YiMin Huang

Framing Democracy: China’s Propaganda and Its Influence on Taiwanese Democratic Perceptions

Research on authoritarian influence largely asks whether propaganda changes citizens’ attitudes toward particular actors, institutions, or policies. This paper asks whether it can move something more fundamental: the standards citizens use to recognize democracy itself. China’s 2021 white paper, China: Democracy That Works, rebrands the hallmarks of authoritarian rule—order, unity, harmony, and effective governance—as the criteria by which governance should be judged democratic. In a survey experiment in Taiwan built on the white paper’s own text, I find that exposure narrows the perceived distance between Taiwan’s authoritarian past and democratic present, with the largest effects among respondents most predisposed toward authoritarian values.

Penn State Best Political Science Master’s Essay Award · Richard L. Walker Best Paper Award · Supported by the Taiwan Government Fellowship for Studying Abroad (Ministry of Education, Taiwan)

Democratic Education and Resilience to Foreign Propaganda: Evidence from Taiwan’s Curriculum Reform

What protects citizens against propaganda? Taiwan’s 2006 curriculum reform brought the history of democratization into national schooling. Using respondents’ birth months in a regression discontinuity design, I find the reform buffers post-reform cohorts against precisely this propaganda: without propaganda the discontinuity is negligible, but under exposure post-reform cohorts maintain their evaluations of democracy—a result that identifies democratic education as a source of democratic resilience.

Companion paper to the job market paper, drawn from the same experiment.

Under the Shifting Sands: Propaganda, Skepticism, and U.S.–Taiwan Relations

Research on alliance credibility has focused on how patrons signal commitment and how allied governments and elites judge those signals—but the mass public of the protected ally remains largely unstudied, even though a commitment like the United States’ to Taiwan must both deter Beijing and reassure Taiwanese society. In a survey experiment, I compare “U.S.-skepticism” narratives about security with narratives about trade: because a trade narrative says nothing about defense, any effect it has on security judgments reveals how doubt spills across domains. Early results show that economic skepticism erodes confidence in U.S. security commitments more than military skepticism does—a finding with direct implications for how democracies defend against narratives that never mention defense.

Silent Conduits: Ties, Donations, and China’s Growing Influence in Australia

We know a great deal about how domestic interest groups buy access in democratic legislatures; we know far less about whether foreign authoritarian donors do the same. Assembling two decades of Australian campaign-finance and parliamentary records, I find that China-linked donations cluster significantly around the foreign-affairs committee network, while timing tests show the money does not chase individual legislators’ committee assignments—a pattern consistent with cultivating durable access rather than transactional exchange. The chapter’s contribution is the idea of democratic mimicry: foreign authoritarian actors replicating the strategies of domestic influence-peddlers inside a democracy’s own open institutions.