Kevin O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (original) (raw)
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China's Rural Land Politics: Bureaucratic Absorption and the Muting of Rightful Resistance
The China Quarterly
In recent years, the Chinese central state has launched the "new socialist countryside" campaign (NSCC), which authorizes the local state expropriation of rural land from farmers, and then incorporates evicted farmers into township residence and urban citizenship. In affected regions, this campaign enables local state officials to enact practices of bureaucratic absorption that undermine potential resistance by bringing resisters into formal channels of bargaining through both juridical and ideological means. Based on ethnographic data from Sichuan province, this article reveals an in situ process of bureaucratic absorption in "Lan-ding village," where the incorporation of rural residents into urban citizenship enables the depoliticization of resistance to land expropriation, first by changing the citizenship-based grounds on which legitimate claims to land can be made, then by discursively reframing eviction as a normative shift towards modern wage dependence.
Democratic thought and practice in rural China
Democratization, 2005
Chinese democratization is usually thought of as a top-down process sponsored by a reformminded government and liberal intellectuals. At the turn of the millennium, however, no such development is in sight. Only recently have western scholars begun to look to the countryside for finding 'sprouts of democracy'. This study explores village self-government as a possibility of making local political practices the foundation of an emerging rights consciousness that becomes increasingly abstract and finally transgresses into the national sphere. Central to the argument is the dynamic of the village moral economy that produces a common good and 'collectivity'. These are serving as the pillars of all political claims that rise from the villages. In the process of appropriating an ongoing national discourse on political reform and democracy, China's peasants translate their entitlements derived from the moral economy of the village into rights, by way of informing a moral contract between them and authority. This contract may lay the ground for full-scale resistance, if the state and its cadres do not respond to the peasants 'rightful' demands. However, if it is honoured it can reinforce trust and secure the current regime's legitimacy.
Peasant protests over land seizures in rural China
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020
This article reports key findings drawing on a database containing more than 12,000 protest news events in China from 2000 to 2018, including over 1500 protests against land expropriation. It finds that while social conflicts over land seizures continue to be the leading cause of protests in rural China, there was an upward trend for the number of related protest between 2000 and 2014 and a downward trend between 2014 and 2018. Under Xi Jinping, police were increasingly inclined to arrest and crack down on land seizure protesters. Failing to adequately deal with land disputes may undermine China's regime legitimacy.
The Power of the Strong?: Rural Resistance and Reform in China and Vietnam
China Information, 2000
This article examines the social bases of agrarian transformation during and after the communist-led collectivization of agriculture in China and Vietnam. The social science literature generally portrays rural people as passive, depoliticized and dependent. Nowhere is this more true than in studies of socialist societies that have been heavily influenced by totalitarian and authoritarian theories. The literature focuses on the initiative and power of supreme leaders, as well as party and state mobilization, to explain social and institutional change. This perspective, while not uncontested, holds generally for the subject reviewed here.' Our central thesis, in contrast, is that the cumulative weight of rural resistance eventually made it too costly, both economically and politically, for the respective states of China and Vietnam to continue collectivized agriculture. While recognizing significant differences in the structure and performance of collectivized agriculture in Vietnam and China, this study underlines strikingly similar tactics used by farmers to circumvent, resist and eventually, under politically fortuitous conditions, contribute to the elimination of the core institutions of collective agriculture and expand the scope of the market and household economies. We consider, in short, the interplay of resistance from below and the roles of party and state in generating fundamental social change. 1 Among the earliest and most eloquent to stress statist explanations for the Chinese reform process were Kathleen Hartford, "Socialist Agriculture Is Dead: Long Live Socialist Agriculture! Organisational Transformations in Rural China," in The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, eds. Elizabeth Perry and Christine Wong (Cambridge : Harvard Contemporary China Series, 1985) and Jonathan Unger, "The Decollectivization of the Chinese Countryside: A Survey of Twenty-Eight Villages," Pacific Affairs 58 (Winter 1985-86). For recent studies on the relationship between rural resistance and institutional reform, see the bibliographical appendix.
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017
This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.
Migration and Popular Resistance in Rural China: Wukan and Beyond
China Quarterly , 2017
This study draws on a case study of Wukan and interviews with migrants and peasants in other sites to examine how migration shapes popular resistance in migrant-sending communities (i.e. rural China). Findings demonstrate multidimensional roles played by migrants and returned migrants who act as a vehicle of informational and ideological transmission and at times directly participate in or even lead rural resistance in origin communities. Both the transmission and participation processes foster political consciousness and action orientations among peasants. The importance of migrants is exemplified in the Wukan protests but is also found in other settings under study. In general, migrants represent a latent political force that acts upon serious grievances back home. The findings provide a useful lens for understanding the diffusion of popular resistance and the linkage between urban and rural activism in China.
Popular Contention and Its Impact in Rural China
Protest outcomes in rural China are typically an outgrowth of interaction between activists, sympathetic elites, targets, and the public. Popular agitation first alerts concerned officials to poor policy implementation and may prompt them to take corrective steps. As a result of participating in contention, certain activists feel empowered and become more likely to take part in future challenges, whereas others feel disillusioned and lapse into passivity. In the course of observing collective action, some onlookers are sensitized to protesters' concerns and public opinion is affected. Without popular action, better implementation, biographical change, and effects on the public would not emerge, but nor would they without involvement from above. Studying the impact of this protest thus sheds light on two issues that have long troubled students of contentious politics: (a) how to get a grip on indirect, mediated consequences; and (b) how to think about causality when change is a result of popular action as well as openings provided by sympathetic elites.