Rightful Resistance in Rural China

How can the poor and weak “work” a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This “rightful resistance” has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O’Brien and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention. Although the focus of their rich, ground-level analysis is contemporary China, the authors make a compelling argument that wherever a gap between rights promised and rights delivered exists, there is room for rightful resistance to emerge.

Kevin J. O’Brien is Bedford Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on popular protest and Chinese politics in the reform era. He is the author of Reform without Liberalization: China’s National People’s Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change and the coeditor of Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice. Currently, he is serving as the chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at UC-Berkeley.

Lianjiang Li is an associate professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research focuses on village elections and collective action in rural China. He has published in Asian Survey, China Information, China Journal, China Quarterly, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Modern China.

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Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

Editors

Jack A. Goldstone  George Mason University
Doug McAdam  Stanford University and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Sidney Tarrow  Cornell University
Charles Tilly  Columbia University
Elisabeth J. Wood  Yale University

Ronald Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism
Charles Brockett, Political Movements and Violence in Central America
Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, Social Movements and Organization Theory
Jack A. Goldstone, editor, States, Parties, and Social Movements
Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention
Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism
Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000
Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence
Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge

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Rightful Resistance in Rural China

KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
University of California, Berkeley

LIANJIANG LI
Hong Kong Baptist University

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521861311

© Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

O'Brien, Kevin J., 1957–
Rightful resistance in rural China / Kevin J. O'Brien, Lianjiang Li.
p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in contentious politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-86131-4 (hardback) – ISBN 0-521-67852-8 (pbk.)
1. Peasantry – China – Political activity. 2. China – Rural conditions.
I. Li, Lianjiang. II. Title. III. Series.
JQ1516.O27    2006
305.5′633′0951–dc22    2005021714

ISBN-13 978-0-521-86131-1 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-86131-4 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-67852-0 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-67852-8 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Betsy and Lijuan

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Contents

Preface			page xi
1		RIGHTFUL RESISTANCE	1
		Rightful Resistance in Rural China	5
		Comparative Perspectives	15
2		OPPORTUNITIES AND PERCEPTIONS	25
		Understanding Opportunities	25
		A Preview of the Argument	26
		A Structural Opening	27
		Crosscurrents: Obstacles to Mobilization	31
		Perceptions of Opportunity	38
		Conclusion	48
3		BOUNDARY-SPANNING CLAIMS	50
		Unpacking the State	51
		Pressing for Accountability	54
		Payoffs	63
4		TACTICAL ESCALATION	67
		Three Variants of Direct Action	69
		How New?	76
		How Widespread?	77
		Origins of Direct Tactics	79
		Who Innovates?	88
		Some Implications	91
5		OUTCOMES	95
		Thinking about Consequences	95
		An Interactive Approach to Outcomes	97
		Consequences of Contention	99
		Understanding Outcomes	112
		A Note on Variation	114
6		IMPLICATIONS FOR CHINA	116
		Citizenship	116
		Political Change	123
Interviewee List			131
Appendix A: Who Leads Rightful Resistance?			135
Appendix B: Sources			139
		Survey Samplings	139
		Written Materials and Interviews	140
Bibliography			143
Index			169

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Preface

We first noticed rightful resistance in the summer of 1994, when we were doing fieldwork on village elections in China. As officials and researchers in Shandong, Hebei, and Hubei described the problems rural leaders faced, they told us fascinating stories about “nail-like individuals” (dingzihu) and “shrewd and unruly people” (diaomin). We soon learned that villagers whom cadres labeled this way were often responsible for launching protests, including actions as small as trying to topple a village leader and as large as organizing an antitax demonstration that drew in thousands of farmers. That first summer, despite some promising interviews, we were not overly hopeful that we could discover a great deal about these people or what they did. After all, rural unrest was (and still is) a sensitive topic in China, on which sources were scarce, anecdotes rare, and fieldwork fraught with complications.

   We returned home and started reading. Our initial search for examples of protests did not turn up much, although we did locate some informative articles in out-of-the-way Chinese journals and popular magazines. Still, we felt unsure what to make of these accounts, mainly because we did not have any complete cases that were as detailed as we needed.

   This changed when we gained access to our first full episode of rural contention, in which dozens of villagers were struggling to oust a local Communist Party secretary who they were confident was corrupt. With the help of friends and colleagues, we interviewed a number of organizers and community members as well as the accused cadre; we collected letters of complaint and testimonies prepared by protest leaders; we also spoke with several township and county officials who had been drawn into the case. Following one episode of contention from shortly after it began to its conclusion proved more valuable than we could have imagined. It was particularly useful in bringing to light aspects of collective action that Chinese sources usually ignored, such as who the activists were, what tactics they employed, and how important it was to win support outside the village (O’Brien and Li, 1995).

   As we continued to gather material on rural protest, it became clear that what we were observing did not fit snugly in the literatures on political participation, popular resistance, or social movements. It was neither as institutionalized as most political participation nor as uninstitutionalized as the “politics by other means” that social movement scholars usually studied. The contention we were hearing and reading about was more noisy, public, open, and consequential than James Scott’s (1985) “everyday forms of resistance,” yet still fell short of rebellion or revolution. This activity made use of authorized channels without playing exactly by the rules and rested on a familiar rhetorical strategy, but it did not involve quite the same accommodations with existing power relations or assertions of long-standing cultural conventions as “moral economy” claims (Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971, 1991: 336–51). This type of collective action, we eventually realized, was not political participation, everyday resistance, or a social movement, but something else. Lacking a good term to describe it, we called it “policy-based resistance.” At this point, we were working solely in a Chinese context and were content to distinguish “policy-based resisters” from “recalcitrants” and “compliant villagers” (Li and O’Brien, 1996).

   Our efforts to figure out what about this contention might be interesting to a wider audience took much longer than we had expected. Once it became apparent that Chinese villagers were struggling to defend rights they had already been granted, or rights they believed could be derived from the regime’s policies, laws, principles, and legitimating ideology, we decided that “rightful resistance” (O’Brien, 1996, 2001; O’Brien and Li, 1999; Li, 2004) was a more precise term than “policy-based resistance.” But we were continually stymied in trying to gain a more complete understanding of the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of rightful resistance. At this stage, we were not sure whether this type of contention would spread, evolve, and have a significant impact, or if it was an epiphenomenon (characteristic of China in its transitional state) that would vanish without a trace. Owing to the sensitivity of research on social unrest, we found it difficult to arrange fieldwork in locations where we knew major episodes of rightful resistance had occurred. For almost eight years we only inched forward, relying on short stints of field research here and there, some survey work, and irritatingly incomplete accounts of rural contention available in Chinese sources.

   Then, in early 2003 good luck came our way. With the help of Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, we gained access to dozens of protest leaders in Hunan province. In the course of joint fieldwork by Yu and Lianjiang Li in January and March 2003, as well as through transcripts and videotaped interviews that Dr. Yu generously shared with us, much new information came to light and much that we had dimly perceived came into sharper focus.¹

   Making sense of these interviews (and our other evidence) entailed moving from single incidents to general patterns to an underlying logic. Rather than presenting our China findings in great detail, as we have done elsewhere, this book focuses on some of the more theoretical implications of rightful resistance: how, in particular, this form of protest speaks to the literature on contentious politics.

   This study is organized like an episode of collective action: it works its way from origins to dynamics to consequences. Chapter 1 defines rightful resistance and explains its relationship to other types of popular contention. In Chapter 2 we explore the onset of rightful resistance by examining opportunities for protest in rural China and how activists perceive them. Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the boundary-spanning nature of rightful claims and tactics and discuss a trend toward claims radicalization and tactical escalation.² In the last two chapters we consider the significance of rightful resistance: Chapter 5 examines its effects on policy implementation, protest leaders, and the wider community, whereas Chapter 6 investigates possible consequences for Chinese state-society relations and political change, particularly those related to policy innovations, institutional reforms, and the spread of citizenship practices.

   Although this book dips into many topics, it is in no way comprehensive. Among other things, we do not spend much time worrying about regional variation; nor do we provide an all-around treatment of rightful resistance (and its analogues) in Chinese history. The book is largely conceptual and “universalizing” (Tilly, 1984: 97, 108) rather than causal and variation seeking.³ For readers interested in the reach of our findings in China, we encourage them to investigate whether our hunches and survey results (often summarized in long footnotes) hold up in different regions, for different policies, at different times.⁴

   We have also not been able to examine as many concepts as we had hoped to. We had thought about including chapters on framing, mobilizing structures, high-risk activism, repertoires of contention, grievances, leadership, and elite allies. But we just did not have enough data to do them justice. The hooks we did end up with were chosen according to two simple principles: where did we have the most to say to students of contentious politics, and where was the lowest-hanging fruit to be found? There are certainly many other points of entry for Sinologists who wish to engage the contentious politics literature, and we are delighted to see that a number of our fellow China scholars, using their own fieldwork and findings, have begun to exploit them.⁵

   Nearly all the questions addressed in Chapters 2 through 5 are drawn from the contentious politics literature, and we discuss (often in glancing fashion) many familiar concepts and theories. But we have seldom found it necessary to jump in decisively on one side or the other in ongoing debates.⁶ Instead, our approach has been to position the China case in relation to the literature by appropriating whatever explained our findings best. This has enabled us to underscore commonalities between protest in China and protest elsewhere, while suggesting bridges between different theories and perspectives. It also means that readers hoping to find clear-cut statements that, for example, failures are more crucial than opportunities in spurring tactical innovation, or perceptions of opportunity are more important than structural opportunities, may be disappointed. Instead, they will have to settle for seeing what rightful resistance in the Chinese countryside can tell us about tactical innovation, radical flank effects, the strategic dilemma, object shift, venue shopping, unpacking political opportunity, blame attribution, transgressive versus contained claims, the biographical consequences of protest, the pleasures of protest, and so on, as we learn what evidence from China and theory can offer each other.⁷

   Looking back over our decade-long collaboration, we feel fortunate and grateful for many reasons. Beyond what we have learned, our work has deepened our ties immeasurably, as we evolved from adviser and advisee into frequent travel companions, daily sounding boards, and close friends. Writing in tag-team style, usually nine time zones apart, enabled us, as Marc Blecher once put it, to reap the benefits of a “globalized production system.” It also ensured that each of us would wake up nearly every morning to find an inbox filled with an improved version of the muddled, question-laden text we had e-mailed across the Pacific the night before.

   Our field trips and surveys were made possible by generous financial support from the Asia Foundation, the China Times Cultural Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, Hong Kong Baptist University, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Ohio State University, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Sun Yat-sen Culture & Education Foundation, and the Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, and Department of Political Science of the University of California at Berkeley. For able research assistance in the nooks and crannies of the contentious politics literature, we thank Kevin Wallsten. Margaret Boittin skillfully wrestled the Word indexing tool to a draw and responded (with unfailing cheer and frightful speed) to our requests to add just one more set of subcategories. As we shared thoughts and papers with colleagues over the past decade, we benefited greatly from comments by Thomas Bernstein, Lucien Bianco, Marc Blecher, Anita Chan, Donald Clarke, Neil Diamant, Maria Edin, Randle Edwards, Edward Friedman, Thomas Gold, Peter Gries, Lei Guang, Kathy Hartford, Daniel Kelliher, Stanley Lubman, Ching Kwan Lee, Kenneth Lieberthal, Xiaobo Lü, Melanie Manion, Ethan Michelson, Andrew Nathan, Michel Oksenberg, Stanley Rosen, James Scott, Tianjian Shi, Dorothy Solinger, Ralph Thaxton, Stig Thøgersen, Jonathan Unger, Lynn White III, Tyrene White, Brantly Womack, Dali Yang, Guobin Yang, Dingxin Zhao, and David Zweig. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Perry and Charles Tilly, both of whom read the manuscript from front to back, and both of whom provided a host of helpful suggestions that improved the book in ways we could never have come up with on our own.

   Among our Chinese friends and colleagues, we are particularly thankful to Bai Gang, Bai Yihua, Che Mingzhou, Cheng Tongshun, Fu Xizhong, Gao Shan, Guo Zhenglin, Hu Rong, Jean Hung, Li Changping, Li Changqing, Li Fan, Li Kang, Liang Jun, Mi Youlu, Qiao Riyong, Shi Weimin, Tang Jinsu, Wang Aiping, Wang Jiexiu, Wang Jingyao, Wang Zhenhai, Wang Zhenyao, Wang Zhiquan, Wu Bin, Xiang Jiquan, Xiao Tangbiao, Xin Qiushui, Xu Fuqun, Xu Yong, Yan Tiezheng, Yang Aimin, Yang Wenliang, Yao Dongfang, Yu Xin, Zhang Guang, Zhang Houan, Zhang Jianxin, Zhang Jinming, Zhang Yinghong, Zhao Shukai, Zhu Guanglei, and, especially, Yu Jianrong. To our interviewees and survey respondents we are most grateful of all.

   At Cambridge University Press, we would like to thank our editor Lew Bateman for keeping us moving toward the finish line; our production editor Brian MacDonald; and Sidney Tarrow, in his dual capacity as coeditor of Cambridge’s book series, Studies in Contentious Politics, and sure-handed guide through the social movement literature. We owe Sid more than he realizes for his encouragement, his suggestions, and the efforts he has made (with Charles Tilly and Doug McAdam) to open up the field of contentious politics and welcome in those of us who do not study industrialized democracies.

   Chapters 1, 3, and 5 draw to varying degrees on our previously published articles: “Rightful Resistance,” World Politics, 49(1) (October 1996), 31–55; “Neither Transgressive Nor Contained: Boundary-Spanning Contention in China,” in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen (eds.), State and Society in 21st Century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 105–22; and “Popular Contention and Its Impact in Rural China,” Comparative Political Studies, 38(3) (April 2005), 235–59. Several pages in Chapter 6 were adapted from “Villagers, Elections, and Citizenship in Contemporary China,” Modern China, 27(4) (October 2001), 407–35. We are grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press, Taylor & Francis Books Ltd., and Sage Publications Inc., for permission to use copyrighted material.

   For our wives and daughters, Betsy, Lijuan, Brenda, Joyce, and Molly, we hope this book provides a small return on the many sacrifices they made while we were working, either in China or tethered to our computers at home. And yes, Molly, you’re right: “That’s enough work for today. Going to the park is much more fun.”

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Rightful Resistance in Rural China