Rebuilding Legitimacy: Vicissitudes of "Unemployment" in China

• In Event: Politics of Communist & Former Communist Countries Virtual Poster Session I

Abstract

How to maintain legitimacy in authoritarian regimes, where the electoral system is absent is one of the essential issues in political science. The previous studies pointed out that normative authorities and the administrative performance are the key sources to legitimacy, while the interactive causations between the both are required to be clarified. To answer these questions, this study focuses on the concept of “unemployment” in socialist China for two reasons. Firstly, China has experienced a tremendous transition towards a market economy while advocating the socialist ideology since the late 1970s. Rebuilding and maintaining legitimacy became the essential task of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Especially, the vicissitudes of “unemployment” is a representative case in this process. The concept of “unemployment” had been “extinguished” fundamentally once in the socialist planning economic system, but it was rediscovered in the late 1980s under the transition towards the market economy. It provides us with the opportunity to observe the process of rebuilding the legitimacy under one authoritarian regime. Secondly, the previous paper has mainly related the legitimacy of China to economic development, improvement of public welfare, and party ideology separately, and therefore, the legitimacy building among unemployment provides a field that is related to all three key factors.

The concept of unemployment is the base of a mature labor market in a market economy system and is also an indispensable condition for building social security systems for unemployed people. What is more, since the socialist ideology treats the market and capital as the source of exploitation, how to recognize the concept of unemployment may even damage the socialist ideology. Therefore, in authoritarian China, for the maintenance of legitimacy, not only the institutionalization of the social security system is an emergency, but also it has to rebuild and justify the related concept such as “unemployment”. How does China respond to this crisis chain and redefine the concept that ensures its own legitimacy? This paper illustrates the transition of “unemployment” in contemporary China and explains how China has recognized, rebuilt, justified, and institutionalized the rhetoric of “unemployment”.

This study picked up from all the articles in the government's official newspapers, the People's Daily and the Worker's Daily, referring to words related to the concept of unemployment, from 1950 to the 1990s and then created a textual and time series data on the concept of unemployment for about 50 years. The reason why we focused on these issues is that the CCP and the government have a monopoly on interpreting these political and institutional discourses and that they promote the institutionalization of the state in accordance with the hegemonic discourses. Based on the quantitative text analysis, which are oriented by two different types of machine learning methods -scaling sentiments and vectorization of the texts, we quantify the changes in the context of "unemployment" and clarify the process of changing the meaning of the concept. Furthermore, through the combination of this quantified context with various economic indexes, we clarify what event was the most significant for the change in the official rhetoric of the disappearance, transformation, and reinterpretation of the concept of "unemployment". This study establishes the following three hypotheses with reference to the previous papers; (1) The needs for unemployment policy and a sense of urgency were noticed by those on the frontlines of unemployment and were spread out to the local and the central governments, (2) The change in perceptions of the central leadership results in the institutionalization before the problem rises up, (3) Interest groups pressed the central government to put the plan for the institutionalization into action. This study is followed by examining which model is significant for explaining these causal relations.

As a result of the examination, this thesis points out that the need for policy change on the unemployment issue was recognized by the party cadres, and the concept of unemployment was institutionalized as a contract that the CCP made with the people. It is clear that the CCP in the post-ideological era institutionalized the concept of unemployment, which used to be considered a taboo in the socialist ideologies, in order to maintain its legitimacy with a view to providing livelihood security for the people. While these results are identical to the tendency towards ideological loss and institutional guarantees in the states under other authoritarian regimes, the gradual change in policy without regime transition led a certain number of people to leaking out of these safety nets in the case of China.

Authors

• Yuki Mikiya, Keio University

• Yue XU