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We conceptualize the reach of the state by examining how the physical presence of the state helps the state project its power by signaling state interests and strength. We present a new measurement strategy to capture the territorial reach of the state using points-of-interest data provided by location-based service companies. Our measure exhibits several advantages: (1) it draws on firm-produced or crowd-sourced (rather than government-produced) data, (2) it includes highly precise, geo-referenced location information, which can be aggregated to any geographical or administrative level, (3) it traces temporal changes, and (4) it covers different types of state agencies. We illustrate its features using original databases that we compiled on state agencies in China and other countries. We demonstrate how researchers can use our measure by examining the locations and effects of coercive organizations and provide our data, code, and a tutorial to help researchers explore new avenues of inquiry.

We theorize and measure a situational self-censorship that varies across spatial-temporal political contexts. Schelling's insight that distinctive times and places function as focal points has generated a literature explaining how activists coordinate for protest in authoritarian states. Our population of interest is not activists but ordinary citizens, who, we assume, are risk-averse and prefer to avoid trouble. Focal points rally activists for political expression. By contrast, we theorize, ordinary citizens exercise greater than usual political self-censorship at focal points, to avoid punishment as troublemakers. We test our theory by leveraging geotagged smartphone posts of Beijing netizens on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, to estimate precisely if, when, where, and how citizens engage in political talk. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares smartphone political talk at and away from focal places before and after focal times. We find netizens self-censor political talk significantly more at potentially troublesome spatial-temporal focal points.

Political scientists often wish to classify documents based on their content to measure variables, such as the ideology of political speeches or whether documents describe a Militarized Interstate Dispute. Simple classifiers often serve well in these tasks. However, if words occurring early in a document alter the meaning of words occurring later in the document, using a more complicated model that can incorporate these time-dependent relationships can increase classification accuracy. Long short-term memory (LSTM) models are a type of neural network model designed to work with data that contains time dependencies. We investigate the conditions under which these models are useful for political science text classification tasks with applications to Chinese social media posts as well as US newspaper articles. We also provide guidance for the use of LSTM models.

In previous work examining heritage language phonology, heritage speakers have often patterned differently from native speakers and late-onset second language (L2) learners with respect to overall accent and segmentals. The current study extended this line of inquiry to suprasegmentals, comparing the properties of lexical tones produced by heritage, native, and L2 speakers of Mandarin living in the U.S. We hypothesized that heritage speakers would approximate native norms for Mandarin tones more closely than L2 speakers, yet diverge from these norms in one or more ways. We further hypothesized that, due to their unique linguistic experience, heritage speakers would sound the most ambiguous in terms of demographic background. Acoustic data showed that heritage speakers approximated native-like production more closely than L2 speakers with respect to the pitch contour of Tone 3, durational shortening in connected speech, and rates of Tone 3 reduction in non-phrase-final contexts, while showing the highest levels of tonal variability among all groups. Perceptual data indicated that heritage speakers' tones differed from native and L2 speakers' in terms of both intelligibility and perceived goodness. Consistent with the variability results, heritage speakers were the most
difficult group to classify demographically. Taken together, these findings suggest that, with respect to tone, early heritage language experience can, but does not necessarily, result in a phonological advantage over L2 learners. Further, they add support to the view that heritage speakers are language users distinct from both native and L2 speakers.

This paper investigates basis spreads on index futures listed on the Taiwan Futures Exchange. We analyze the role of speculators and of informed trading in Taiwan's futures market using intraday data during the five-day pre-expiration period. We demonstrate that liquidity, volatility, and informed trading are each significantly positively related to spread magnitude, indicating that speculators may dominate arbitrageurs. While spreads have narrowed as the market has matured, liquidity and informed trading continue to widen spreads despite the fact that a naïve arbitrage strategy outperforms the market.

China's rapid and ongoing urbanisation has led to the expansion of the local state. The state, traditionally exhibited as physical institutions of government, has emerged virtually in recent years based on intricate network infrastructure systems, such as social media platforms. Scholars contend that a strong physical state infrastructure enhances government function and can increase citizens' life satisfaction; in contrast, the state's virtual presence is unlikely to exert a substantial independent impact because of its reliance on the state's physical infrastructure. In this research, we calibrated innovative measures of the state's physical and virtual presence. Combined with data from the 2018 Urbanisation and Quality of Life Survey conducted in 40 sampling sites undergoing rural–urban transition, we further assessed how the local state's physical and virtual presence is associated with citizens' self-reported life satisfaction in the context of China's national new-type urbanisation. Our results, based on three-level mixed-effects regressions, indicate that the local state's bricks-and-mortar institutions do not correlate with citizens' life satisfaction; rather, the establishment of a web-based, cost-effective, transparent, and coordinated virtual presence is associated with a higher level of life satisfaction among citizens. At a time when the Chinese central government emphasises its commitment to 'people-centred' urbanisation, the findings offer insight into the strategies that local governments could employ to improve governance quality and enhance citizens' well-being.