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In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyzing a novel dataset of news stories and reader comments posted by Chinese citizens over the course of China's anticorruption campaign between 2012 and 2015. My findings show that users' comments about stories of corrupt national officials were unexpectedly lower than those about lower-ranking officials. Such irregularity suggests that either algorithms or censorship suppressed comments on national-level corruption, which indicates the ruler's uneasiness toward propagating scandals that may implicate themselves. I also find that China's rulers reduce their risks by outsourcing reports of their scandals to media outlets less closely linked to the state. My findings show that advancements in ICT and increasing competition among new media firms can help authoritarian rulers finetune their propaganda by promoting self-damaging political messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research has suggested that the negative impact of scandals on public evaluation of the politicians involved is not always strong. Part of the reason is that people may hold varying perceptions regarding the nature, factuality, and importance of the scandals. According to the theory of motivated reasoning, people develop varying perceptions by processing information in ways that reconfirm their existing views. This study applies such insights to analyze how citizens react to political scandals surrounding government leaders in Hong Kong, where such scandals have arguably become increasingly prominent in recent years. This study constructs a theoretical model linking prior political attitudes, scandal-related perceptions, response evaluation, and evaluation of politicians. Analysis of survey data confirms most of the hypotheses in two cases. External efficacy and support for democracy substantially influence perceived factuality and acceptability of the scandals. Such perceptions shape people's evaluations of the responses by the government and the officials involved, which in turn affect evaluation of the officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]