Chinese Society

Change, Conflict and Resistance

Elizabeth J. Perry, Mark Selden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415560733
• eBook ISBN: 9781135149284
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This bestselling introduction to Chinese society uses the themes of resistance and protest to explore the complexity of life in contemporary China. An interdisciplinary and international team of China scholars draw on perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and political science and covers a broad range of issues.

Topics covered include:

• labour and environmental disputes
• rural and ethnic conflict
• migration
• legal challenges
• intellectual and religious dissidence
• opposition to family planning.

The newly revised, third edition adds two new chapters on gender and the family, and the reform of the Hukou system thus providing a comprehensive text for both undergraduates and specialists in the field, encouraging the reader to challenge conventional images of contemporary Chinese society.

1
Rights and resistance

The changing contexts of the dissident movement

Minxin Pei

Rights consciousness not only increases the frequency of resistance, but changes the forms of such resistance. The forms and tactics of democratic resistance have undergone significant changes since the late 1970s. While the dissident movement in the 1980s favored direct and confrontational approaches, the movement in the late 1990s relied increasingly on indirect and legal means. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Chinese dissidents further refined their tactics by focusing on social issues that resonated with the Chinese public.

This chapter places the transformed dissident movement in political, institutional and social context. Rapid economic development has brought enormous changes to Chinese society and created a more hospitable environment for individuals to assert and protect their rights. Legal reform has opened a new legitimate political arena in which individuals, including political dissidents, can exercise greater autonomy and even challenge the regime. Rising rights consciousness in Chinese society provides a social milieu within which invocations of rights are more likely to gain broad-based support. Finally, China’s extensive and deepening integration into the international system in general, and its various commitments to international laws and institutions in particular, have placed leaders under new constraints and provided dissidents with new sources of moral support.

Oppression and resistance are symbiotic—one almost never occurs without the other. Even the most oppressive regime, such as the one portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984, fails to eradicate resistance completely. Although resistance—ranging from dramatic and sometimes violent confrontations with the authorities to “everyday forms of resistance”—may not succeed in overthrowing oppressive regimes, such acts of defiance help preserve individual dignity, exercise pressure for institutional change, and set limits to and raise the costs of oppression. ¹ Those whose works celebrate resistance in all forms may have bolstered our faith in the strength of the human spirit. But at the empirical level, much scholarship on resistance remains opaque on the precise relationship between oppression and resistance. We are not sure, for example, whether more oppression elicits greater resistance or vice versa; above all, the conditions that produce successful resistance, moreover, remain disputed.

This relationship poses an especially intriguing problem for social scientists because it is central to understanding the politics of reform in a liberalizing authoritarian regime. The most insightful contemporary observer of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville, was perhaps the first to hint at a possible connection between declining oppression and growing resistance. In one of his most quoted passages in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, de Tocqueville wrote:

The social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it. Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated. ²

Tocqueville’s formulation identifies a sudden change in the sensibility of the people as the cause for a dramatic fall in the public tolerance of the practices of the regime that used to be accepted with resignation. What Tocqueville called “sensibility” seems very similar to “rights consciousness” in the parlance of social scientists. Unfortunately, although he alerted us to the paradoxical effects of political opening by a softening autocracy, Tocqueville’s own analysis overlooked other important issues on oppression and resistance: why rights consciousness rises quickly in an autocratic regime undergoing partial political opening; which specific factors contribute to this change; how changes in rights consciousness affect the forms and tactics of resistance; how changes in the balance of power or control of resources between the state and society may result from regime-initiated reform to produce a more favorable outcome in the contest between the regime and its societal opponents.

It is of theoretical and practical importance to raise these questions in analyzing the changing relationship between the Chinese government and its citizens in general, and the evolving patterns of conflict between the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its domestic critics in particular. For many students of Chinese politics have observed that, despite a considerable fall in the level of overt political repression since the late 1970s, resistance against the post-communist authoritarian regime persisted and may even have increased. In some cases, such resistance even took explosive and violent forms. ³ The most dramatic expression of resistance was, without doubt, the 1989 nationwide pro-democracy movement, with its focal point in Tiananmen Square, a movement which posed the most serious challenge to the regime in the post-Mao era. But the 1989 movement was a rare event (as was the violent repression unleashed by the regime in response). Most forms of post-Mao resistance did not directly threaten the regime. There are few signs suggesting that popular resistance has reached such a level as to portend an imminent revolution. Nevertheless, despite the absence of revolution, China’s limited reform has created enough public space to permit a small but tenacious dissident movement persistently to challenge the political legitimacy of the ruling regime. ⁴

This chapter explores the factors that have indirectly contributed to the endurance, growth and change in resistance by China’s pro-democracy activists. Such resistance must be understood in the overall context of the far-reaching institutional, socioeconomic and political changes that China has experienced since the 1980s. While no single cause should be credited with increasing the degree of rights consciousness of the Chinese people in general, including the dissident community, I argue that a multiplicity of factors has decidedly reshaped the contexts within which rights consciousness is engendered. More importantly, the changing contextual factors have not only influenced the emergence of new norms that give more specific meanings to certain rights, but have also reduced the institutional and structural barriers that previously impeded the full protection and exercise of such human rights, enabling resisters to adopt novel means of activism and defiance. In the first section of this study, I briefly discuss the idea of rights and the relationship between rights and resistance in the Chinese context. Then I trace the evolution of dissident resistance since reform began in 1979. Finally, I analyze the socioeconomic, legal, international and political–psychological contexts within which such resistance has been waged.

Rights and resistance

In theory, the relationship between rights and resistance appears straight-forward: individuals or groups of individuals who feel either entitled to and/or endowed with certain fundamental rights may be expected to put up resistance when such rights are violated or perceived to be violated. The stronger the feeling of entitlement and/or endowment, the stronger the resistance. The more rights are claimed by individuals or groups, the more likely resistance will be triggered as government action infringes on them. In reality, however, the definition of rights, the degree of rights consciousness and the ability to secure rights are contingent on historical, cultural and political contexts within which such concepts are invoked. Students of Chinese politics and legal history, for example, have long noted some of the important differences in the meaning, nature, scope and utility of rights. According to Andrew Nathan, rights in contemporary China are derived from citizenship/membership instead of humanity, treated as programmatic goals instead of claims on government, restricted by state power, and unprotected by independent judicial review. ⁵ This restrictive conceptualization of rights creates apparent inconsistencies in rights practices. For example, even though Chinese constitutions grant extensive rights in theory, the state has maintained tight control over how these rights are exercised in reality. ⁶ The central goal of the extension of rights to individuals, moreover, is not the protection of individuals against the state, but the better fulfilment of duties to the state by individuals. This state-centerd notion of rights, Nathan argues, is a product of Chinese obsession with a weak state since the mid-nineteenth century. Consequently, the strengthening of the state and the restoration of political order were viewed by Chinese rights thinkers as the more important collective goal than the protection of individual rights. ⁷

Other scholars have detected a strong influence of utilitarianism and collectivism on the Chinese conceptualization of rights. Chinese often conceive of rights as interests. An important political consequence of this conception is that political legitimacy does not derive from popular sovereignty but from the government’s ability to serve the interests of the people. Another consequence is the inherent bias in this conception in favor of collective interests (rights) over individual rights (interests), especially if the two should come into conflict. ⁸ Thus, reciprocity becomes a central principle: an individual may possess and enjoy certain rights only to the extent that he or she has fulfilled certain duties to the community and the ruler. ⁹

The conceptual differences between Chinese and Western notions of rights, however, must not be exaggerated. Even though such differences may influence rights practices, the extent to which rights are respected and protected may depend more on political conditions than on concepts of rights. In particular, the political milieu of a society may profoundly affect the degree of rights consciousness. Since rights consciousness is never static, individuals may assess the extent of the protection, exercise and enjoyment of rights on the basis of various political signals they receive from the governing elite, from the international environment, and from society in general. Therefore, the level of rights consciousness may be low when the possibility of rights protection and enjoyment is judged to be dim, and high when the same possibility improves. This reasoning may explain the paradoxical relationship between falling repression and rising resistance observed first by Tocqueville, whose insights provide a persuasive explanation for the patterns of repression and resistance in contemporary China.

If the Maoist era involved massive and systematic violation and curtailment of civil and political rights, the post-Mao reform era is a period in which the regime has tried to remedy its past excesses and has restored some basic rights to people. Formally, some of these rights were re-granted or reiterated in the revised Chinese Constitution (1982) and in many other laws. Informally, the regime has significantly expanded certain individual rights (such as most personal freedoms) while severely restricting some of the most important political rights (such as the freedom of political speech and association). Despite the limited nature of the improvement in the expansion and protection of rights, the enumeration of leg...

Table of contents

• ASIA’S TRANSFORMATIONS
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Rights and resistance
• 2 Pathways of labor activism
• 3 Conflict, resistance and the transformation of the hukou system
• 4 Contesting rural spaces
• 5 To the courts or to the barricades?
• 6 Women, marriage and the state in contemporary China
• 7 Domination, resistance and accommodation in China’s one-child campaign
• 8 Environmental protests in rural China1
• 9 The new cybersects
• 10 Chinese Christianity
• 11 Alter/native Mongolian identity
• 12 The revolution of resistance
• Index