16 Demanding state intervention

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Demanding state intervention

During the National People’s Congress and the Chinese Political Consultative Conferences (NPC and CPPCC) in 2016, a massive worker protest in China drew widespread attention at home and abroad. Thousands of coal miners swarmed the streets of Shuangyashan City in Heilongjiang, claiming back wages and social security contributions. This protest was mainly sparked by the statement of Lu Hao, Governor of Heilongjiang, that the state-owned firm had met all its salary obligations, which infuriated the miners who were complaining that they had not received paychecks for months. They marched through the streets and surrounded the headquarters of the company to increase media publicity. The pictures showing their banners, assemblies, and blockage of railways quickly spread via social media. Under immense public pressure, the governor finally admitted that he had been “misinformed” about the problem of wage arrears and promised to raise funds to repay workers.

This dramatic sequence provides some clues to understand the political meaning of popular protest in China. With the domestic economy in a down- turn, the majority of workers are facing more precarious working conditions, triggering new cycles of labor protests. In response, Chinese authorities have started to arrest many lawyers and nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists and tightened the control of media. Although the Communist Party of China (CPC), which has been increasingly worried about its regime stability, has made efforts to curb the spread of unrest, protesters can still use mobile phones and social media to mobilize, which is increasingly difficult for the authorities to prevent.

China’s political landscape and the political form created by the masses have in fact been undergoing a profound transformation for over two dec- ades. Since the repression of the Tiananmen Square protest movement in 1989, Chinese protest politics has been struggling to find new possibilities amid the changes in state–society relations and the logic of state govern- ance. The official name assigned to social protests during this period is mass incidents (quntixing shijian) – a term that deliberately attempts to evade any negative meaning toward the regime.¹ To understand the political configura- tion of contemporary Chinese mass incidents, it is necessary to situate them in a wider historical sequence.

16 Demanding state intervention

New opportunities for popular protest in China

Shih-Diing Liu

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Demanding state intervention 235 Demanding state intervention

Governmentalization and its discontents

Ever since the 1990s, the Chinese party-state has become increasingly governmen- talized, with more bureaucratic apparatuses and techniques being created, which in turn provide new opportunities for popular contestation. Rather than merely a source of sovereignty, the population has also become the field of government intervention and a target of governmental rationality, combining neoliberal and socialist strategies. The reform regime, which has produced more heterogeneous social space accompanied by rising inequality, has triggered widespread protests across the country.

The neoliberalization of the mode of governance has also reshaped the trajec- tory of protest formation. Driven by the force of marketization, the power structure of the party-state during the past 30 years has been reconfigured through the privatization of state enterprises, decentralization of the administrative structure, and alliance with capitalist power. During the Maoist era, “work units” and organizations offered a point of contact between the party-state and masses, yet now such mechanisms of mediation have largely broken down one after another.

In the absence of old mechanisms of mediation, citizens have started lodging their complaints directly to the governments. Citizen–government relations have thus become more fragile and unstable, while social conflicts often turn into opposition between officials and the masses.

When the organs of the party-state are no longer able to effectively represent

“the people,” the masses will take direct action to recover their rights. Along with the transition of the state from a provider of social security to a promoter of capitalist interests, the rights of the grassroots workers, peasants, and average residents are seriously violated. Even the middle class is no exception and is subject to all kinds of arbitrary rules. As the crisis generated by marketization deepens, popular discontents are penetrating into various fields of social life. That is why all sorts of mass incidents occur in China every day, posing a threat to the legitimacy of local and regional governance.

Compared with the protests in the 1980s, popular resistance in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protest movement has produced new protest subjects and grievances, showing distinctively different patterns. The protesters come from almost all social groups affected by the structural change: dislocated peasants and urban dwellers, laid-off workers, unpaid pensioners and migrant workers, consumers, parents and patients, aggrieved teachers, students and taxi drivers, demo- bilized soldiers, residents affected by pollution, and tax-burdened farmers. Their grievances are immediately associated with the party-state’s reform and development trajectories and have become the main protest subject in the post-1989 era.

Such diversity implies that the neoliberalization process has expanded to various facets of society and pushed the party-state into a more precarious condition. The protests articulate the “politics of redistribution,” with a focus on material interest and survival (Hsing & Lee 2010). Most protests in this period are driven by a sense of deprivation and unfairness closely linked to local development projects, mass layoffs, welfare benefits, salary arears, social security, excessive taxes, land

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expropriation, and housing demolition. The majority of them are associated with the abuse of power and rights violations and thus can be seen as the people’s struggle for social self-protection.

In the wake of the 1989 crackdown, Chinese mass protests have been carried out in a pervasive “stability maintenance” (weiwen) system deployed by the party- state. Although CPC claims to “govern the country by law” (yifa zhiguo), the biggest obstacle of rights protection remains the party-state. The regime has made enormous efforts to prevent social unrest from turning into a general crisis, like what happened in the former USSR. The right to strike was removed from the Constitution in 1982 for fear of a politically oriented labor movement, and workers are only permitted to express demands over purely economic and survival issues. Independent unionism and explicitly political activities have been vigor- ously repressed in the name of stability. With the new security apparatus, the authority employs a large amount of armed police and paramilitary forces to suppress petitioners, cutting off their traffic and communication to limit their scale.

In the face of severe constraints on speech and association, people are employing limited resources in the newly reconfigured social space to coordinate action.

This chapter attempts to provide an account of the mass political forms that have taken shape in the past 30 years. It demonstrates that although the Chinese experience shares something in common with other parts of the world, such as focusing on the lack of democracy, its politics aims to search for the possibility of expression and recognition by state power rather than autonomy and self-governance.

The political significance of popular protests should be situated in a particular relationship of the forces unleashed during the process of state reconfiguration since the 1990s. The reconfiguration has created new opportunities for popular struggle along with a neutralization of antagonism that has assimilated popular discontents and made them subordinate to the party-state. This chapter also evalu- ates the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and points out some problems in the current discussion on the global social movement.

Localities as a site of struggle

Starting from the 1990s, the increasing devolution of political and economic authority from the center to localities and the bureaucratic differentiation of its governance structure have created divergent conflicts of interest among various government departments or regions, as well as between the center and localities (Zheng 1997). The functions of governmental departments and agencies have become more complex and differentiated at both vertical and horizontal levels, giving rise to the dispersion and fragmentation of popular struggle across the country. Under the new circumstances, the party-state’s decision-making power has been increasingly transferred to lower-level governments, though it still retains the power to appoint local party cadres.

In such a decentralized yet still hierarchical political system, the center has relaxed its grip on local economic development while also finding it more difficult to coordinate and monitor the behavior of its local agents. Under pressure from

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the center to promote rapid economic growth, short-term speculative behavior has been encouraged at the local levels. Local governments have sought to relent- lessly expand revenue through various means, often at the expense of local residents and workers. The loosening of party control and the rise of local interests have become the main sources of tension. Since local governments are increasingly dependent on local economic activities for income, and local cadres are evaluated primarily on their ability to develop their local economy, many local cadres have abused their power to achieve goals at the expense of social stability (Fewsmith 2013). This is the main reason why local governments have increasingly become the prime targets of contention.

One primary example is the struggle over land. The enormous benefits from farmland conversion for local government revenues and the opportunities for corruption have made it difficult to hold into account local cadres who have desperately sought to benefit from selling the land for property development.

Environmental struggles are mostly aimed at the local abuse of power. During labor conflicts, it is usually the local government that calls in police to suppress the strike and orders unions to side with management (Friedman 2014). With popular grievances increasingly attributed to local misrule, these struggles have blossomed forth across the country. Most struggles are highly localized, isolated, and spatially constricted in terms of social composition, territorial reach, and demands.

In order to prevent protestors from approaching higher-level leadership, local authorities will normally respond by blocking the flow of information the first time. They have to calculate the costs involved and be more cautious of the con- sequences, and their responses have often combined repression and concession (Cai 2010). If concession is not too costly, then some local authorities will avoid using coercive measures and choose to make expedient concessions by revok- ing policies or giving compensation to pacify protestors. In many cases, however, local authorities will order courts to reject lawsuits, override court rulings, or use threats or violence to deter protestors from making skip-level petitions (O’Brien & Li 2006). However, suppression alone cannot effectively prevent dis- turbances, which may trigger more protests and instead generate chain reactions in neighboring areas.

Exploiting the center–local divide

The center does know the problem, yet the dependence on local economic development has made problems of local governance difficult to solve. However, the center’s concern for stability and local oligarchies’ pursuit of interest are always contradictory, thus creating an opening for popular contestation. In the last decade, the center has repeatedly denounced local cadres for policy violations, which makes it possible for protestors to blame local authorities for taking on measures that are unfavorable to social harmony. Local governments have been asked to solve conflicts at the initial stage, which implies that outright repression may push lower-level governments into vulnerable positions. If a local government

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fails to solve a dispute, then pressure will be transferred up to provincial authorities or even higher levels. In the administrative hierarchy, lower-level cadres are accountable to their superiors, who can dismiss local officials from their posts to appease the protesters. Under the high pressure to maintain social stability, some lower-level governments have become more willing to defuse the conflict through negotiations. Sometimes conflicting interests among local governments and agencies at different layers or between different departments may also create structural openings for shaping alliances. This new circumstance has given Chinese protestors more opportunities to contest local power.

When local governments refuse to address their grievances, people start amass- ing and acting in concert to draw attention from upper-level states, such as visiting petition agencies to lodge complaints (shang fang). If the petition does not work, then protestors will take to the streets and surround government buildings or even storm them. Protesters sometimes block traffic to generate pressure on authorities. Although strikes and street protests are illegal and public assemblies require official approval, the center has selectively tolerated isolated protests, as long as they are bounded in scale and non-regime-threatening. The center will only get involved when the situation becomes worse. The proliferation of demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins across the country has made the center more aware of the need to rebuild legitimacy. For upper-level governments, preventing an escalation of tension by accommodating small-scale protests can help preempt large-scale revolts. Mass protests, as long as they are isolated and kept within the framework endorsed by the center, have become one of the ways to discover wrongdoings by local officials. To avoid punishment from above, some local governments have changed their modes of response and become more willing to negotiate with protestors (Perry & Seldon 2000). These emerging opportunities facilitated by the political atmosphere partly explain why Chinese protestors generally support central power but are critical of local oligarchies.

Chinese protestors’ attitudes toward the state are ambivalent; they generally do not see the state as a completely unified apparatus. Partially due to fear and strategic considerations, Chinese protestors generally refrain from undermining the central leadership. Despite the mixed sentiment toward the CPC, Chinese protestors tend to view the center as “a source of legitimacy, a symbolic backer, and a guarantor against repression” (O’Brien & Li 2006, p. 68). The imagery of evil local cadres versus benevolent center has been played out in many protest events.

Partly driven by the common belief that the center has benevolent intentions but cannot always find out what is happening below, Chinese protestors tend to see the center as a potential ally to counter local oligarchies. Rather than challenge the party rule and demand for radical regime change, they seek proper recognition from the center.

In Chinese political culture, displaying loyalty to the center could increase the legitimacy of action. It is also often necessary to appeal to party discourse to prevent any crackdown. In some environmental, land, and housing struggles, the national flag rose over the protest site. The protesters have held banners reading

“We love the Communist Party,” “Support the Communist Party,” and “Love the

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Communist Party and China” and have chanted “Long live the Communist Party”

or the national anthem to show loyalty. Some protestors employ old socialist language (such as “down with official-business collusion” and “harsh punishment”) as slogans to rally the crowds (Chen 2003). Whether the masses truly love the CPC or not is not the issue at stake. As a strategic choice, such acts send a signal that they do not intend to overthrow the regime and minimize the risk of suppression. In a top-down political system, the holding of procenter banners is also a strategy to exert pressure on local governments.

All of these efforts do not necessarily guarantee the support of the center.

Upper-level governments only decide to get involved in a few exceptional cases where local governments fail to resolve conflicts or the crisis of legitimacy mounts as a result of suppression. Unrests that involve massive participants and serious casualties and are widely covered by the media are more likely to trigger such intervention (Cai 2010). In these cases, higher-level governments intervene by issuing an urgent directive to lower-level governments, publicizing opinions through official media, or forming a “work team” to conduct an investigation and negotiate with protestors directly. However, the center does not necessarily side with protestors in the course of interaction, and the outcome is determined by the contingency of the situation. Although such intervention is not frequent and highly conditional, it has facilitated a favorable condition for popular contention.

Turning central directives and legal resources into weapons

To regain regime legitimacy, the center has institutionally incorporated social rights into citizenship. The center has repeatedly stressed its commitment to improve the lives of ordinary people and promulgated directives warning local governments. Frequent references are made to “putting people first” as well as

“broadening the legitimate right and interests” of ordinary citizens.

The policies and instructions issued by the center serve as indispensable resources for protesters. Grievances are frequently framed with reference to central policies or in terms that reflect the deviation of local officials. Protesters usually uphold the central directives and frame their demands as being in step with the center. For instance, provincial and central leadership often call on enterprises to improve their treatment of workers, which is subsequently invoked by workers to seek rights. The official discourse on citizen rights is also deliberately rede- ployed by protestors. The center’s promise to create a harmonious environment is frequently reappropriated to blame local officials.

In addition to central policies and commitments, the center’s continued empha- sis on legality has also provided strategic resources for protestors to enhance their bargaining power. Since the 1990s, the regime has increasingly responded to unrest by passing many legislations and enacting many laws and regulations that allow citizens to frame their grievances in legal terms (Bernstein 1999). The proliferation of legal knowledge and the establishment of institutions for appeal have produced a growing rights awareness among citizens and encouraged them to frame their grievances as matters of rights protection. In order to prove the

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legitimacy of their actions and to avoid suppression, protesters often cite laws and emphasize the legality of their protests. Protestors emphasize their appeals as being nothing but the reasonable requests of the masses (qunzhong de heli yao- qiu), and they demand the government to comply with laws.

Taking the chaiqianhu’s (evicted households whose homes are demolished) legal mobilization in Beijing, for example.² The relocated households had appealed to the law and claimed that the entire process of demolition was illegal.

The protestors wrote letters to party leaders demanding a clarification of land use rights, regularly holding mass legal education meetings to raise legal awareness in the neighborhoods. They also organized collective litigations to sue the local government and developer. Moreover, they launched a campaign called wan ren da jubao (the grand petition and revelation), which targeted local governmental officials and corruption cases.

Take worker protests as another instance. To contain mounting labor unrest within legal boundaries, during 2003–2008, the state implemented a set of labor laws, including the Labor Contract Law and the Law on Mediation and Arbitra- tion of Labor Disputes. These offer workers the right to negotiate with employers.

Despite poor law enforcement and the failure of the unions, the new legal apparatus promised a fair handling of labor disputes and a greater protection of labor rights, thus offering workers more bargaining power to defend their rights. They now make legal claims and urge the enforcement of the law concerning wages and benefits.

The importance of news media

In the emerging center–mass alliance, media exposure can increase the possibility of intervention from above (Cai 2010). Extensive and positive media coverage can often magnify the voices and bring lasting public attention to the issue and prompt intervention. However, due to the tight control of the media, the coverage of mass protests has been intensely restricted. For a long time after the Tiananmen incident, national media outlets cautiously covered protest events and avoided the forbidden zone of the central leadership. The capacity of local media (including those of provincial, municipal, and county levels) to exert pressure on local cadres was much more limited. However, starting with the administrations of Hu Jingtao and Wen Jiaobao, the news media have become more open and critical of issues on local governance. In the past decade, the center has urged local governments and the media to facilitate greater “information transparency” to avoid unrest.

With the center increasingly emphasizing “public opinion supervision,” the role of media in monitoring local governments has become all the more important.

The media directly controlled by the center (such as CCTV and Xinhua News Agency) have become more open in dealing with local discontents. Although the center still censors news coverage, it does not completely block information, but rather manipulates it as a tool to supervise local cadres. That is why many protesters enthusiastically welcome official media reporters or gather at media buildings in Beijing for help.

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One can imagine that the local governments are deeply afraid of media exposure. Local media are generally forbidden from reporting protest actions or are ordered to play down their coverage. Once a protest occurs, the most common tactic is to block information or to discredit protests and then justify repression through the media. In some cases, reporters are not allowed to interview anyone, or people are beaten because they take pictures of the scene. Some local governments even cut off regional mobile phone signals or Internet connections to prevent protesters from spreading protest information.

Despite the heavy censorship, the partially liberalized media system has provided some opportunities. First, although news media are controlled by the government, they are not part of an official sector. State media tend to bypass the bureaucratic hierarchy and produce critical news reporting on local governance. In the present administrative hierarchy, the media controlled by upper-level authorities do enjoy some degree of freedom in disclosing the misconduct of local officials. With the authority given by the upper-level leadership, these media outlets cover the news more from the perspective of the official line drawn by the center, pointing out local officials’ responsibilities. These reports publicize complaints and impose pressure on local governments to settle conflicts. In particular, state media coverage is perceived by protestors as an expression of state recognition of their grievances and a signal that “other media can do follow-up reporting.”

The transformation of the state-controlled media system has also opened up more discursive space for rights struggles. With the spectacular growth of the media sector and the relaxation of state control since the 1990s, more unofficial media outlets have entered the market and created more opportunities for cover- ing mass discontent. Despite severe official censorship, the market mechanism of the media sector has indeed offered some opportunities to expose scandals associated with official misconducts. The growing dependence on consumers has also presented the media with more bargaining power when negotiating with propaganda officials, with “greater space for press reporting to allow media to cater to audiences as a means to attract advertising” (Stockmann 2013, p. 133). Under the circumstances, the media as a whole have substantially departed from the previous role of being a mere propaganda tool (Chen 2012, p. 64). Some unofficial media, in order to attract an audience, boldly challenge official instructions and report protests without touching the bottom line of the party. For instance, in a 2010 Honda worker strike, the magazine Caijing, in order to gather first-hand informa- tion from the striking factory, had gone so far as to intervene in the bargaining process by inviting a prominent labor law scholar to serve as the striking workers’

legal advisor (Wang 2011). In some economically powerful cities, it is not easy to block information. Some media practitioners even conduct “cross-border supervision” to extensively report events that have occurred in other provinces.

Another key factor is overseas media. In the past few years, more and more overseas media have dispatched reporters to China, and they enjoy more freedom in reporting conflicts. When official media do not report, overseas reporters are warmly welcomed by the masses. Take the village protests in Wukan for instance. The villagers had made a concerted effort to attract foreign media. As

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the rebellion unfolded, it was obvious that foreign media played a key role in publicizing the whole event. Due to Wukan’s geographical proximity to Hong Kong, the news was circulated widely on the media overseas. Despite the police blockade and surveillance, some foreign reporters managed to enter the besieged site to cover the protest and were provided with free food and accommodations by villagers. In an attempt to encourage favorable coverage, the villagers assisted foreign reporters in interviewing protestors and set up a media center for them to conduct real-time coverage.

Protest in the internet era

The Internet has also become a weapon for Chinese protesters. On the one hand, news reports that spread online can prompt heated discussions and evoke broad emotional resonances. The ferocious comments by the massive amount of netizens can generate far-reaching public effect within a short time. On the other hand, the Internet has become the main source of information for news media, which use the pictures and descriptions produced by netizens. The communication network that combines mainstream media, social media, and smartphones has reconfigured the ways in which popular protests are heard and seen.

The Internet has profoundly enhanced the horizontal communicative capacities of people and created new political forms. During the 1990s, e-mail and online forums were the main channels for users to exchange information and mobilize anti-U.S. demonstrations. During the outbreak of SARS in 2003, as mainstream media had been banned from reporting it, mobile phones and the Internet played a central role in spreading information (Yu 2007). In 2005, people used mobiles and online forums to mobilize anti-Japanese and anti-French demonstrations as well as Shanghai and Xiamen environmental protests (Yardley 2005). Since 2008, with the rapid development of microblogging and social media, citizens can more easily circulate their appeals online. Pushed by a large reserve army of tech-savvy students, the Internet has gradually become an integral part of public opinion supervision, making it difficult for the government to cover up protests.

Two kinds of online activities deserve attention. The first is appeal to the public. The masses can publicize online the actions and demands of protesters before the government becomes aware. When mainstream media do not report, they can use mobile devices to do live reporting themselves. The non-professional con- tent typically includes first-hand witnesses of protest scenes and police measures, accompanied with angry comments. Such messages are spread via social media and video websites and can often lead to follow-up reports by news media that amplify the event. The Internet also gives protesters greater power to set the agenda. Since heated online discussions often arouse enormous sympathy among citizens, the center has paid closer attention to their impacts. When a protest event is widely discussed in cyberspace, the center feels more pressure to take measures to prevent regime legitimacy from being damaged.

The Internet has also enabled protestors to coordinate action. In many cases, protesters use mobile devices and social media to share experiences, information,

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and discuss protest strategies at a long distance. For factory workers, the Internet can quickly deliver the latest news of faraway labor protests and help form a sense of solidarity. For protesting villagers, mobile phones and social media provide them with channels to link with the outside world. For urban residents, the Inter- net allows them to bypass censorship, share information, and respond quickly to the measures of local authorities.

Into the image

With the popularity of mobile and internet communication, the visual documenta- tion of protests via pictures or videos has gradually become a powerful way to appeal to the public. When a protest occurs, official authorities will try all they can to block the flow of images by taking away cameras, cutting off mobile signals, or discrediting the incident via official media. Sometimes progovernment media will publish photos favorable to local authorities rather than whole video foot- age, so as to manipulate the meaning of events. However, the videos posted by citizens themselves can often change public perception. They capture live images of protests from the perspectives of participants on the street, including crowd gathering, slogans and demands, body language, and police deployment and suppression. These images are often in stark contrast with those released by official media.

There is no doubt that images have become a key site of struggle between Chinese authorities and the crowd. When dramatic images of strong conflicts are spread to deterritorialized media space, the “audience” of events is broad- ened to include not only local governments but also domestic and overseas media, human rights organizations, and netizens. In this transnational image politics, news media and activists pick up the images via social media and produce a wider public sphere. Overseas dissident websites publish the images of violent repression and wounded protestors and use them to illustrate the brutal- ity of authorities and the injustices inflicted on protestors. The image politics can generate moral responses, scandalize authorities to exert heavy pressure on official authorities, and provide broad communication space for future mass protests.

NGNO (nongovernment nonorganization)

Because the party-state has prevented any organized actions and cross-regional and cross-sectoral alliances, Chinese popular protests tend to be uncoordinated and lack sustainable organization and leadership. Due to the severe punishment of protest organizers, it is a more secure way to mobilize action in an “unorganized” manner. This is why the Internet has been tactically appropriated as a tool to organize. Different from the NGOs in liberal democracy, China has its unique NGNO (nongovernment nonorganization). Such novel protest organizing relies on internet communication to engage in collective cooperation and decentralized organization.

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The logic of NGNO lies in that protesters will use networked forms of organizing to coordinate actions. This organization combines existing interpersonal networks and extends mobilization to a wider range of social networks. For example, the land or environmental protests of some local communities are organized through existing relationships and leadership. However, mobile devices and the Internet can mobilize relatives and friends in different places to expand the protest base. In some large-scale urban protests (such as anti-PX campaigns or strikes), the role of the Internet is even more remarkable, while decision-making tends to be more horizontal and decentralized. Since most of the participants are unwilling to reveal their identities or play the roles of organizers, the actions rely more on spontaneous cooperation and mobilization.

Due to this lack of leadership, mobilization becomes largely unorganized, but it is difficult for authorities to crush it. It is because of this loose form of organization that an event can attract a large number of people who coordinate and divide tasks by themselves, seek wider support, and create spectacular scenes on the street.

One of the major features of NGNO is its flexible and ad hoc organizational form. Based on specific topics and demands, it can mobilize the masses within a short time to participate in collective discussions, demonstrations, or strikes. Its rapid responsiveness and mobility can surprise authorities. Although the purpose of such mobilization is not to seize power, it does generate a widespread public effect on authorities. That is why governments block online messages in various ways (common practices include blocking accounts, closing forums, or blocking mobile or internet connections in the area).

The waves of labor strikes in 2010 are just one instance to demonstrate the power of NGNO, where factory workers in various cities mobilized via the Inter- net and mobile phones without forming any centralized leadership or organization. Another case is the anti-PX protest in Xiamen, which had a profound impact on mass protests in China. In May 2007, many Xiamen citizens received a mobile message on the danger of a local PX chemical plant and called on citizens to take to the streets on June 1. The message went viral in a short time, but no one knew who initiated it. Relevant discussions appeared on a local online forum, but they were quickly closed down by the local government. On May 29, a por- tal website disclosed the story and attracted widespread public attention beyond Xiamen. During this time, people kept communicating and mobilizing through mobile phones, e-mails, and microblogs and conducted online live reporting during the demonstration. Though the local government tried to block information and undermine protest organizing, the networked form of communication made it difficult to contain. Later, the government required netizens who posted messages on online forums to register with real names, but it was criticized by the media and online opinions across the country. People’s Daily then published an article to support the protestors, implying that the NGNO could exert sufficient pressure on the center. The subsequent anti-PX protests across various cities suggest that the NGNO could provoke widespread popular resistance beyond locality and generate a chain reaction.

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Bringing the state back in

The Chinese experiences may provide an opportunity to rethink the role of the state in popular protests. Chinese protests do not simply emanate from “civil society.” Vibrant protest politics, as shown previously, has developed by exploiting the opportunities within the state hierarchy. One who fails to grasp this point cannot fully understand the political meaning of Chinese protests.

The Chinese case also offers an opportunity to rethink the critical theory on protest movements. I would like to respond to some arguments formulated in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. At the core of their narrative is the weaken- ing of the state and the reduction of its capacity. The emerging global empire, they argue, is a decentralized transnational network power in which nation-states and their sovereignties are dissolving. The empire also produces the “multitude,”

which is an insubordinate subject “adequate to sustain an absolute constitutional procedure capable of opposing the concept of sovereignty” (Negri 1999, p. 34).³ The global capitalist regime assumes a new form of global sovereignty in place of the national as a new logic of domination (Hardt & Negri 2001).

The Chinese experience I have discussed so far seems to demonstrate a picture different from their theory in terms of the status of the state and the power of its sovereignty. Hardt and Negri insist on “the autonomy of the social against the domination of the state and capital,” but in China, social struggle relies heavily on state intervention and does not seek novel political forms that are independent from the state. The center continues to enjoy high levels of acceptance, and the protesters generally see it as being powerful, resourceful, and indispensable to their rights struggle. The state “still has a decisive function in such areas as implementing an active industrial policy, managing wage relations, limiting the mobility of labor, and carrying out program of social insurance” (Wang 2003, p. 127). Contrary to Hardt and Negri’s assumption, it seems too early to claim, at least in this populous country, that the state’s autonomy has been shrinking. Far from completely losing its political efficacy, the Chinese party-state, which of course has never allowed a serious challenge to its authoritarian rule, still plays a dominant sovereign-juridical role in mediating social conflicts, redistributing resources, and expanding lawful rights. Rather than becoming completely subordinate to capitalist demands, the state remains the effective institution for exerting (however limited) political power over the logic of profit.

Hardt and Negri advocate the abolition of the state and the refusal of its mediating power. In contrast, protestors in China still rely on the state’s mechanisms of representation. They have sought the state’s recognition of their plight and their entitlements as proper citizens, that is, as members of the popular sovereignty represented by the state. They are not against the existing political institutions but request that they better represent their interests. Different from the Indian population group portrayed by Partha Chatterjee (Chatterjee 2004), the protest claims of the Chinese are mainly founded on the terrain of popular sovereignty and focus on legal rights. These claims are conceived in terms of the people constituting the source of popular sovereignty and universal rights; therefore, protestors come

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to the streets to increase the possibility of intervention from above. They appeal to government responsibility and at the same time ask the state to see them as citizens who have the right to survive. Many struggles attempt to elicit a positive response from upper authorities in the hope that the center will recover their rights as citizens. Citizenship, after all, cannot be made possible without the state.

This is also why Empire’s call for state-free global citizenship appears empty and unrealistic in this part of the world.

Hardt and Negri’s refusal of the state also ignores the fact that contemporary protests require the state to offer a space for articulating grievances and that the regime does sometimes tolerate the sort of struggle that displays loyalty. The state still assumes the responsibility of addressing rights violation. To maintain its legitimacy, the state continues to expand citizenship rights and welfare provi- sions. In this sense, the relationship between the protesters and the state is more of negotiation and contestation rather than of binary opposition and revolution. The type of “autonomous politics” advocated by Hardt and Negri that is independent of the state does not in fact exist in China. The population may have many discontents with the state, but they remain reliant on the center to support its cause and insist on having their voices heard by the center rather than trying to overthrow the one-party system.

In considering a politics that is supposed to be autonomous from the control of the state, Hardt and Negri believe that it is possible to produce a common political project across different sectors and territories (Hardt & Negri 2004).

Such an idea, however, does not fit the situation in China. Above all, the struggles therein tend to focus on local forms of governmental rationality instead of broader social issues. They frequently lack leadership and do not attempt to make broad-based demands and expand the struggles into demands for political rights. The huge population, moreover, does not have enough knowledge and ambition to think about how to reconstruct a different system. Moreover, the authorities will crush any protest that seems capable of crossing boundaries. The main protesters in China (workers, peasants, and residents) are very different from the multitude (such as immaterial, mobile, and flexible workers) described by Hardt and Negri. Since these actors have never converged and worked together, it remains difficult to form a generalized opposition to the center.

In their optimistic account, Hardt and Negri assume that if the multitude is able to manage production, then “politics will look after itself” (Callinicos 2010), as if there is no need for political strategy and political articulation on the part of the protestors. The Chinese experience illustrates a unique political process that constantly is shifting around the bottom line of the party-state in order to draw its attention. In this political culture, conflicts have been individualized, fragmented, and neutralized by a range of governmental apparatuses. Within the expansive boundary drawn by the paternalistic state, crowds must display loyalty to the center in order to increase their chances of success. Workers remain pro- hibited from organizing themselves as autonomous political forces, and peasant

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discontent has been channeled into a variety of apparatuses as mechanisms for neutralizing antagonism. The masses can hardly gain access to political power and challenge the status quo. According to Friedman’s observation:

Workers self-consciously submit to the state-imposed segregation of economic and political struggles and present their demands as economic, legal, and in accordance with the stultifying ideology of “harmony”. To do oth- erwise would incite harsh state repression. . . . Perhaps workers can win a wage hike in one factory, and social insurance in another. This type of dispersed, ephemeral, and desubjectivized insurgency has failed to crystallize any durable forms of counter-hegemonic organization capable of coercing the state or capital at the class level. . . . The result is that when the state does intervene on behalf of workers – either by supporting immediate demands during strike negotiations or passing legislation that improves their material standing – its image as a “benevolent Leviathan” is buttressed: it has done these things not because workers have demanded them, but because it cares about “weak and disadvantaged groups” (as workers are referred to in the official lexicon).

(Friedman 2012) Under such conditions of depoliticizing popular protest, it is unlikely that these struggles can effectively contest state power and its political thinking. All the protests are contained within the confines imposed by the party-state. That is why most of their demands are about concrete benefits and not proposals with political agendas. Protesters still operate in relative isolation from each other rather than turning themselves into sustainable political forces and making truly political claims. It is paradoxical that though unrest has grown dramatically in recent years, the strategy of allying with the state has continued to reinforce the status quo politics. How to provide a more nuanced interpretation of such political formation may be a focus for future studies.

Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by the Research Committee of the University of Macau under a grant entitled “Politics against the State” (MYRG2014–00063-FSS).

The author would like to thank Peter Funke and the book editors for their assistance.

Notes

1 According to the rule promulgated by the Ministry of Public Security in 2000, mass incidents are defined as “group actions in violation of state law, regulations, charters, that disrupt social order, endanger public safety, violate the personal safety of citizens and security of public and private property.”

2 This case is adopted from Hsing (2010).

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3 The idea of the multitude is informed by the Spinozan-Deleuzian notion of immanence, which tends to privilege spontaneity and oversimplify a complex political formation of the subject of struggle. As global capitalism turns to become more “immaterial” and deterritorialized, they argue, the class struggle is also changing shape and is dispersed into a more amorphous “multitude” consisting of all those subject to capital (Hardt &

Negri 2004).

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