Abstract
Keywords
This comparative historical study traces the evolution of protests in the mid-Qing period of Chinese history. The book is organized along the lines of a concise introduction, followed by six chapters and an epilogue. In this book, the author surveys over 1000 cases of protests and presents around 37 detailed and pertinent cases that serve to bolster his theoretical standpoint.
At the onset, the author criticizes the Eurocentric historical narratives, which depict the East as a tranquil place inhabited by people without history. Moreover, the Eurocentric narratives also neglect the indigenous and local vectors of historical transformation. He states that modern politics in China was neither initiated by British aggression, nor by the Republican revolution. Its origin lies much earlier: in sixteenth-century Chinese politics. The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century reactive violence in China, which is represented as a starting point of dynamism from stifling stagnancy, is in fact the closing chapter of a century-long transformation. The author suggests that the indigenous trajectory of change in China is as important as the exogenous changes brought about by its encounter with the West, which has been overemphasized. In the rest of the book the author traces the path dependence of this ‘indigenous trajectory’ of historical transformation to modern politics in China (p. 4).
To do this, he relies on the concepts of proactive and reactive protests propounded by Charles Tilly in the context of Western European and North American history (p. 7). At the level of macro-causality scholars like Tilly and Tarrow identify the centralization of state and expansion of market as the two major factors behind the flowering of modern politics in Europe. Though certainly a useful generalization, these factors have emerged from the particular historical experience of Western Europe and America and cannot be applied verbatim to Asia. Moreover, Tilly and Tarrow do not delve deep enough to understand the cultural repertoires of these contentious politics. An ad hoc application of their theory in Asia would make it seem inherently teleological and would also depict transformation of protest patterns as preordained (p. 9).
To fill these theoretical lacunae, the author attempts to refine the theory in two ways. First, he modifies Tilly’s concept of proactive and reactive protests, which include both state directed and elite group directed protests, into state-engaging and state-resisting protests, which are exclusively positioned around the state, with their centripetal and centrifugal directionality. State-engaging protests demand new rights or the extension of old rights from the state, whereas state-resisting ones oppose the state, infringing on the rights of the protesters (pp. 58–59). Second, apart from state consolidation and market expansion, he includes the third factor of moral legitimacy and hegemonic decay or consolidation of state, to account for the macro-cultural dimensions of transformation and its ability to shape protest movements.
The author posits that protests are not only affected by the political economic shifts, but also by macro-cultural transformations. These cultural aspects are clearly visible in the continuity of the movement repertoires from the sixteenth century to modern-day protests in China. These repertoires are drawn from Confucian ideology that invokes aspects of justice, autonomy and filial-loyal reverence for the imperial centre, which are prominent facets of these protests. The repertoires typically include acts such as kneeling down and weeping or holding glowing incense sticks, to urge the state to fulfil its paternalist obligation. This signifies the endurance and resilience of these symbolic cultural markers, the presence of which makes the Chinese mode of protest unique.
Further, the culturally contentious discourses surrounding the protest play a significant role in the formation of collective identity and strategic framing of any dissent. Apart from the micro-aspects of culture, there is a macro-dynamics of an encompassing and overarching cultural schema which shapes codes, meanings and choices of the protesters. The available cultural milieu provides a choice of available symbolic tools, from which the protesters choose, synthesize and frame the issues and modalities of the protests.
Empirically, the author focuses on mid-Qing protests from 1740 to 1839, in the 18 predominantly Han Chinese inner provinces of the Qing Empire (p. 47). He starts from 1740, the year when political reform and trade liberalization, as well as systematic documentation and maintenance of archives particularly of protest episodes were initiated (p. 17). He cuts the narrative short at 1839, the year in which there was a direct frontal attack initiated by the British colonial power in the form of the Opium War, which continued until 1842.
The author periodizes this entire timeline into three phases. The first phase, from 1740 to 1759, was the period of filial, loyal, proactive and state-engaging protests directed towards the paternalist state, where the moral legitimacy of the emperor was high and state centralization and commercial expansion was at its pinnacle. In the second phase, from 1776 to 1795, the state centralization dwindled, commercial expansion continued and the moral legitimacy of the state crumbled. Most of the riots in this period turned into rebellions against the state because of high tax rates imposed and the repression of illicit trade by the state. In the third phase, which spans the two decades from 1820 to 1839, the state and the market both collapsed, but the moral legitimacy of the emperor was regained. This period was marked by fierce resistance against the local administrations, combined with humble petitions and ‘capital-appeals’ to the emperor, which in fact signalled a return to the initial Confucian protest repertoires.
This aforementioned non-liner trajectory of protest cycles in China also nullifies the notion of the irreversibility of state-engaging proactive protests, despite declining state power that the unilinear theory of protest development suggests (p. 62). This implies that the unidirectional protest path of modern Europe cannot be applied blindly across any spatio-temporal context, rather that path has to be ‘provincialized’ (Chakrabarty, 2000).
In Chapter 6 and the epilogue, the author compares the Chinese case with that of rebellions in Tokugawa Japan and the French Revolution to render deeper insights. In France, the end of revolution gave birth to the idea of modern citizenship and the notion of popular sovereignty, whereas in China, the traditional cultural repertoires reinforced reverence for pseudo-familial hierarchy, filial authority of the ruler and Confucian orthodoxy. On the other hand, in Tokugawa Japan, unlike China, the sundry rebellions never culminated into a full-fledged revolution because of Japan’s decentralized and feudal state structure. Whereas in China, the centralized administration of empire brought about its own demise by attracting and solidifying the myriad of protests that eventually precipitated into revolutions.
Though not explicitly stated, epistemologically and methodologically the work belongs to the critical realist school of thought. This book has been written with utmost candour and clarity, which makes it immensely readable. The high theoretical rigour of this work is strengthened by its empirical grounding and extensive historical research.