From April 7 to April 10, 2026, doctoral researcher Xiaoyu XIONG of the Research Training Group GRK 2833 “East Asian Futures” participated in a joint session of workshops hosted by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) at the University of Innsbruck. Mr. XIONG took part in the workshop “Social and Psychological Factors of Mass Support for Authoritarianism”, presenting his research on April 8 with a talk titled “Teacher Policy and Regime Security in China: Co-evolution of Quality and Morality Discourse”.

His presentation examined teacher policy in post-reform China and its relationship to the state’s concern with maintaining regime support. It traced the shifts and continuities in the state’s political expectations of teachers to untangle a central puzzle: how does the post-reform state balance the need to professionalize teachers for economic development with the need to mobilize them for ideological conformity?