Research

Working Paper

The Long Shadow of Heroes: Martyrs’ Cemetery, Patriotic Education, and Street Crime(View)

• Abstract: Moving beyond the traditional dichotomy of formal and informal social control, this study explores how state curbs crime by embedding political and historical narratives in physical space. Drawing on geo-coded crime data and a staggered Difference-in-Differences design, results show the establishment of Martyrs’ Cemetery Parks (MCPs) lead to a significant decline of crimes within adjacent areas, especially property crimes. The crime-reduction effect decays with distance and operates through two channels: spatially by the clustering of patriotic education venues rather than more police force, and temporally by seasonally memorial activities especially during the August to October. Moreover, the vignette experiment, complemented by instrumental variable estimates derived from a national survey, provides plausible evidence demonstrating how memorial architecture fosters social order through implicit moral suasion from patriotic education rather than through conventional forms of coercion.

Figure: Monthly Trends: The Effect of Martyrs’ Cemetery Parks on Crimes

Reticence or Theatrics? Grassroots Cadre Presence and Political Response in Surveys (View)

• Abstract: Survey studies struggle to eliminate response bias, yet they frequently neglect the impact of the interview context. This article investigates the influence of grassroots cadre presence in surveys on self-censorship and social desirability bias. Using the China Family Panel Studies from 2012 to 2018 (N≈100,000), I demonstrate that the presence of grassroots cadres can induce social desirability bias rather than self-censorship in responses to political queries, regardless of whether they are framed positively or negatively. Specifically, treated individuals tend to over-report their trust in grassroots officeholders and local government while under-reporting experiences of unfairness, unreasonable treatment, and conflict with authorities. Novelly, I perform randomized controlled trial simulations (N≈6,000) utilizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation and In-Context Learning, alongside implicit association tests (N≈100), and findings indicate that social desirability bias is driven by authoritarian cognition (risk perception, fear-based anxiety, suppositional insight, and avoidant tendencies), consistent with the inference that fear of perceived or actual sanctions plays a crucial role in shaping responses.

Figure: The Effect of Cadre Presence on Authoritarian Cognition