Written by Zihan Chen, Class of 2026 | Edited by Chi Zhang
On November 7, 2025, the CSCC Governing China Cluster hosted Valerie Li from Pennsylvania State University for an engaging online talk on mass petitioning in China. Builing upon the literature on digital activism, she shared insights from her research on citizen grievances and state responsiveness in authoritarian contexts.
In her presentation, Li explored how citizens in restrictive environments express discontent, noting that while street protests remain rare due to high risks, mass petitioning has become prevalent. She defined mass petitioning as a collection of duplicate petitions, templates written by advocacy leaders and submitted by supporters, enabled by digital technologies. This low-cost, low-effort approach lowers participation thresholds and increases mobilization speed and scale, though it carries the risk of being dismissed.
Li argued that the Chinese state views these mass petitions unfavorably, as they can distort public representation and challenge the government’s monitoring capabilities. Drawing on a large-scale dataset of online public complaints submitted to state-built local petition platforms across 33 cities from 2005 to 2024, her analysis identified more than 4,000 mass petition campaigns. The result revealed that local governments are significantly more likely to reject mass petitions than isolated individual complaints.
Li proposed a theory of informational overload, suggesting that mass petitions crowd out substantive information and signal low-effort participation, leading to higher rates of dismissal, punishment, and deterrence of future use. Local governments tend to become dismissive toward high-volume, low-effort grievances; however, responsiveness increases when campaigns reach a critical group size or show higher effort through customization (e.g., lower duplication). Her visuals illustrated networks of campaigns as clusters, and conditional effects graphs disaggregated by group size and degree of duplication, indicating negative effects for small groups and high duplication, but dampened negatives for large groups (>50 letters).
While online activism is not a substitute for offline engagement, Li emphasized that it can build civic skills and foster community-building, serving as a stepping stone to broader participation. The talk was further enriched by Li’s clear methodological explanations and data visualizations, which made complex political science concepts accessible and underscored the innovative use of computational methods in studying contentious politics.
The Q&A session between the speaker and the audience was lively and thought-provoking. Students and faculty raised questions about how artificial intelligence tools might influence both citizens’ petitioning behavior and researchers’ data analysis methods. Participants also drew comparisons between petition campaigns and social media trends as examples for understanding how governments respond to different dynamics of public opinion.
The talk offered valuable insights into how collective online actions shape governance and civic participation in contemporary China. By bridging empirical research with comparative perspectives, Li’s presentation deepened understanding of the complex relationship between digital technologies, citizens, and the state.
