that rival both on the international stage and at home.Footnote ⁷ Friendly countries, on the other hand, may be more likely to play down or justify their ally’s actions, especially if that ally itself fights back against the criticism (Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen2014). Certainly, the most extensive coverage (in authoritarian states at least) of American human rights violations has come amongst its geopolitical rivals (Dugyala Reference Dugyala2020). That is not to say that America’s authoritarian allies have not covered or even criticised its violations, especially in the case of Abu GhraibFootnote ⁸ – but this coverage has often been less enthusiastically negative than that of its adversaries.Footnote ⁹

For these adversaries, highlighting American human rights violations may help to entrench their citizens’ negative opinions of the USA and its behaviour, bolster their views about the comparative superiority of their own country,Footnote ¹⁰ and make them more likely to consider how well – in comparison - their own leaders respect those same rights.Footnote ¹¹

Whataboutism

Authoritarian states are also particularly likely to be shamed and sanctioned by the international community for their own human rights violations (Lebovic and Voeten Reference Lebovic and Voeten2006). In the first place, as mentioned above, highlighting American abuses may show that these kinds of violations are not that unusual or counter-normative. Moreover, given that the USA is often at the forefront of any human rights shaming, highlighting American leaders’ own inability to live up to their words helps to frame those criticisms as hypocritical and illegitimate (Chow and Levin Reference Chow and Levin2024).

And just as a common response in the Soviet Union to American critiques of their political system was ‘and you lynch negros’,Footnote ¹² Chinese propagandists have regularly accused the USA of hypocrisy when it pressures Beijing over human rights (Gruffydd-Jones Reference Gruffydd-Jones2022). This also works the other way: Egyptian state media’s comparatively restrained response to George Floyd was plausibly linked to the Trump administration’s recent refusal to condemn Cairo’s own crackdowns (Abdelaziz and Katz Reference Abdelaziz and Katz2020).

This implies that America’s geopolitical rivals, as well as those countries subjected to its human rights criticism, have incentives to play up American violations. In practice, there will be substantial overlaps between the two. States are far more likely to put pressure on their geopolitical opponents over human rights (Terman Reference Terman2023), while human rights pressure can critically damage bilateral relations – China in particular has increasingly conditioned its diplomatic relationships on silence over human rights. How under-pressure US allies might deal with American violations is a question for another study – but the above argument does imply that authoritarian rivals of the USA subject to regular American pressure over their human rights will see strategic advantages from reporting highly critical accounts of America’s own violations on to their people.

But while these propaganda tactics may well lend those states a temporary ideological victory, as Mokhtari (Reference Mokhtari2009, 163) says: ‘governments can be trapped by their own appropriations’. Autocratic rivals’ efforts to gain a strategic advantage from naming and shaming liberal states’ human rights violations leave them vulnerable to giving oxygen to those same norms at home. While authoritarian state media coverage of the norms may not necessarily tell people what their peers at home think, it does give space for those peers to consider and talk about those norms in a way they may not have done otherwise. Geopolitical rivalry may even strengthen these dynamics. We would expect that publics who are already highly anti-American will be especially critical of the USA when it breaks an international norm. In order to be consistent with this criticism, they may persuade themselves that the norm is highly important to them (Acharya et al. Reference Acharya, Blackwell and Sen2018), and, as a result, pay more attention to how well their own country protects that norm.

In China, the CCP’s attempts to rally its populace against a hypocritical USA has, on occasion, led to unintended consequences, spreading awareness of human rights at home (Gruffydd-Jones Reference Gruffydd-Jones2022). In April 2022, for example, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai, the CCP sought to battle back against a U.S. Congressional report on human rights in China by issuing its own heated denunciation of the conditions in America, under the hashtag ‘America is the country with the world’s biggest human rights deficit.’Footnote ¹³ In one night, the hashtag received over 580 million views on Weibo – but not in the way intended. Instead, accompanied by the phrase ‘Call me by your name’, the hashtag became the focal point for an extraordinary burst of criticism towards COVID-19 restrictions, human rights, and authoritarianism in China (Ma Reference Ma2022).Footnote ¹⁴

To summarize, prominent violations of international human rights norms by liberal powers may be a way by which those norms develop and spread in information-poor authoritarian environments. Regimes seeking to gain (geo)political advantages against their liberal rivals have incentives to publicize and condemn their rivals’ failures to respect human rights norms. However, the subsequent unusual salience afforded to these norms and to the criticisms of their violation may increase support for the norms themselves and make citizens more critical of the (lack of) respect for those norms at home. This gives us four hypotheses:

Chinese media coverage of race in America

In this paper, I focus on how American discrimination against ethnic, racial, and religious minorities affects the attitudes of citizens in China. The relevant norms here are the norm of racial equality, a strong international norm (Klothz Reference Klotz1995; Búzás Reference Búzás2018) containing as its core elements the norm of equality of treatment, equality of opportunity, and equality of outcomes,Footnote ¹⁵ as well as the range of global and regional norms and laws aimed at the protection of ethnic minorities (Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka2017).

The USA signed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1966, although the country’s subsequent compliance has been accused of being ‘grossly inadequate’ in many areas (Human Rights Watch 2022). The People’s Republic of China has also been an advocate for international norms around racial equality and minority rights (Sautman Reference Sautman1999) and signed the ICERD in 1981. Despite criticism from the United Nations and others that it has also widely violated these norms and laws (OHCHR 2022), the CCP has publicly proclaimed itself a defender of minority rights and racial equality and has implemented hundreds of national and local laws and regulations aimed at protecting the rights of its 125 million ethnic minority citizens (Leibold Reference Leibold and Zang2016). Despite this, as discussed above, the treatment of minorities is a highly censored topic in China.

Firstly, I examine how violations of minority rights in the USA are reported in China’s state media, in order to understand what the CCP wishes its public to be exposed to. To do this, I use the People’s Daily (人民日报), the most authoritative and tightly controlled source of CCP propaganda (Stockmann Reference Stockmann2013). As Figure 2 demonstrates, the paper’s coverage of racial issues in the USA does not appear to neatly follow domestic coverage in the US. So, what does explain this coverage?

Figure 2.

Number of articles mentioning ‘racism’ or ‘racial discrimination’ and ‘United States’ in the People’s Daily and New York Times by year from 1979-2023.

If H1a is correct, Chinese state media coverage of American racial issues should be more likely at times of particularly intense geopolitical tension between China and the USA. If H1b is correct, then coverage should be more likely at times of American criticism of human rights in China. To test this, I conducted time-series regressions of People’s Daily mentions of racial discrimination in the USAFootnote ¹⁶ between 1979 and 2023, examining the change in the twenty-eight days after a major international incident between China and the USAFootnote ¹⁷ and the twenty-eight days after any American criticism of human rights in China.Footnote ¹⁸ Further details of the time series model are in Supplementary Materials 1A, including a discussion of covariates.Footnote ¹⁹

As we might expect, American media coverage of racial issues in the USA does predict coverage in Chinese state media. But the People’s Daily is also significantly more likely to write about this discrimination in the period after American pressure on human rights in China. In the twenty-eight days after (any) American pressure, on average the newspaper includes almost twice as many stories about racial issues in the USA than at other times.Footnote ²⁰ It is over twice as likely to write about these issues in the aftermath of geopolitical incidents with the USA, although this is only weakly statistically significant.Footnote ²¹

Much of the coverage was a direct response to American criticism of human rights in China. Some People’s Daily stories that reported on recent American criticism of China also sought to play up the hypocrisy of those comments by highlighting racism in the USA,Footnote ²² while People’s Daily stories about Congressional reports on human rights in China were often featured right next to China’s own reports on the USA.Footnote ²³ Indeed, issues of the People’s Daily that mention American human rights pressure are almost three times as likely to also contain references to American racial discrimination (whether in the same article or not, see Supplementary Materials Table 3). The timing and content of these articles suggest that the goal is to delegitimize the USA as a global leader and arbiter of human rights, rather than to rile the public up against a rival. Issues of the People’s Daily that discuss American racial discrimination are significantly more likely to describe the USA as a ‘hegemon’, for example, but are no more likely to refer to it as an ‘enemy’.Footnote ²⁴

The coverage is overwhelmingly critical. In none of the articles is there an attempt to justify or contest the norms around racial discrimination or minority rights. Sometimes the coverage itself takes a highly critical tone,Footnote ²⁵ at other times it highlights other states’ criticisms,Footnote ²⁶ and at others it explicitly emphasizes the fact that international norms and laws have been violated.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, the People’s Daily mentions the ICERD significantly more often in the aftermath of stories about the USA’s racial problems than at any other time,Footnote ²⁸ showing how in Chinese state media, international laws are most likely to be talked about when the USA breaks them.

Experiments on the impacts of American racial discrimination in China

The above analysis shows that Chinese citizens are regularly exposed to information about discrimination in the USA, and not necessarily at the times when the discrimination occurs. Next, I examine how American violations of international norms affect attitudes and preferences at an individual level, using online survey experiments with Chinese citizens.

Study 1

The first goal was to test H2b: how exposure to American discrimination against minorities influences Chinese attitudes towards minority rights at home. The experimental design was a simple one. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Those in the control group were given a paragraph containing generic information about minority groups around the world (see Supplementary Materials for full texts).Footnote ²⁹ Those in the main treatment group were given a paragraph about systemic discrimination against minority groups in the USA that was designed to closely reflect storie, 2022). This text contained generic information rather than news about a specific incident to ensure that respondents’ views were not influenced by potential biases around the incident itself.Footnote ³⁰ While the text highlighted the human and social costs of discrimination, the language used was designed to be as neutral as possible:Footnote ³¹

After questions on their understanding of the text, respondents were given two main items.Footnote ³² The first tests the belief that norms against discrimination are respected at home, and asks (on a 1–100 scale, from ‘none at all’ to ‘very serious’): ‘Does discrimination exist in China against any minority religious or ethnic groups?’ To test support for norms around minority rights, respondents were asked the extent to which they agreed with three questions, which were aggregated to form one ‘norms’ measure:Footnote ³³

1. o Religious or ethnic discrimination should be illegal in China.

2. o Minority religious and ethnic groups in China should be given preferential access to education to ensure equal representation.

3. o Workplaces should provide discrimination training to ensure good ethnic and religious relations.

The first pilot study was carried out online in summer 2018, with a sample of 409 respondents recruited through a Chinese crowdsourcing company. The surveys were drawn from all walks of life, but the sample more closely resembles the social media population – more urban, rich, and well-educated – than the overall population, and those who participated are likely to be those citizens who are more interested in social issues (they chose to take a survey on ‘social attitudes’). However, the social media population, in 2019 almost 60 per cent in China,Footnote ³⁴ are arguably those most likely to find out about news of racial discrimination in the USA, as well as being especially likely to participate in public political and social discussions (Yang Reference Yang2009). Studies of Chinese online samples (Li et al. Reference Li, Shi and Zhu2018) have found that they are largely consistent with population-based surveys.

Results

Study 1 provides initial support for H2b. As Figure 3 shows, information about discrimination in the USA increased Chinese citizens’ willingness to support policies that protect minority rights by 0.14 on a 1–4 scale (p=0.015) and increased their perception that minorities were discriminated against in China by 5 percentage points (p=0.06).

Figure 3.

Study 1’s Average Treatment Effects of US discrimination on beliefs about the seriousness of discrimination in China and support for minority rights (combined three measures), 95 per cent confidence intervals.

Study 2

Given the small sample size, the first study has only moderate power.Footnote ³⁵ To replicate and extend our findings, I carried out a second study in 2019, this time with an online sample of 974 respondents from across China. This experiment provided the same prompts in the control and US treatment group and measured the same two main dependent variables. It also extended the study in two ways.

The first goal was to test H2a: that exposure to information about American human rights violations would provide propaganda benefits to the Chinese Communist Party. The survey included two post-treatment questions asking respondents to state their opinions towards the US government; and their level of patriotic sentiment (both on a 1–4 scale). In this survey, questions directly asking about support for the CCP were removed for political sensitivity reasons, but the CCP has promoted patriotism for political purposes (Zhao Reference Zhao1998), and patriotism is a strong predictor in surveys of support for the Party (Dickson et al. Reference Dickson, Shen and Yan2017). Nonetheless, even by itself, an increase in patriotic sentiment would demonstrate clear propaganda benefits of this strategy.

The second goal was to understand whether the effects in Study 1 were driven by the fact that violations occurred in the USA. On one hand, we might expect that any information about human rights violations would increase the salience of those norms, regardless of their location. On the other hand, the USA is a liberal democracy, a global hegemon and leader of the human rights movement over the last three decades, and a geopolitical rival to China. As such, violations in the USA should be more noteworthy than violations in allied or other authoritarian states. To test this, in Study 2, respondents in a second treatment group were given a similar paragraph to Treatment 1 about discrimination against minority groups in Iran (see Supplementary Materials).

Results

Exposure to information about discrimination in the USA increased the proportion of respondents who saw the USA in a negative light from 59 per cent to 69 per cent and increased those who reported the highest level of patriotism from 66 per cent to 75 per cent.Footnote ³⁶ As with Study 1, however, this information also significantly increased Chinese citizens’ belief that minorities were discriminated against in their own country, and increased their willingness to support policies that protect minority rights (Figure 4). In the control group, Chinese people were highly supportive of policies that protected minority rights, but relatively sceptical of the existence of discrimination at home. US discrimination increased their already-high support for minority rights by around 0.1 on a 1–4 scale (difference significant at p=0.013), and their perceptions of discrimination at home by almost 7 percentage points (p=0.0015).

Figure 4.

Study 2’s average treatment effects of US and Iranian discrimination on beliefs about the seriousness of discrimination in China and support for minority rights (combined three measures), 95 per cent confidence intervals.

For the Iran treatment, while the direction of the effects was the same as for the USA, the strength of those effects was weaker. Given that respondents were equally critical in the survey about US and Iranian violations,Footnote ³⁷ this suggests that there may be something about the fact that violations occurred in the USA that made these norms particularly salient.Footnote ³⁸

These results are robust to the inclusion of covariates and the disaggregation of the norms measures (see Supplementary Materials Tables 14 and 15). Despite the low starting point for perceptions of discrimination in the control group, the results do not appear to be due to floor effects. After splitting the variable into two blocks (‘high’ (over 50) and ‘low’ (below 50), the treatment makes significantly more Chinese citizens (from 16 per cent to 24 per cent) believe that discrimination is ‘high’ in their country.Footnote ³⁹