Intergovernmental Conflict and Censorship: Evidence From China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign

Abstract

Media censorship is prevalent in autocratic regimes, but little is known about how and why censorship might vary within a country. I collect close to 40,000 articles from Chinese newspapers about officials caught during Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, which is campaign widely publicised in the central state media. Yet, despite greater reader interest, local newspapers underreport corruption scandals involving high-level officials from their own province compared to officials from other provinces. Underreporting is greater when a newspaper does not rely on advertising revenue and a corrupt official is well connected. When newspapers do report high-level corruption at home, they deemphasise these stories, by making them shorter and featuring official sounding headlines without references to corruption or the anti-corruption campaign. City-level newspapers report less about corruption in their own city relative to other cities in the same province, but are more likely to report high-level corruption within the provincial government than provincial newspapers. These results suggest that intergovernmental conflict within an autocracy can lead to diverging media censorship strategies by different levels of government.