Featuring contributions from top scholars and emerging stars in the field, the Handbook of Protest and Resistance in China captures the complexity of protest and dissent in contemporary China, while simultaneously exploring a number of unifying themes. Examining how, when, and why individuals and groups have engaged in contentious acts, and how the targets of their complaints have responded, the volume sheds light on the stability of China’s existing political system, and its likely future trajectory.
Although contemporary China is a repressive state, protests and demonstrations have increased almost tenfold between 2005 and 2015. This is an astounding statistic when one considers that Marxist-Leninist regimes of the past tolerated little or no public dissent. How can protests become so common in an autocratic state? What are the trends of repression and mobilization? This collection helps to answer these compelling questions through in-depth analyses of several Chinese protest movements and state responses. The chapters examine the opportunities and constraints for protest mobilization and explains their importance for understanding contemporary Chinese society.
Although academics have paid much attention to contentious politics in China and elsewhere, research on the outcomes of social protests, both direct and indirect, in non-democracies is still limited. In this new work, Yongshun Cai combines original fieldwork with secondary sources to examine how social protest has become a viable method of resistance in China and, more importantly, why some collective actions succeed while others fail. Cai looks at the collective resistance of a range of social groups—peasants to workers to homeowners—and explores the outcomes of social protests in China by adopting an analytical framework that operationalizes the forcefulness of protestor action and the cost-benefit calculations of the government. He shows that a protesting group's ability to create and exploit the divide within the state, mobilize participants, or gain extra support directly affects the outcome of its collective action. Moreover, by exploring the government's response to social protests, the book addresses the resilience of the Chinese political system and its implications for social and political developments in China.
Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square occupation, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau have experienced an increase in and persistence of mass gatherings, demonstrations, and blockades staged as a means of protesting the ways in which people are. In this book, Shih-Diing Liu argues that these popular protests are poorly understood, because they are viewed through the lens of protests and occupations globally, with insufficient attention given to their distinctively local aspects. He provides a better account of these distinctively Chinese-style occupations by describing, contextualizing, and analyzing a range of relevant recent case studies. Liu draws on theoretical concepts developed by Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and other contemporary critical theorists and shows the the importance of considering bodily, spatial, and visual dimensions of these protests. By seeing them as staged, contentious performances, the author demonstrates how these precarious populations mobilize their bodies and symbolic resources offered by the Chinese government to open up temporary spaces of appearance to articulate their grievances, and argues that this kind of embodied and performative analysis should be more widely conducted in studies of popular politics worldwide.
The origin of political modernity has long been tied to the Western history of protest and revolution, the currents of which many believe sparked popular dissent worldwide. Reviewing nearly one thousand instances of protest in China from the eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, Ho-fung Hung charts an evolution of Chinese dissent that stands apart from Western trends. Hung samples from mid-Qing petitions and humble plaints to the emperor. He revisits rallies, riots, market strikes, and other forms of contention rarely considered in previous studies. Drawing on new world history, which accommodates parallels and divergences between political-economic and cultural developments East and West, Hung shows how the centralization of political power and an expanding market, coupled with a persistent Confucianist orthodoxy, shaped protesters' strategies and appeals in Qing China. This unique form of mid-Qing protest combined a quest for justice and autonomy with a filial-loyal respect for the imperial center, and Hung's careful research ties this distinct characteristic to popular protest in China today. As Hung makes clear, the nature of these protests prove late imperial China was anything but a stagnant and tranquil empire before the West cracked it open. In fact, the origins of modern popular politics in China predate the 1911 Revolution. Hung's work ultimately establishes a framework others can use to compare popular protest among different cultural fabrics. His book fundamentally recasts the evolution of such acts worldwide.
Social science theories of contentious politics have been based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from the European and American experience, and classic texts in the field make no mention of either the Chinese Communist revolution or the Cultural Revolution -- surely two of the most momentous social movements of the twentieth century. Moreover, China's record of popular upheaval stretches back well beyond this century, indeed all the way back to the third century B.C. This book, by bringing together studies of protest that span the imperial, Republican, and Communist eras, introduces Chinese patterns and provides a forum to consider ways in which contentious politics in China might serve to reinforce, refine or reshape theories derived from Western cases.
Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.
This Handbook gives a wide-ranging account of the theory and practice of human rights in China, viewed against international standards, and China’s international engagements around human rights. The Handbook is organised into the following sections: contested meanings; international dimensions; economic and social rights; civil and political rights; rights in/action and access to justice; political dimensions of human rights in Greater China; and new frontiers.
