Jason Gainous is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on information technology and politics. He is the co-author of Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics and Rebooting American Politics: The Internet Revolution. He has published widely in various journals and is the Co-Editor in Chief of Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Rongbin Han is Associate Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His research interests include contentious politics, media and cyber politics, and civic participation in China. He is the author of Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience and has recently published in The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, and Political Research Quarterly, among others.
Andrew W. MacDonald is Assistant Professor of Social Science at Duke Kunshan University. He primarily works in the area of Chinese public opinion research, having authored nearly a dozen surveys of Chinese attitudes on politics, technology, and social questions. His work on this topic has been published in a wide variety of communication, technology, and experimental design journals.
Kevin M. Wagner is Professor and Department Chair in Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the co-author of Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics and Rebooting American Politics: The Internet Revolution. His work has been published in leading journals and law reviews, including Political Behaviour, Online Information Review, Journal of Information Technology & Politics and The Journal of Legislative Studies.

• Chapter 1 - The China Case: Strong State, Popular Contention, and the Internet


• Chapter 2 -The Chinese Internet: Citizen Awareness of Government Control


• Chapter 3 - What Does Directed Digital Dissidence Look Like? Critical Information Flows, Trust, and Support for Protest


• Chapter 4 - Social Media: The Battleground of the Information War


• Chapter 5 - Jumping Over the Great Firewall: A Threat to the Chinese Strategy


• Chapter 6 - The Digital Dissident Citizen: Who are the Wall Jumpers?


• Chapter 7 - Managing the Information War: Voices Heard from Beyond the Wall are Lost


• Chapter 8 - Digital Directed Dissidence in Action: Applications and its Limits


• Chapter 9 - Will Digital Directed Dissidence Keep Working?


• Appendices


• Notes


• References


• Index

Drawing on original survey data and rich qualitative sources, Directed Digital Dissidence in Autocracies explores how authoritarian regimes employ the Internet in advantageous ways to direct the flow of online information. The authors argue that the central Chinese government successfully directs citizen dissent toward local government through critical information that the central government places online--a strategy that the authors call "directed digital dissidence". In this context, citizens engage in low-level protest toward the local government, and thereby feel empowered, while the central government avoids overthrow. With an in-depth look at the COVID-19 and Xinjiang Cotton cases, the authors demonstrate how the Chinese state employs directed digital dissidence and discuss the impact and limitations of China's information strategy.