Against the Law

"Yes. My last book is by Ching Kwan Lee who is a sociologist at UCLA. She has done a considerable amount of fieldwork in China on labour protests. And in this book, she compares protests among workers in two different parts of China. One is the northeast, what she calls the rustbelt. And the other is the southeast, what she calls the sunbelt, although frankly there’s so much pollution down there, you hardly ever see the sunshine. So it’s a bit of a misnomer. Up in the rustbelt you have workers being laid off from the major state-owned enterprises, and she points out that there protests are often framed in nostalgia for the security of the Maoist era. And down in the southeastern part of China, in Dongguan and Shenzhen and around there, you have migrant workers, largely female, who come from the countryside and are working in these new foreign-owned enterprises. And their protests do not hark back to the nostalgia of the Maoist era, and instead are really very much about ‘We need higher wages, we need better working conditions’. But in both cases she suggests that the political dangers of these protests are fairly limited, so long as the state responds fairly sympathetically and intelligently to them. And she stresses the limited nature of what the workers are actually demanding. So I think it gives a good understanding, rather like Esherick’s book on the Boxers, of the fact that local political economies, local political cultures in China, give rise to very different kinds of protest traditions and it’s really only under unusual circumstances that these kinds of movements can become united and become politically terribly dangerous for the regime. There’s always a possible threat, because accidents and contingencies are impossible to predict. But, on the whole, my reading is that the popular protests that we see in China today are really just a sign of ‘politics as usual’. China has always had a huge amount of popular protest, whether we’re talking about the late Imperial period or the Republican period or the Communist period. And for the most part this protest is about local kinds of issues. Up to this point the Chinese government has been very skilful and very smart – not in every case, by any means, but on the whole – in responding to this protest. Therefore I see it as actually, in some respects, strengthening the Chinese regime. Because in a non-democratic system, where you don’t have popular elections, there are no good institutionalised channels for the state to learn what’s really on people’s minds. And so popular protests give the government a very good sense of the issues that people are concerned about; what they care about so much that they’re actually willing to risk danger and go out in the streets and raise a hue and a cry about it. In the 1990s, the bulk of the protests that one saw in China were about the tax burden that was crushing peasants, especially in the interior agricultural regions. In 2006 the Chinese government did a rather amazing thing: they abolished the agricultural land tax. So, for the first time in 2,600 years, China has no agricultural tax. And that was definitely a response to the large number of rural protests in the interior, which really did simmer down substantially after that. Then, of course, we’ve seen this huge development of land protests, especially close to the cities, over the sale of land. There’s no doubt that the recent legislation on property right laws, and trying to figure out how to rationalise land transfers and so on, is a direct response to that problem. There’s a variety of other instances – for example, the internet protests that developed after a college graduate from rural Hubei was beaten to death by police in Guangzhou. He’d been detained by Chinese police for being a migrant. And this resulted in a large internet protest about police brutality, and the central state responded by changing its laws about vagrancy. Of course, the central government doesn’t respond in all cases. Sometimes protests are repressed, and often local officials do things that central officials don’t like and sometimes the state, through its officials, is extremely heavy-handed. But I would say that, on the whole, protest has been dealt with very effectively by the Chinese state, and it gives them a kind of reading on what people care about, what they are concerned about, and therefore what kinds of things it needs to respond to, in terms of its policies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, yes, up to this point one should not interpret popular protest in China as somehow a signal that there is serious political instability, or that the regime is on the ropes. Quite the opposite. Popular protest is a normal part of Chinese politics, and it only becomes politically threatening if it’s clear that the state is not responding to people’s grievances. But in any kind of non-institutionalised form of politics like protests there is always the danger that things are going to get out of hand and escalate and turn into something quite different from what they started out as. So I don’t completely discount the possibility that one of those protests could turn into the spark for a major political transformation. But I think, rather than focusing on that, we would actually have much more to say about Chinese politics if we focused on downplaying these protests as harbingers of regime change and understood better the way in which the regime has actually very skilfully changed many of its policies to respond to the demands that are articulated."