URS Lunch Talk

Date: 

Friday, November 20, 2015, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel K401
Professor Yuhua Wang will be presenting. Do Colleges Breed Revolutionaries? Education and Political Engagement in China After Tiananmen Yuhua Wang Assistant Professor Department of Government Harvard University Abstract Modernization theorists believe that education empowers citizens to take collective actions to challenge authoritarian rule. I present the first quasi-experimental evidence to test the microfoundations of this argument in a noncompetitive authoritarian regime. Exploiting China’s college expansion reform as a natural experiment, I report that higher education increases the overall level of political engagement. However, college education merely has a positive effect on people’s individualistic, expressive behavior, while having no effect on collective actions. China’s young intellectuals also do not differ from the less educated in a range of political attitudes, such as demand for political rights. They care more about local affairs and are more worried about socioeconomic issues, while revealing no particular concerns with broader political issues. I attribute the widespread political apathy among China’s college graduates to the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and the heightened political control in Chinese universities after 1989.