Reclaiming Chinese Society

The New Social Activism

You-tien Hsing, Ching Kwan Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135277284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Reclaiming Chinese Society analyses the mechanisms, processes and actors producing a wide spectrum of social and cultural changes in reform China. Contrary to most literature that emphasizes economic and political processes at the expense of Chinese society, this volume argues for the centrality of the social in understanding Chinese development.

Each of the eleven chapters addresses one type of grassroots activism, covering feminist activism, civic environmentalism, religious revival, violence, film, media, intellectuals, housing, citizenship and deprivation.

The wide-range of research styles used in this collection, including ethnography, regional comparison, quantitative and statistical analysis, interviews, textual and content analysis, offers students a methodologically rich vista to China Studies.

Written by subject experts and covering all aspects of Chinese Society, this book offers an authoritative overview of Chinese society. It is an invaluable resource for courses on Chinese Society and culture and will be of interest to students and scholars in Chinese and Asian studies.

1 Social activism in China

Agency and possibility

Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing

The thirtieth anniversary of the official launch of market reform in China coincided with a severe global financial crisis at the end of 2008. Bracing for a dramatic slowdown in economic growth after decades of reform-driven high speed growth and social change, which drew the country deep into the belly of global capitalism, “social stability” has become the most emphasized buzzword in political, policy, and academic circles. Chinese political legitimacy, observers caution, is so reliant on sustained economic growth that any interruption of the boom will call forth massive social unrest. Informing such a view is the assumption that political authoritarianism is the price that the Chinese populace has paid in exchange for economic development. Income growth buys consent and compliance, but once this bargain falters, rebellion is the likely consequence. This volume rejects this static view of Chinese society. The extensive research presented in these pages uncovers a broad array of modes of activism that is a product not of the current downturn but has been steadily developing over the past 30 years. In this process important elements of Chinese society have repeatedly asserted demands for rights, justice, accountability, and legality. Income growth is not a priori the sole, or even the central, concern of many of movements that have erupted throughout the reform era.

The rise in social activism has not escaped the attention of the Chinese leadership. A shift in official rhetoric toward “the social,” in the name of “constructing a harmonious society,” is a significant telltale sign, but the shift also masks a long and gradual process of responding to social ferment. Since the beginning of reform, the Communist leadership has struggled to balance “efficiency” and “justice.” By 1993, official rhetoric had settled on “efficiency first, and also justice.” By 2005, the pendulum had swung the other way, with the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership proclaiming “the primacy of social justice” and the need to “let 1.3 billion people enjoy the fruit of socio-economic development.”¹ This shift in official discourse has been accompanied by a plethora of social policies, such as rural tax reform, pension funds for rural residents, education subsidies to poor families, reform of labor contract law, and access to AIDS treatment, to mention several of the most important. These moves seem to signal a sensibility among the political elite that reform has reached a point where market liberalization alone is not a panacea to social development and political stability. Like many economic policies, the drive to achieve a “harmonious society” has appeared in the wake of and in response to an emergent tide of social discontent and agitation from below.

The changes in Chinese society during the reform era have always been deeply intertwined with, and as profound and complex as, those in the economic domain, since the two are so closely intertwined. China scholars have documented many of these social tendencies.² In this collection we zero in on processes, the various forms of activism, actors and strategies, ideas and interests – in short, the micro-foundations of an active society. We believe there is far more to “the social” realm than overt “mass disturbances,” the term employed by the Ministry of Public Security to label extra-legal protest. The chapters here demonstrate that legal mobilization, civic activism, and symbolic forms of subversion can provide avenues to change that are quieter, at times invisible, but may result in more sustainable progress than mass protest.

Micro-foundations: interest, identity, and idea

A premise of this volume is that collective social action is a prime mover of change. Society, including Chinese society, is not just a passive receptacle reacting to transformations in the economy or the state. For instance, a few researchers in this book discuss the rise and the role of social activists, or shehui huodongjia (社会活动家). Many of these individuals are fueled by an unusually strong civic impulse and commitment to promoting social justice and civic rights. These activist pioneers, some charismatic leaders, open new terrain for collective action and articulate new or suppressed identity claims. Sociological and political theories often slight individual-level explanations in favor of structural and institutional ones. Yet, our observation in this volume is that daring and driven individuals in reform China are pivotal to the formation of social movements, often transcending the boundary of the politically permissible, sowing the seeds for institutional change. In addition to these individuals, global social actors are increasingly salient. In tandem with the influx of capital, corporations, and goods – or globalization from above – China has also experienced a “globalization from below.”³ Transnational civil society furnishes discourses, values, cultural capital, funds, and organizational forms that Chinese citizens and groups have leveraged to create new communities of activism.

How then can we conceptualize or categorize the various types of activism in China? The reform period has witnessed an impressive rise in social activism by a wide range of social groups: workers, peasants, environmentalists, journalists, homeowners, feminists, religious communities, ethnic minorities, AIDS activists, and human rights advocates, among others. Parallel to these developments has been the rapid erosion of Communist Party-dominated social infrastructures, notably the work unit and urban neighborhood associations. The work unit, whether the factory or the rural work team, was formerly the foundational institution of state control over society, or what Michel Foucault would have deemed a powerful and ubiquitous conduit for achieving governmentality.⁴ The collapse of the work unit in step with large-scale layoffs from and privatization of state enterprises and decollectivization in the countryside, together with the opening of channels for large-scale migration, challenges us to grapple with the fragmented, dispersed, and fluid modes of state-society relations that have dominated the reform era.

Thus far, there has been scant effort to reconceptualize “Chinese society,” although scholars have offered a number of conceptualizations of the Chinese state, such as “local state corporatism,” the “predatory state,” the “entrepreneurial state,” “Chinese-style federalism,” and “state capitalism.” In some writings, “post-socialism” or “late socialism” are used as a general description of Chinese society, but these terms are devoid of content. The general sociological literature offers other tantalizing candidates, such as “network society,” “civil society,” “transnational society,” “post-industrial society,” etc. Our goal here is not to coin another totalizing term that risks concealing rather than revealing the complexity and heterogeneity of China’s emergent social formations. Instead, we attempt an initial typology of activism, distinguishing among the politics of redistribution, recognition, and representation, and compare their respective relations to state, market, and global society. In the following section, we discuss some findings that result from this exercise which, no matter how tentative and speculative, may serve as a heuristic framework for illustrating the sources of social activism.

Redistribution, recognition, and representation

As an initial framework, we propose a spectrum of politics defined by the goals at stake and out of which collective social actors are formed. They are the politics of redistribution, recognition, and representation. In reality, these strands of politics, far from being mutually exclusive, intertwine in multiple ways. But these ideal types are useful in accentuating the different grounds for social action and the varying trajectories they take.

The politics of (re) distribution entails struggles and claims for material interests among social groups or between social groups and state actors that spring from their common or differential class locations, whether these are defined by property ownership or productive roles. Not only does market competition bring a spectrum of results to various social groups, creating losers and winners, the market can also atomize and demobilize as much as constitute collective interests and provide resources and space for class-based and group-based activism. Also, redistributive struggles vary in terms of collective capacity and in their different relations to a diversity of government and enterprise and residential units. The chapters in this volume on rural conflicts, workers, homeowners, and urban residents show that economic interests are today playing out as much in public protests as in the legal and judicial systems and that some struggles are waged in both arenas whether simultaneously or sequentially. The law is a highly contested terrain to which conflicts of labor, land, and property are being channeled by the Chinese state. Making laws and reforming the legal system have led to some lively “rights protection” discourses and legal mobilization. The self-consciously articulated collective identities of the participants in these redistributive struggles are more grounded in citizenship than in class.

The second type of activism we term the politics of recognition, which is concerned with the discovery and articulation of needs previously denied or ignored, especially the demand for social recognition of certain groups’ moral status, political position, and identity.⁵ These are often challenges against cultural domination and have roots in “difference” from the dominant segments of society. We find it useful to think about recognition of needs as a ground for social formations conceptually distinct from material interests, yet such formations may in turn affect the material interests of diverse groups. In China social agitation has appeared to articulate new needs, form identity-based communities, and renegotiate the boundary between public and private, normal and abnormal, legitimate and illegitimate. Three chapters in this volume offer instances of recognition politics, including that of religious communities, feminist groups, and environmentalism. These often take the form of civic activism, often, but not always, non-confrontational, community-focused, routine associational activities, at times becoming overt oppositional protests.

Finally, the politics of representation is about expression of ideas and symbols. In this information-saturated age, the news media, film, print, arts and electronic publications constitute vibrant sites of contending ideas, expression, and information. But the creation of these sites entails contestation with state and market ideologies and apparatuses of control. They also bring new pressures and liberties arising from the marketplace. Culture producers, like journalists, filmmakers, and artists all play pivotal roles in carrying out symbolic contestations in their various realms of operation.

This typology leads to the following observations of social activism in China today, concerning the connection of global civil society and domestic social activism, the scope and mode of mobilization, strategies for engaging the state, and the role of the market in generating collectivities.

Uneven global–local linkages

A salient theme that has emerged across the chapters in this book is the uneven influence of globalization on Chinese society. Transnational organizations, networks, ideas, and resources have significant impacts on various domains of recognition and representation struggles but are conspicuously absent in redistributive politics.

Wang Zheng’s analysis of Chinese feminist campaigns to stop domestic violence points to the crucial influence of the United Nations, the Fourth World Women’s Conference, Indian feminist forums, the financial support of the Ford Foundation, and the flow of ideas (e.g. gender, women’s empowerment) and organizational forms (e.g. non-governmental organizations). Environmentalism, the focus of Guobin Yang, even more explicitly zeroes in on the critical role of “cultural translation” in the rise of China’s civic environmentalism, i.e. voluntary, non-disruptive and self-organized citizen action. He maintains that the dynamism of China’s environmental movement has roots in the skilled “social actors – cultural translators” in tapping global cultural resources in their efforts to negotiate China’s ambiguous political context. Seizing the moment created by two international events, specifically China’s unsuccessful bid in 1993 for the 2000 Olympics and the UN Women’s NGO forum in 1995, Chinese environmental activists appropriated the NGO form and applied a gamut of linguistic and symbolic tools to push their agenda. They speak of “sustainable development,” “public participation,” “grassroots initiatives,” and “nature–human harmony,” all of which point to a local appropriation of global idioms even though the substantive environmental values have indigenous origins. The Chinese state has even absorbed some of these terminologies into state policy.

Richard Madsen spotlights the difficult battle the Chinese state wages against competing global religious hierarchies in an age of porous borders and easy communication. The Chinese government staunchly reserves its monopoly on religious authority by recognizing only churches registered with the official Catholic and Protestant associations. The Vatican, however, has found ways of establishing communications with Catholics throughout China, appointing bishops and spawning a vigorous unregistered hierarchy claiming ultimate allegiance only to the Pope. Money flows into these churches through a global network of supporters. Pentecostalism is another case of fluid religious networks that have received a new lease on life in the reform period, energized by itinerant foreign evangelists now roaming the countryside and cities preaching to believers in private homes.

Researchers in the realm of cultural politics have likewise underscored the centrality of global connections and flows. Seio Nakajima finds an “international artistic logic of filmmaking” whereby directors not only depend on financial capital from overseas but also seek cultural capital accrued by winning recognition in international film festivals including Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. Moreover, the expanded importation of foreign films following China’s accession to the World Trade Organization has triggered a sense of crisis for the domestic film industry which was long insulated from global competition. Officials in the Film Bureau and the State General Administration of Radio, Film and Television have responded to these challenges in part by liberalizing regulations on film production, distribution and exhibition.

Zhongdang Pan documents how “bounded innovations” in the news media, including investigative reporting and audience research, are heavily influenced by international models. China Central Television, for instance, formed a joint-venture with a British-French firm to conduct ratings surveys to then provide a patina of “international standards” for the station. The state uses this as a tool for content control and as currency for negotiating with advertisers. In another instance, watchdog journalism and investigative reporting in the Chinese media have been heavily influenced by the American newsmagazine 60 Minutes in its format and spirit of in-depth investigation.

Max Woodworth analyzes the cultural politics surrounding redevelopment in Beijing by investigating a decade-long graffiti project by the artist Zhang Dali and a spate of heated online discussion over the demolition of the Qianmen neighborhood. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Zhang spray-painted thousands of heads around Beijing on the ruins of demolished buildings and on walls in residential areas marked with a Chinese “chai” character – the public signal that the building was slated for demolition. Experimental art here becomes a medium for expressing popular ambivalence and grievances about demolition in the city. In online discussion over Qianmen, the public engages in lively debates over the meanings and representations of urban transformation. In both cases, Deng’s claim that “development is the only hard principle” undergoes deep scrutiny.

Magnus Fiskesjö’s chapter on “repatriation activism” by patriotic Chinese antique collectors in alliance with semi-autonomous civil society groups offers yet another example of how the international arena can be leveraged to serve the construction of Chinese nationalism. Here is an example of a case in which social actors complement rather than undermine state goals. He shows how the buyback of Chinese treasures “lost” abroad by wealthy Chinese parallels the official campaign for the repatriation of Chinese artifacts, such as bronze pieces from the Yuanmingyuan plundered by invading foreigners at the end of the Qing Dynasty. These actions allow the Chinese state to claim for itself the role of protector of the Chinese past and restore to the motherland objects that had been spirited abroad.

In stark contrast to the penetration of global flows of ideas and resources in the politics of recognition and representation, there is little evidence that foreign discourses and organizations have significantly impacted redistributed activism and protests by workers, peasants, or even middle-class homeowners. Redistributive politics entail the distribution of resources like land, wages, pensions, and property, and making claims to various legal rights accorded and enforced by the state. These often involve localized interests aggregating in the work unit, factory, village, or neighborhood. Local implementation of national law and policy, or failure thereof, is typically central to these actions. Unlike the amorphous flow of universal values, abstract ideas, and virtual images, material interests are constituted, defined, and shared locally, giving rise to geographically confined activism. There is no global property rights movement to inspire the new generation of homeowners, nor is there a global housing rights movement to leverage, emulate, or connect with. Even on the labor front, the transnational labor movement has hardly galloped to the aid of workers abandoned by state-owned enterprises. Being primarily concerned with China’s alleged contribution to a race to the bottom in wages, transnational labor organizations have had little impact on the new generation of Chinese workers toiling in global factories. Only recently have service-oriented Chinese NGOs receiving international funding sprung up, but their effects on labor activism will take time to show. All this is not to deny that the anti-sweatshop movements and Wal-Mart unions have targeted or come to China or that overseas housing movements are unheard of in China. Our...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• 1 Social activism in China
• Part I Politics of (re)distribution
• Part II Politics of recognition
• Part III Politics of representation