Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.
Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts?such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures?while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to ?silences? in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.
Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.
Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts?such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures?while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to ?silences? in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.
* Acknowledgments * Prologue: The New Contentious Politics in China: Poor and Blank or Rich and Complex? Sidney Tarrow * Introduction: Studying Contention in Contemporary China Kevin J. O'Brien and Rachel E. Stern * Student Movements in China and Taiwan Teresa Wright * Collective Petitioning and Institutional Conversion Xi Chen * Mass Frames and Worker Protest William Hurst * Worker Leaders and Framing Factory-Based Resistance Feng Chen * Recruitment to Protestant House Churches Carsten T. Vala and Kevin J. O'Brien * Contention in Cyberspace Guobin Yang * State-Society Relations and Environmental Campaigns Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao * Disruptive Collective Action in the Reform Era Yongshun Cai * Manufacturing Dissent in Transnational China Patricia M. Thornton * Permanent Rebellion? Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese Protest Elizabeth J. Perry * Notes * Contributors * Index
This is a much needed book that will rightfully attract a great deal of attention. The Introduction is a masterful guide to the range of analytical issues concerning contentious politics, and the quality of the research, analysis, and writing throughout is impressive. -- Marc Blecher, Oberlin College This important book will interest both China specialists and social movement scholars. The essays cover many major issues in popular contention and protest in China, including labor rights, the environment, the internet, and religion, and offer valuable insights into such understudied topics as protest leaders and the effects of transnational activism. -- Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan
Kevin J. O'Brien is Alann P. Bedford Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Elizabeth J. Perry is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Patricia M. Thornton is University Lecturer in the Politics of China at Oxford University.
This is a much needed book that will rightfully attract a great
deal of attention. The Introduction is a masterful guide to the
range of analytical issues concerning contentious politics, and the
quality of the research, analysis, and writing throughout is
impressive.
*Marc Blecher, Oberlin College*
This important book will interest both China specialists and social
movement scholars. The essays cover many major issues in popular
contention and protest in China, including labor rights, the
environment, the internet, and religion, and offer valuable
insights into such understudied topics as protest leaders and the
effects of transnational activism.
*Mary E. Gallagher, University of Michigan*
A valuable addition to the studies of social movements and Chinese
politics, Popular Protest in China provides a lively account of
various forms of social resistance in a non-democratic environment.
The wide range of assembled research encompasses a rich empirical
spectrum of collective action from workers' strikes to internet
contention, from environmental campaigns to religious dissent, and
from openly organized or spontaneous assemblies to underground
mobilizations. We find in the book many of the same stories on
contemporary Chinese insurgence covered recently by the media but
with much more complexity, nuance and depth.
*Contemporary Sociology*
This book defines its aim as to "nudge the study of contentious
politics and China a step closer together." This is a welcome goal
in the study of Chinese popular protests, and the book delivers
what it promises. At the same time, it provides a wealth of
information on contemporary contentious politics in China. Most
articles in the book manage to be both theoretically interesting
and to provide new information...Everyone interested in
contemporary Chinese protests and social movements will find the
book worth reading. It also calls for further research using
concepts from studies in contentious politics. The book thus raises
the level of theoretical debate by asking how well these concepts
travel to China and what China can give back to them.
*China Journal*
Two decades of citizen action in China since 1989 have presented
social movement scholars with a goldmine. A veteran scholar of
Chinese protest, Kevin O'Brien, brings out this edited volume to
showcase a group of experienced field researchers, continuing an
effort to build a dialogue between Chinese experiences and the
Western-honed theoretical models. The book is a welcome addition to
the literature, as movement theorists have for years lamented the
lack of lessons learned through a broadened comparative scope.
*China Quarterly*
As Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern explain in their introductory
chapter, the volume is designed as a springboard for new research.
In that respect, they succeed marvelously. This book is highly
recommended for graduate courses on contemporary Chinese politics
and to anyone interested in state-society relations in China.
*Journal of Chinese Political Science*
This fine collection of chronicles of what were largely short-lived
episodes of disturbance and appeal, paired with analyses of what
kept them so, sheds much light on the situation of protest in China
today. The individual pieces, most of them drawing attention to
novel aspects of expressing dissent in contemporary China, and new
means of doing so, are all gems. Almost every one of them improves
on work the authors published earlier on the same topics they write
on here. But these new essays possess much more relevance to the au
courant comparative social movements, "political process"
approach--one that account for protest by reference to structural
and ideational factors, as well as to the resources available to
protesters. The extent of the theoretical and comparative material
consulted and assimilated in pretty much every chapter is extremely
impressive.
*China Perspectives*
Overall, the book has several strengths that make it a valuable
contribution to the literature on popular contention as well as to
the study of China more generally. It includes informative cases
that reflect some of the contemporary challenges facing the Chinese
state. Furthermore, the individual chapters offer detailed reviews
of the literature and build on one another quite well, so that the
book reads as a unified body of work rather than a disjointed
collection of essays, as sometimes occurs with edited volumes.
Together, the essays offer a nuanced assessment of the factors
contributing to the successes and failures of different protests,
and have a nice combination of both historical and contemporary
protests to discern important areas of convergence and
divergence...The book is highly recommended for a wide audience,
and it is a must-read for anyone who is interested in what the
future holds for the state of protest in China.
*Journal of Asian Studies*
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