Research Question: How do citizens react to authoritarian responsiveness? To investigate this question, we study how Chinese citizens reacted to a novel government initiative which enabled social media users to publicly post requests for COVID-related medical assistance.

Data: First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we directly expose subjects to real help-seeking posts, in which we find that viewing posts did not improve subjects' ratings of government effectiveness, and in some cases worsened them. Second, we analyze over 10,000 real-world Weibo posts to understand the political orientation of the discourse around help-seekers. We find that negative and politically critical posts far outweighed positive and laudatory posts, complementing our survey experiment results. To contextualize our results, we develop a theoretic framework to understand the effects of different types of responsiveness on citizens' political attitudes. We suggest that citizens' negative reactions in this case were primarily influenced by public demands for help, which illuminated existing problems and failures of governance.

Methods: In the analysis of social media content, we employed techniques of natural language processing, including dictionary-based methods and supervised machine learning methods. In the analysis of survey experiment, we used conventional analysis of experimental results, like calculating causal effect of treatment with difference-in-means.

Challenges: The survey experiment is collected through a commercial company who only holds a convenience sample, meaning that we cannot generalize our conclusions to the general Chinese population. Also, the experiment was costly. The collection of social media data in China faces the challenge of censorship, so the anti-government contents may have already been removed by the authority before they enter our dataset, so any observation we have based on the dataset can be biased.

Findings: We find that negative and politically critical posts far outweighed positive and laudatory posts, complementing our survey experiment results. To contextualize our results, we develop a theoretic framework to understand the effects of different types of responsiveness on citizens' political attitudes. We suggest that citizens' negative reactions in this case were primarily influenced by public demands for help, which illuminated existing problems and failures of governance.