The Gulag For My Neighbour?: Factors Affecting The Punitiveness of Chinese Public Opinion Towards Crime

Abstract

When members of the Chinese public are asked to sentence the crimes of their fellow citizens, do they punish Uyghur offenders more harshly than Han? To answer this question, I employ an original factorial survey experiment which randomly varies the ethnicity, gender, and age of criminal offenders in descriptions of crime scenarios, and ask respondents about their preferred sentence for the crime. Contrary to my primary hypothesis, I do not observe conclusive evidence of a "race effect'" in sentencing preferences, with the exception of a high-volume drug sales scenario, for which the Uyghur perpetrator is sentenced to 3.97 years more prison time than an otherwise-identical Han. On the other hand, the data presents mixed evidence in favour of "stereotype fit," where the Uyghur perpetrator is less likely to be sentenced to prison time than the Han offender for two white-collar crimes. I also identify an interaction effect between respondents' hukou status and the race of the offender, where a "race effect" is discerned across crimes only amongst rural hukou-holding respondents.

I use text analysis of articles from the state-owned People's Daily newspaper to propose a potential explanatory path for the absence of an observed "race effect": whereas crime is often racialised against minorities in Western contexts like the U.S., the Chinese state has explicit political incentives of stability maintenance to prevent excessive perceptions of criminality and violence. I find that coverage of ethnic minorities and Uyghurs in the People's Daily overwhelmingly skews towards officially-sanctioned narratives of development, state-driven poverty alleviation, and cultural exoticism. The results of my factorial survey experiment have a number of implications for contemporary politics in China, particularly with regards to the government's Xinjiang crackdown. Moreover, I make a contribution to the literature on race and crime, a field largely dominated by Western research, through original analysis of how race, crime, and state power intersect in the Chinese context.