Much research on contentious politics focuses on the origins and dynamics of contention or the impact of contention on policy change. Although some studies have delved into the state reactions to contention, relatively little is known about the outcome or effectiveness of state responses, especially in non-democratic settings. This paper attempts to fill this gap and to uncover the policy feedback effect in non-democratic settings by studying the Chinese state's repression of violent incidents targeted at healthcare personnel and facilities (yinao). I argue that without comprehensive healthcare reforms to tackle the root causes of yinao, state repression of yinao generates unintended adverse outcomes, causing the doctor–patient relationship to deteriorate. Using the difference-in-differences method with China Family Panel Studies data for 2014 and 2016, I find that the criminalization of yinao diminishes public trust in doctors and confidence in hospitals’ competence and instead increases public concerns about the healthcare system.

The relationship between economic inequality and political support is not well established in previous empirical studies in part because people commonly misperceive the level of economic inequality. Moreover, people perceiving high economic inequality may not oppose the incumbent government or political regime because they consider the inequality fair. To better capture the political outcomes of economic inequality, we investigate the effects of perceived distributive unfairness on regime support. Using data collected from the fourth wave of Asian Barometer Survey (2014–2016), we find that perceived unfairness decreases support for the current political regime. We further examine three mechanisms through which distributive unfairness dampens regime support: changes of political value orientation, redistribution demand, and social trust. We find that political value orientation plays a greater mediating role than redistribution demand and social trust, meaning that distributive unfairness depresses regime support largely through its erosive impact on citizens’ affective identification with authoritarian values that underpin regime support in East Asian societies. Moreover, we find that distributive unfairness is more detrimental to regime support in autocracies and lower-income groups. Our study corroborates the importance of distributive fairness for regime legitimacy and highlights the vulnerability of autocracies to distributive unfairness.