Abstract
This paper proposes a new framework to analyze social contentions in China from the perspectives of contention motives and mobilization channels, explains why traditional forms of contention do not undermine the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule, and identifies anti-system contention as a distinctive form of contention that poses the greatest challenge to the CCP’s rule. Through analysis of political opportunity structures and mobilization mechanisms that allowed anti-system contentions to rise, this paper argues that since such contentions mainly consist of value-oriented social actors mobilized via informal channels, it would require the Chinese regime to adapt to a more targeted and coordinated model of repression to address the new challenges. The paper further provides empirical case studies to show the effectiveness of the regime’s adaptive repression and shows that anti-system contentions in China face their own hurdle to develop into more prominent contentions.
Social contentions in contemporary China
The Chinese authoritarian state has been noted for its rigidity and durability ever since its foundation (Nathan, 2003; Shambaugh, 2009). Throughout different global waves of democratization and regime turbulences, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully weathered multiple challenges to its authoritarian rule. Since 1989, it seems that the regime has so far blocked nationwide large-scale protests and threats against the Chinese state. Yet this does not translate to a picture of autocrats sitting safely on a dead social volcano. While not having to deal with acute eruptions of overwhelming social unrests, the CCP has been busy coping with daily challenges arising from virtually every corner of the society. Various government and unofficial estimates all point to the fact that the number of social contentions in China has kept rising to an annual count of 90,000 to 180,000. Their forms range from petitions (shangfang), strikes, public assemblies, marches, and demonstrations, to extreme forms of taking hostages, beating party cadres and government officials, or small-scale armed resistance.
As the number of these contentions rises, their participants also infiltrate many parts of the social fabric, including peasants (O’Brien and Li, 2005), workers (Lee, 2007), urban residents (Huang and Yip, 2012), and dissidents (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002). Additionally, since the inception of the internet, protest participants have been using the web to mobilize, organize, and broadcast their resistance, which has given new shape to their activities (Bondes and Schucher, 2014; Esarey and Xiao, 2011; Yang, 2003). In an effort to explain the paradoxical coexistence of China’s ever-increasing social contentions and strong authoritarian durability, this paper seeks to break down social contentions into nuanced types and analyze how and why one particular type of contention shapes the dynamic of China’s regime durability and state–society relations.
Researchers have done extensive works on many kinds of social contentions in contemporary China. O’Brien (1996) raised the concept of “rightful resistance” to analyze rural protests in China. Such protestors would often frame their claims in accordance with the regime’s policy and ideology discourse. O’Brien and Li (2006) further classified Chinese peasant resistance movements as “legal resistance,” or “policy based resistance.” In studying labor movements, Hurst and O’Brien (2002) proposed a type of resistance consisting of unemployed former state-owned enterprise workers and retirees, calling it “moral economic resistance.” Xi Chen (2007) proposed the “opportunistic trouble” strategy, in which protestors decide to act however and whenever they think they are most likely to obtain their interests.
We argue that despite the existing literature’s important contribution in helping us understand the state–society relationships in China, they do not resolve the paradox of a large number of protests in a generally stable authoritarian state. In fact, most of the contentions under study, such as anti-levy rural protests in the 1990s and confrontations against the government on disputed eminent domain cases in the past decade, do not pose severe challenges to the regime’s survival.
There are three reasons to explain this paradox. First, the claims of most such contentions are parochial and personal interest-oriented. Protestors are primarily citizens whose own interests are violated by local government actions. This constrains their claims toward only a fraction of the regime apparatus, without questioning the fundamental aspects of the regime. Such contentions also tend to be geographically limited, very often locating in only one village or town, which tends to go under the news radar for a country with almost 700,000 villages. Contentions tend to stay where they are without diffusion, and tend to have limited participation without coalescing with other actors. These factors all reduce the likelihood that such contentions will escalate into a broad mass contention that shakes up the pillars of the regime.
Second, such protestors often do not question, and even voice support for the Chinese political system, thus showing no fundamental conflict with the system. As it is shown in O’Brien’s studies, many protestors quote official ideology in support of their own claims. Researches also show that protestors engaged in local, personal interest-oriented contentions tend to show lower trust for local government, while maintaining a high level of trust in central government (Li, 2004). Scholars propose that such a dynamic is achieved by the Communist regime’s intentional design of administrative hierarchy (Cai, 2008). Local governments play the bad cop and take all the blame when there are backlashes in the society, and the central government stays away from problems and often plays the good cop by coming to rescue protestors from their plights. The regime receives credit by turning contentions from potentially against the state to dependent on the state.
Third, the regime has accrued enough institutional and financial capacity to deal with routinized daily contentions. Many rural, environmental and labor contentions have already become institutionalized, with repertoires and discourses familiar to both the protestors and the regime. People would most often resort to petitions, which are directly submitted to the petition bureaus in different levels of government and then wait to be processed by the government. Protests, strikes, and demonstrations are legally possible but practically always blocked by the police bureaus who do not issue permissions as required by law. Yet these forms of contentions still go on and the government has prepared standardized procedures to dismiss mass gatherings. The regime has also established a stability-maintenance system to institutionalize their effort to dissuade such contentions (Su et al., 2013). Moreover, with the ever-growing financial capacity of the second largest economy in the world, the regime is often in a powerful position to offer protestors satisfactory compensations to resolve troubles. For instance, the anti-levy contentions were once rampant in rural China, when poor peasants violently resisted local government excessive charges. As the Chinese economy grew, abundant fiscal revenue led the government to gradually abolish the agricultural taxes and most other levies within 5 years. The once severe rural contentions then disappeared quietly across the nation (Smith, 2010). Since such grievances can be easily addressed by the state’s overwhelming capacity, they do not pose long-lasting danger to the stability of the regime.
Hence, while the accident of a street vendor setting himself on fire triggered a national turmoil in Tunisia that finally led to regime change, the grievances of many Chinese citizens who receive a similar level of treatment from the state do not grow into a threat to the rule of the regime. That being said, contentions discussed above are not the only type of contentions in China, and we argue that a distinct form of contention, anti-system contention has been burgeoning in China. It receives special attentions from the CCP regime and is a key factor to understand how the regime and society co-evolve and adapt as the authoritarian regime keeps hanging on.
Anti-system contentions in China
We define anti-system contentions as social contentions in authoritarian regimes that fit into the criteria listed here. First, anti-system contentions primarily involve value-oriented social actors, that is, people who participate in actions against the state not for their own material gains (as opposed to peasants who fight against the government for excessive levy, or urban residents who fight against chemical plants projects in their neighborhood). It is possible that the initiator and some key organizers of such contentions may be interest-oriented, but participants of such contentions have to be value-oriented, that is, non-stakeholders who do not have direct material interests in movement claims. For instance, many petitioners who started out to seek remedies for their own grievances only to find out the futility of the process are transformed into active members of other social contentions that do not necessarily pertain to their own interests. A close inter-personal network then developed among such petitioners that allowed them to mobilize and organize effectively for contention.
Second, anti-system contentions are mobilized via informal channels. By informal channels, we mean that the contentions’ mobilizing structures are predominantly informal (McCarthy, 1996), and their repertoires and discourse are also informal, which means that such contentions’ forms are flexible, innovative and often disapproved by the state. The fact that the state does not permit or endorse such contentions’ repertoires and discourse puts the protestors in direct opposition to the regime, which makes them more confrontational and dangerous to the regime. Most notably, online activities have become an important channel for Chinese activists to organize and coordinate contentions in unprecedented forms.
Last but not least, we are speaking of contentions in the context of an authoritarian regime. It is because of this context that virtually all value-oriented contentions via informal channels lead to some kind of challenges against the regime’s rule. To borrow the term “anti-system parties” who compete in democratic elections to threat democracies (Linz and Stepan, 1978), “anti-system contentions” work in authoritarian regimes to threaten autocrats.
Situating anti-system contentions in the big picture of Chinese social contentions, we propose a 2 × 2 chart (Table 1) to show where anti-system contentions stand in relations to various other contentious activities. The upper-left cell covers most of the social contentions discussed in the previous section. They happen locally and the agents are those people whose interests are directly connected to their contentious activities. Examples of this type include protests against house demolition projects, laborers’ movements, environmental protection acts, or property rights defense movements, etc. These contentions are often collectively referred to as “Rights Defense Movement”. 1 The upper-right cell covers what the Chinese government refers to as “Mass Incidents”; Participants’ primary motive is still interest-oriented, but they often take more extreme course of actions, such as destroying public goods, threatening government official’s safety, or even upsetting the local social order. Notable cases include the Shishou County incident 2 and the Weng’an Incident. 3
Contention types in China.
The lower-left cell includes many other contentions that pose challenges to the state, but not to the extent of anti-system contentions. These contentions are primarily mobilized by value-oriented actors, such as human right activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They engage in social contentions for claims that are not directly related to their personal interests, but for general values such as religious freedom, judicial transparency and environmental public goods. Their chief difference to the anti-system contentions lies in their acceptability to the state, or dependence on state approval. In China, human rights lawyers have to rely on the state to approve their bar qualification (which is annually re-authorized by the Ministry of Justice) and allow their active practice. NGOs have to keep official registrations with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and their fundraising and employment activities are also heavily regulated at the discretion of various government departments. By making such contentions highly dependent on state acquiescence, the regime remains powerful when it comes to punishing “troublemakers”. In order to make their contentions acceptable to the state, actors must often limit themselves in both claims and actions. Once they cross the line and become repressed by the state, their actions will enter the zone of anti-system contentions.
The lower-right cell then represents the anti-system contentions. We argue that these contentions are important to the survival logic of the Chinese authoritarian regime for three reasons. First, since actors involved in anti-system contentions are value-oriented, their claims are very hard to be satisfied by the regime without making fundamental concessions regarding the political system 4 . Therefore, it is more difficult for the regime to co-opt or placate such protestors, which will make contentions more persistent. The contention claims also often pose direct or indirect challenges to the legitimacy of the rule of the regime, making such activities more dangerous to the regime.
Second, the fact that participants of anti-system contentions are primarily value-oriented also expands the constituents of the contentions. Participants will not likely to be geographically concentrated in certain localities where some policies are implemented. Anti-system contentions tend to involve participants scattered across the nation in various professions and social status, with different social capital and networks. Such heterogeneity makes it harder for the state to come up with a general strategy to wipe out all protestors, and hence anti-system contentions are more likely to sustain government repression or at least be more recurrent than other types of contentions.
Third, since anti-system contentions are organized via informal channels, they are less dependent on and controlled by the state. Therefore, the state is less able to follow institutionalized mechanisms to target and repress such contentions, as it often has no experience with non-traditional contentions. Participants of anti-system contentions used to organize “group side-walking” to skirt official discretion of allowing demonstrations, they also create tons of innuendos and puns to convey messages and mobilize, leaving the censoring apparatus far behind those linguistic and organizational innovations.
Scholars such as Minxin Pei (2003) have divided contentious activities in China since 1989 into “ordinary resistance” and “dissident resistance.” The former’s participants normally come from the ordinary masses, and they fight for specific interests. In contrast, the latter’s participants are primarily intellectuals and activists whose aims are far more political. It should be noted that anti-system contentions include but are not limited to explicit political dissidence. Actors do not have to engage in open criticism of the authoritarian rule to qualify for anti-system contentions, so long as their claims and acts (explicitly or implicitly) clash with the fundamental interest of the regime. Examples of this type include: the Deng Yujiao incident; 5 the Sun Zhigang incident; 6 etc.
The 2 × 2 chart in Table 1 of course cannot categorically differentiate social contentions in China. A local contention with only rural victims involved could stay on as a right-defense contention, but it could also escalate into a riot if the policy problem persists and impact more people in the same locality. It could also evolve into another different category if outsider lawyers or NGOs get involved to aid contentions, or if more information dissemination leads activists nationwide to come to help and organize new contentious campaigns which will become anti-system contentions.
Speaking of the last possibility, the internet in China has greatly aided in spreading awareness for each of the public incidents that have attracted widespread interest since 2002, a factor we consider as key to the rise of anti-system contentions. Other forms of contentions today of course also use the internet to varying extent, but the degree to which anti-system contentions rely on the internet for spreading information, organizing, and mobilizing is much higher. While Chinese citizens’ online activities have received some scholarly attention, such as descriptions of netizen strategies and behavior (Esarey and Xiao, 2008), political resistance movements (Béja, 2009; Pu, 2010), and the ways that the government now permits more “internet vigilantism” (Herold, 2008), there remains a gap in connecting these netizens’ online behavior to the larger development of offline social contentions. Furthermore, most of these articles only provide descriptions of netizens’ online activities up until 2008, when the state has not crafted a pattern to deal with such contentions.
Anti-system contentions existed in Chinese contentious politics before the age of the internet, as political dissidence was a key factor that led to the 1989 pro-democracy movement. A few years after 1989, intellectuals once again began publishing public letters expressing their strong political demands. For example, in March 1994, Xu Liangying and others called for the government to stop persecution against dissidents and release people who had been imprisoned for speaking out for human rights and liberty. In 1995, Wang Ganchang and 45 others called for an end to restricted speech and renewed discussion of the Tiananmen Square incident. However, owing to the continuous high pressure from the post-1989 government and the small extent to which contentious ideas circulated, anti-system contentions in the 1990s did not have any noticeable effect on Chinese society at the national level.
After the year 2000 when the internet had become more commonly used in China, contentious protestors quickly learned how to utilize its functions to express their views and to organize and mobilize resistance movements. Thus online citizen or “netizen” movements came into existence. The earliest netizen movement began in 2002; 7 after 2002, public letters published on the internet and group netizen signature petitions became the most common contentious repertoires of netizen movements, and they are still in use today.
Netizen movements’ contentious repertoires began to diversify after 2003. In this year, there were 4 incidents that had a deep impact: the Sun Zhigang incident; the Huang Jing incident; 8 the Liu Di incident; 9 and the Du Daobin incident. 10 Among these, the Sun Zhigang incident received the most media coverage and became the most widely known. Surrounding this incident, there gradually formed a new repertoire of contention: internet onlooking (wangluo weiguan). The elements of this repertoire included: media reports; public letters; acts of artistic expression; and internet opinion leaders posting their remarks. 11
Internet on looking has usually taken the following form: a certain incident attracts widespread comments on internet forums and eventually becomes a popular discussion topic, which leads to its publication in the media, attracting even more subsequent attention. Popular internet intellectuals publish articles online or in the media commenting on the events, and thereby spur internet followers in various forums to join with them in putting forth their own opinions. Internet opinion leaders may then write a public letter calling for people to sign their names on a collective petition. Human rights lawyers provide legal advice and support, and people begin putting on displays of public artistic expression. In addition to internet opinion leaders, human rights lawyers, and media reporters’ direct involvement in the incident, other internet followers post comments to express their support and interest. Because it attracts such extensive public interest, the media is driven to report on the event, thereby creating comprehensive public opinion pressure. Over a long period of time, internet on looking has become netizen movements’ primary mode of resistance.
From the start of 2003 to the end of 2011, many anti-system contentions had been happening in quick succession. As their participants increased in number and regional representation, their influence also had deepened and spread far and wide. In fact, many movements transcended China’s borders, gathering supporters and influence internationally. Such contentions uniquely display tendencies of being proactive, politicized, decentralized, and having a snowball organizing effect. Moreover, they were in a process of incessant evolution and development. They cannot be explained as reactive resistance, as policy-based resistance, or as interest-oriented actions. This distinct form of contentions then deserves explanations for its origins and development mechanisms.
Mechanisms of anti-system contentions
We think it is important to look at the origin and evolution of anti-system contentions in China from perspectives of political opportunity structures and mobilization mechanisms. As Tarrow (2011: 16) puts it, “contentious politics emerges in response to changes in political opportunities and threats when participants perceive and respond to a variety of incentives: material and ideological, partisan and group-based, long-standing and episodic.” Once an inconceivable scene in pre-1978 Communist China, mass social contentions were able to develop through the political opportunities provided by the changing social and political landscape in China since 1992. Meanwhile, mobilization mechanisms would best explain how anti-system contentions come into today’s shape and adapt as the state and society evolve.
Political opportunities structure
The recession of state control and the rise of the private sector
According to Tang Tsou’s (1994: 69) terminology, before 1978, the Chinese state operated as a “total state”. The government maintained total control over all politics, economics, and society. The majority of people at the time were incorporated into state control mechanisms such as People’s Communes and danwei (place of employment), while those left outside these bodies were placed under the control of neighborhood committees. China’s government, having assumed control over the nation’s economic resources, made the public completely dependent on their system for their livelihoods. To leave one’s danwei or commune would in general result in destitution and ruin (Walder, 1986).
The 1989 Tiananmen Square incident had cast many doubts on the course of China’s reform and opening up. However, following Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992, China entered an era of increased economic marketization, and the state’s control over society gradually began to relax. During the 1990s, employment opportunities in state-owned enterprises rapidly decreased. Concurrently, private enterprises’ economic strength suddenly skyrocketed. This led more and more workers to find jobs in the private sector or even to start their own private businesses, thereby breaking off their dependence on the system. In the following decade, millions of people left their places of hukou residence to seek work in new cities, effectively throwing off the system’s economic and political control over their lives. Consequently, participating in contentious activities no longer necessarily led to economic ruin. Now, the majority of political entrepreneurs operate far outside state or danwei control. To put it another way, many political entrepreneurs like rights defense lawyers or movement reporters have created their own employment beyond and against government control.
The development of contentious claims
In China’s new netizen movements, the most frequently used contentious claims are simply demands for universal values such as liberty, human rights, democracy, civil society, judicial justice, or anti-corruption. Several sources aided in the formation of these contentious claims.
The first source lies in the changes in values, changes in state policies regarding rights, and changes in shared expectations about behavior that have increased the public’s awareness of their own rights (Lorentzen and Scoggins, 2015). The second source comes from the relatively free speech that internet dissidents have been able to use in their online discussions. Research has pointed out that the Chinese censorship machine is far more interested in censoring speeches that have immediate potential in inciting collective actions than they are in paying attention to speeches that are only critical of the regime (King et al., 2013). Influential opinion leaders’ audacious speeches have enabled the spreading of clear and accurate descriptions of the meanings of these value-laden words, thereby helping an increasing number of people accept and understand them.
Thirdly, the rise of China’s “marketized media” has also promoted the spread of these values. China’s economic growth and increasing social diversity have stimulated the society’s appetite for all things cultural, recreational and informational. Official media responded to this new demand by supplying “marketized media” sources such as popular newspapers and magazines; 12 the public’s new craving for more open viewpoints and more information has also spurred certain “marketized media” sources to become bolder in presenting criticisms.
While the Chinese government keeps censoring the media’s content, it has also long given the news media the task of gathering information on local problems which allowed the publication of reports of high-profile local scandals and criticisms of local governments and officials (Lorentzen, 2014). On the other hand, the profit-driven “marketized media” has increasingly adapted to the tastes, preferences and values of the public. Popular news sections, such as columns, opinions and commentaries often scrutinize the behavior of local officials, national policies and various social phenomena. While the “marketized media” is still state-owned, it offers a relatively open platform for free expression that differs from the state’s official ideology.
In sum, the “marketized media” has diminished the effectiveness of the authoritarian regime’s control over information and expression while spreading greater public awareness of universal values.
The dissipation of political apathy
Ordinary political resistance participants by the very nature of their identity keep a high degree of interest in politics. During the 1990s, a wave of political apathy had swept over the nation, but after the year 2000, attitudes began to change because of transformations in class characteristics, policies, information sharing methods, and because of structural flaws.
Chinese society is home to a vast number of people who have had their interests harmed, such as unemployed labor, low wage workers, migrants, landless peasants, or victims of the unjust legal system, etc. To protect their remaining interests or rights, people in this group must pay close attention to politics (Lorentzen and Scoggins, 2015). People’s awareness of their rights has grown in recent years. Following China’s economic development, the government has put forth all kinds of people-oriented public welfare policies. In order to ensure and check the implementation of these policies, the public needs to keep a close eye on regional political developments. Marketized media has also strengthened the public’s interest in politics with their coverage of issues that have harmed the public good such as high housing prices, the income gap, serious corruption, environment pollution, etc. The interaction of these elements has brought about a reawakening of political consciousness in the Chinese public. 13
The declining fear of government and the incentives associated with resistance
As already mentioned, the number of resistance participants in today’s China has increased largely because people have become more daring. Those who have entered into non-danwei employment, individual businessmen, and migrant workers, etc. have not only thrown off the system’s economic control, but also have freed themselves from the authorities’ coercive propagandized thought control. Opinion leaders and political entrepreneurs have been the first to explore the new reaches of this freedom. Their bold speeches and audacious resistance activities have become models for other netizens, showing them that one need not fear the government. After 1989, officials’ reactions towards several high pressure protests were actually quite low-key, which prompted the youth of the following decades to grow up without any memory of or fear towards government repression.
Government punishment towards resistance activities in all actuality is rarely harsh, as they very infrequently prosecute activists and instead primarily only take them to “drink tea”. Often after their tea drinking experiences, activists will post written accounts of their experiences on the internet, and as a consequence, readers slowly have overcome their fear of government reprisal. With more and more people having been taken to “drink tea,” this experience has become an acclaimed internet symbol of one’s courage and spirit and a “rite of passage.” Moreover, the mutually supportive social network also lowers participants’ estimation of potential risks. Being chosen as a target for repression has become an honor and brings activists political capital, which has encouraged more people to take the risk.
Mobilization mechanisms
The lack of contention resolution channels
The causes of social contention in Chinese society include the serious income gap, government official corruption, civil rights abuse, an unjust legal system, environmental pollution, and many others. Consequently, many citizens live with a strong sense of relative deprivation. Moreover, they lack both the economic resources and the political resources to defend their interests. For example, workers are not allowed to establish their own labor unions independent of the government-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions. When any rights abuse victim tries to put forth an appeal against the government or an enterprise before the courts, they have a very difficult time obtaining legal support. Regarding petitions (shangfang), which are China’s unique channel of contention resolution, many local governments will harass and attack citizens who file such petitions. Public protests and other contentious repertoires often used in Western countries almost never obtain the Chinese government’s endorsement. Owing to this serious lack of legal contention resolution channels, victims and other people started using informal channels almost immediately after their inception to express their dissatisfaction and resistance.
The emergence of political entrepreneurs
As Charles Tilly (2004: 13) puts it, “As compared with locally grounded forms of popular politics, social movements depend heavily on political entrepreneurs for their scale, durability, and effectiveness”. Indeed, the majority of China’s anti-system contentions have relied on the leadership of political entrepreneurs. Their ranks are formed of university or college professors, reporters, lawyers, media workers and dissidents as well as other professional workers, and enterprise owners and executives, etc.
Political entrepreneurs’ role consists of many duties and practices. Naturally, political entrepreneurs’ methods are as varied as the events they mobilize against. Generally, political entrepreneurs’ first important role is to sift through the many rights abuse or other types of incidents that occur regularly and choose events to analyze. These political entrepreneurs clearly define the contentious movement’s program claims and publish them in articles and public letters. Writing with audacious language that cuts to the heart of whatever issue they have discovered, they stimulate people’s interest and build support. In so doing, they arouse participants’ sense of their shared “identity claims” (Tilly, 2004: 12). Their works have a snowballing effect on the readers: those who read their works tell others, thus gathering an increasing amount of internet followers’ attention and sparking responses from the general public. Another way political entrepreneurs build support is by hosting large online discussions, which attract many followers not only because of the entrepreneurs’ fame and acclaim but also for the fresh information they are able to give out. These entrepreneurs are the architects of most new contentious repertoires. They are the minds that create richly diverse and effective forms of resistance activities to transform netizens’ claims into action.
Two of the most well-known examples of political entrepreneurs’ work come from artist Ai Weiwei. 14 Firstly, after his studio had been demolished in November 2010, Ai Weiwei invited netizens to attend a dinner – a banquet of river crabs, which have ironic symbolism stemming from the Chinese homonym “social harmony.” In the end, it is estimated that 1000 netizens attended to demonstrate their mutual support for Ai Weiwei and their contempt for the government’s fake “social harmony.” On another occasion in November 2011, after the government fined Ai Weiwei 152.2 million RMB (2.3 Million USD) for purported tax evasion, many people offered to help him pay the fee. At their behest, he used the internet to broadcast a request to netizens to loan him money to pay an 8.45 million RMB deposit in order to guarantee his legal standing in the appeal of the tax evasion case. In only 15 days, by using websites, cash, bank money transfers and anonymously throwing money into his yard, over 27,000 people donated 8.2 million RMB. Many people demonstrated great pride at having helped Ai Weiwei. 15 Through these examples, Ai Weiwei quintessentially demonstrated a political entrepreneur’s creativity and ability to bring people together under a common identity for a common cause.
During long-term resistance movements, entrepreneurs develop a sort of moral charisma; they become the representatives and symbols of resistance movements. As resistance activities’ frequency has increased, political entrepreneurs’ influential power has also grown, with some reaching beyond the internet realm to the traditional public media, and many of them have become public political dissidents subsequently.
The emergence of mobilization means
Due to the atrophied development of civil society before the rise of the internet, national resistance movements had almost no chance of occurring. After the internet came about, people’s ways of communicating with and relating to each other changed. Currently, there are two identified methods that bring together resistance scattered around the country: mobilization via the internet; and mobilization via interpersonal networks. The two methods are often combined by resistant people in pursuit of their cause.
Even though the Chinese government still maintains strict censorship control over internet users’ speech and has established the “Great Firewall of China,” it cannot completely shut down discussions or the sharing of information. In the last ten years, the internet has become the most up to date platform for new information, the number one source for the most incisive and audacious speeches, as well as the most effective tool for mobilization. At the same time, after many rounds of protests and contentious activities, resistance participants have become familiar with each other and have begun interacting with each other offline. They often will host dinners together, creating the Chinese pun, “fanzui,” which means both “eating and drinking” and committing a “crime.” By getting together to eat, drink, and criticize the government, they thumb a figurative nose at the current political regime. At first, political entrepreneurs formed the majority of this group, but over time many ordinary netizens have joined their ranks. They are the most dedicated and proactive discussion forum and microblog contributors, and have now become the central force powering contentious activities.
Resistance repertoires
During the process of developing netizen movements, a certain contentious repertoire has formed which, among many things, includes on looking, public letters, “human flesh hunts” where netizens expose all the personal information of the officials who committed an injustice, and artistic expression. The most important item in this contentious repertoire is on looking, including internet on looking and on-site on looking. Similar to the previously explained internet on looking, on-site on looking means non-stakeholding netizens go to a site where an incident is taking place to conduct surveys, interview local people, and express support for the incident’s victim. Though when asked by police, they innocently say they are simply there to “buy soy sauce,” netizens’ presence serves to express their disapproval of the officials involved in the incident. 16 Online, on-site on looking participants call what they do “tour-group-ing” because they will post a tour group proposal online followed by their touring agenda. On their “tour,” they post what they did and what they encountered like a live TV broadcast. The fresh information acts as an incentive to attract people to follow the story on the internet. These netizens then virtually participate online in the “on looking,” putting added pressure on their opposition.
Overall, the public’s greater willingness to resist as well as political entrepreneurs’ ability to mobilize people and create widely acceptable contentious repertoires has enabled citizen movements to spring up naturally. A resistance network had also formed during the continuous cycle of anti-system contentions. This resistance network is made up of the following groups: first, victims of rights abuse, second, media reporters who have abandoned traditional media topics or practices to become “social movement reporters,” and third, volunteers such as professional rights protection figures, political dissidents, and past heroic petitioners 17 . Even though people constantly come and go within this network, the increasingly large numbers of people who join each year far outnumber those who leave. This resistance network has not only the ability to respond quickly to issues, it also has the ability to proactively create resistance issues such as the illegal Google flower tribute after Google left China 18 , and the three Fujian netizen court case on looking incidents 19 .
Authoritarian responses
It is not surprising that anti-system contentions have drawn the attention of the Chinese government. Taking aim at these movements’ challenge to the government’s control, the government adjusted its Stability Preservation System (SPS, weiwen tizhi) to adapt to these new challenges (Yang, 2016), which also pushed the anti-system contentions to make their own adjustments.
Before the reform and opening up in 1978, the government’s system of social control consisted of three parts: law enforcement departments and the siloviki 20 ; the functional departments of CCP and state administrations, for example, the Propaganda Department; and public organizations led by various CCP committees, such as the Labor Union, the Youth League, the Women’s Federation, and community and village committees. However, the regime needed to maintain complete control of resources in order to sustain this system, and following the reform and opening process, changes that occurred in state–society relations weakened the state’s domination. Therefore, the regime was forced to readjust its focus to exert direct control over specific individuals and organizations that are deemed as threats to social stability. It is under such conditions that it created the modern SPS.
This modern SPS involves many levels performing separate functions. For example, the Domestic Security Department suppresses the country’s most active political dissidents, and local government departments block citizens’ petitions and appeals. The SPS has two primary goals. The first is to effectively “nip all factors of instability in the bud”, and the second is to put down mass incident emergencies with professionalized operating plans. Following the recent increase in mass incidents, preserving stability has become a top priority for the government. The SPS’s effectiveness is clearly visible in cases where it was needed to stifle rights defense movements or mass incidents. Even in incidents involving large numbers of people, such as those that occurred in Weng’an and Shishou, the SPS was still able to quickly bring the situation under control.
However, the SPS has not been able to effectively control the development of anti-system contentions in the 2000s. Even though netizens’ use of the internet to organize movements attracted close government supervision and many measures were taken to block netizens’ organizational efforts – for example, shutting down websites, deleting posts, threatening active netizens with “drinking tea”, etc.– netizen movements have not only persisted, the rate at which they are occurring and the influence they have are also increasing. Even though the government updates the SPS’s enforcement methods, netizen movements continue to develop.
As discussed in previous sections of this article, distinct characters of anti-system contentions best explain the government’s unpreparedness when it comes to repression. First, they could not use armed forces to carry out standardized repression, as the forms of anti-system contentions vary. (How can you manage to use armed forces to stop Ai Weiwei’s fundraising efforts?) Second, the propaganda department is also often inefficient in censoring new messages innovated in myriad ways. Information spreads since the emergence of microblogs have compromised the government’s ability to seal off information. Third, the widespread nature of anti-system contentions makes it difficult for the SPS to predict where to focus its suppression, and therefore unable to nip the buds when it cannot pre-emptively identify them.
Such incidents clearly alarmed the CCP regime, whose vigilance in post-1989 had helped itself through many potential political challenges. The new pattern of repression emerged in government response to anti-system contention after around 2010. The main strategy is harsh, retrospective and precise repression of political entrepreneurs. Many activists involved in previous cycles of anti-system contentions were harassed, detained, or economically punished. As a consequence, those leading activists were silenced or removed from the public sphere. It is true that in anti-system contentions, netizens’ resistance network is like a web in which political entrepreneurs are simply single strands, but these entrepreneurs are important strands. Controlling or cutting out the leaders will not destroy the web, but will severely damage the existing structure of mobilization. When leaders are removed, their networks cannot be easily inherited by someone else, nor can their repertoires or contention discourses be easily replicated, since these aspects are often innovative and individual tailored. For instance, Ai Weiwei’s identity of artist enables him to organize many contentions under the name of art which triggers public interest and provides smart cover against state repression; both advantages cannot be easily picked up by other leading activists. By leaving general participants out of the range of repression, the government draws out a line for contention activists, efficiently spends its resources by not wasting money on identifying every grass-root members of anti-system contentions, and reinforces the political deterrence for people who plan to become political entrepreneurs in such contentions.
The anti-system contentions naturally suffer a blow, with leaders silenced and mobilization cooled off. Among them, it is the loosely-organized anti-system contentions that suffered the most. Through their common experiences of mobilizing and participating in anti-system conventions, rights-defense lawyers, intellectual activists, journalists, and dissidents became acquainted and loosely organized which enabled genuinely national anti-system movements to rise. Such movements are equipped with a relatively stable set of core leadership, clear claims, and effective repertoires. We now briefly discuss two prominent cases of such contentions and also highlight the specific means through which the regime succeeded in repression.
The New Citizens’ Movement was founded by Dr. Zhiyong Xu, formerly a lecturer at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. Xu was a key activist involved in the 2003 Sun Zhigang incident and had become an active political entrepreneur ever since. In the beginning, Xu organized his contentions largely in the form of NGO-mediated mobilization, the kind of contention that fits into the lower-left box of Table 1. However, after Gongmeng, the NGO vehicle Xu founded was shut down by the state in 2009, Xu moved toward less institutionalized channels to organize his contention. In 2012, along with a dozen intellectual activists, Xu founded the New Citizens’ Movement, calling for people “starting from one to act as a citizen”. He described the movement as a trailblazer in “coalescing and growing healthy forces that favors democracy and constitutionalism” 21 . The movement used the internet to publish its claims and distributed a “citizen badge” online. Famous campaigns organized by the New Citizens’ Movement include equal rights to education 22 , financial disclosure of civil servants 23 , local fanzui, and attacking the black jails 24 . The rise of the New Citizens’ Movement as a contention network that not only connects political entrepreneurs but also incorporates any netizens who identify with the movement’s claim marks the transformation of Xu to an anti-system contention leader. As Xu puts it, “in the past, I may choose to concede, for I’m not fully prepared. Now I will make no concessions.” 25 The regime took a quick response: Xu was arrested in July 2013 and was later sentenced to four years in prison. At least 45 “New Citizens” nationwide were detained in the 4 months afterwards. Microbloggers who use the citizen badge as their profile image to show their affiliation with the movement had their accounts deleted. The New Citizens’ Movement was hence quickly put to rest.
Another transition similar to that of Xu can be found in the group of rights-defense lawyers. In the rights-defense movement, lawyers have always been crucial actors: they are instrumental in both providing the actual legal defense and popularizing the cases of human rights violation. Lawyers would often publish their cases online and seek to increase the relevance of their cases to a broader range of audience. Individual cases therefore become politicized and bear marks of anti-system contentions. In the course of their work in similar cases, such lawyers have developed a repertoire of “public and collective fundraising and spending, online and offline coalescence, trans-regional onlooking, and direct expression of contentions”. While these lawyers used to identify themselves as rights-defense lawyers, many have now opted for “diehard lawyers” to represent their resolve in fighting on. Prominent campaigns organized by such lawyers include the on looking of Zhengzhou Police Bureau 26 and the on looking of Fan Mugen’s trial. 27 The regime has always been vigilant toward these lawyers as they grow in number and influence. Individually targeted repression was frequent and included oral warning, disbarment, and even arrests and convictions. In July 2015, such repression upgraded from local and individual operations to a nationally coordinated operation, with 12 lawyers arrested and more than 260 lawyers detained or subpoenaed. The official news release says that the police have cracked “a major criminal gang that coalesce lawyers, activists and petitioners to disrupt public order under the guise of a law firm.” The police accuse these lawyers of orchestrating more than 40 contentions and published videos in which these lawyers were interviewed to show remorse. After this national repression campaign, the lawyers’ anti-system contention also went quiet.
Beyond targeting political entrepreneurs, the regime has also upgraded its control over netizens. The Chinese Supreme People’s Court issued a judicial interpretation making it a criminally liable offense for posting online “libelous” posts that are retweeted more than 500 times. Such actions, together with the state’s stringent management of prominent microblogger accounts, were considered as a new move to silence potential dissidence online.
Based on these recent developments, the Chinese regime’s adaption to new forms of repression seems rather successful. On the one hand, active political entrepreneurs all received harsh repressions and were either imprisoned or forced out of active movements. On the other hand, loosely-organized anti-system contentions have been obliterated after waves of nationally coordinated repression campaigns. Besides, as the chilling effect builds up on the microblog, the website has lost its prominence in facilitating communications on value-oriented contentions, leaving interest-oriented contention as the main form of contention rising in volume.
This of course, does not mean that the regime has once and for all eliminated its threats. Without addressing the structural factors that led to the rise of anti-system contentions, and without pre-emptively targeting all potential participants, the state will never be able to placate anti-system contentions, and we expect such contention to remain in a high-frequency, low-intensity, and innovative pattern, and continue to be a threat greater than any other social contentions to the Chinese authoritarian regime. The innovation competition will keep going on both for the political entrepreneurs and for the authoritarian state.
Conclusion and discussion
This paper has discussed anti-system contentions as a new form of contention that has been rising in China but has not yet been analyzed in the literature. By comparing anti-system contentions with other forms of social contention in China, this paper demonstrates the political opportunity structures and mobilization mechanisms that give rise to anti-system contentions, and further analyzes the Chinese’s regime’s response and the corresponding evolution of anti-system contentions.
China has long witnessed endless social contentions that had an effect on the landscape of Chinese politics and governance. But different forms of social contentions also vary in their political implications. Interest-oriented contentions’ impact is largely regional. While the central government would intentionally allow such contentions to emerge as a way to extract information and monitor local officials (Lorentzen, 2013), local governments could always use cooptation and/or repression to eliminate such contentions before they spin out of control. Therefore such contentions are unlikely to challenge the political rule of the CCP. Value-oriented contentions mobilized through formal channels often have a clear set of activists’participants who are identifiable to the state. Therefore the state would be better-equipped to target activists involved in such contentions and use a wide range of repression tools such as warning and sentencing to neutralize the threats.
Anti-system contentions have a more long-term impact on the CCP’s political rule as they call strictly for political reform. So far, most of their activities have ended quietly without the government wholly responding to their political demands. However, numerous thorough and heated online political debates are attracting more and more netizens calling for systematic government reform. This has led to a decline in the public’s estimation of their government’s legitimacy. Furthermore, China’s netizen movements and political entrepreneurs’ constant political whistle-blowing has attracted the attention of the international community. China’s government must now deal not only with heightened domestic pressure but also heightened international political pressure.
Predicting the course of anti-system contentions’ development is difficult. Despite the important impact of anti-system contentions and the staunch resolve of activists, anti-system contentions still has a quite limited pool of participants. It is therefore so far quite difficult for anti-system contentions to develop into more prominent forms of contention that shakes the regime’s rule. Such difficulty can be explained by several reasons. The first is the relatively high level of political trust in the Chinese government. Capitalism-oriented economic reforms, nationalism propaganda, moderate improvements in protection of civil and political rights (Dimitrov, 2008), strict control over the media and education system (Kennedy, 2009; Su et al., 2015), and Chinese cultural tradition (Shi, 2001) have all contributed to the public’s trust in its government. Even though the wealth gap has grown significantly, everyone’s standards of living have at least somewhat improved in the thirty-year-long high speed growth. Government improvements to its healthcare and pension programs have been a positive improvement for all levels of society, which has also strengthened the government’s public approval ratings. Even if grievances arise, the central government could also use the pattern of hierarchical trust it constructed to deflect blame to local governments (Su et al., 2016). Thus, the poor economic conditions that would produce a nation-wide contentious political atmosphere do not exist anymore. Anti-system contentions participants’ reasons for protests therefore must stem from demands for political reform, but only a small percentage of people have that perspective, and even fewer have the audacity to act.
Second, the Chinese government has developed an effective system to collect information and manage social protests. On the one hand, the e-government initiative allows the central government to extract economic information and efficiently monitor and potentially steer economic activity at a more abstract level (Ma et al., 2005). On the other hand, as Lorentzen’s studies show, the Chinese government’s attitude toward social protests is neither completely repressive nor entirely supportive (Lorentzen, 2013, 2017); Popular protests reveal true information on local politics for the government to improve its governance and also help the government to identify key social activists. The high cost of participating in popular protests and the fact that protestors come from grassroots level make social protests a channel of monitoring society and extracting information superior to more institutionalized channels such as the People’s Congress and the petition system. As long as the information keeps flowing to the central government from local levels, social protests in China can actually serve as a safe valve for the public to release their discontent. At the same time the government has made great effort to keep information from flowing among the public which could preempt systemic protests against the political system. This set of strategy has allowed the Chinese central government to maintain a delicate balance between tolerating social protests and maintaining social stability (Lorentzen, 2013, 2017). This is also evident in the fact that none of the cases of protest discussed in this paper had escalated to national and prominent contentions.
The third reason pertains to the fact that civil society organizations have not fully developed or matured in China. Current civilian organizations all function under the government’s control and their connections with contentious actors are by no means strong or close. Lacking the support of these organizations, the public lacks the ability to organize and mobilize on its own, and would not be able to support any wide-scope or large-scale contentious activities.
Fourthly, the SPS logistically and physically functions quite well. In terms of organizational set up, the SPS is present in every Chinese town and street with the ability to quickly and effectively control active resistance actors (Yan, 2016). Its operational tactics are flexible and adaptive enough to develop appropriate measures to control many different targets. As a consequence, the SPS can and often does “nip” national-scale contentious activities “in the bud.” Even though the government’s SPS operational costs have increased over the years, the high-speed economic growth in the past thirty years has provided sufficient revenue for the state to maintain the SPS.
On the other hand, though, these elements do not necessarily hinder the development of anti-system contentions. Since anti-system contentions’ fervently demand large-scale systematic political reform, they will not stop until they have achieved their goal and seen to massive overhauls in the political system. This is a race between society and the current regime to influence China’s future. Who will win depends on who can adapt faster and win the hearts of the common people.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is a periodical achievement of planning project of Zhejiang philosophy and social science research bases (16JDGH003). This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.