Preventing Protests By Surveillance: The Changing Landscape of Protests in China

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Dimensions of Dissent: Protest in Contemporary China

Abstract

Scholars on contentious of politics in China nearly unanimously agree that there is a high number of protest in China, and the number of protests is still increasing. To explain the co-existence of authoritarian regime with a high level of social protests, past literature suggest that the Chinese government has tolerated protests that are not regime-threatening in order to obtain true information about serious grievances.

In contrast, I argue that the leadership turnover from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping in March 2013 has marked a critical juncture of the shift in policies governing protests nationwide. Since the leadership transition, the Chinese government has abandoned the previous protest-tolerating mind-sight and has implemented multiple protest-preventing systems based on human or digital surveillance systems to proactively prevent grievances and mobilization attempts from becoming protests. The human surveillance system relies on implementing the so-called "grid-style" management system that split residential areas into grid and hire human workers to monitor citizens in the grid, including their collective action. The digital surveillance system relies on building online petition systems to collect citizen's grievances without local government distortion, and relies on CCTV-based video surveillance systems that quickly detect small gatherings and prevent them from growing into large protests. Overall, the leadership transition has marked a critical juncture in the national-level adoption of human and digital surveillance systems that can be used to gather information about grievances and prevent the grievances from being developed into protests. Consequently, I hypothesize that there will be fewer protests in China after the leadership transition, and the protests will become more contained, being less violent, less disruptive, and less likely to directly targeted against the state. Furthermore, cities that have adopted surveillance systems to prevent protests earlier than other cities may also witness earlier increases in their protest activities.

Using a unique dataset capturing 131,565 protest events in China (CASM-China), I found that there were qualitative changes in the landscape of protests in China after April 2013. Statistical analysis has shown that at the national level, the number of protests decreased, the average size decreased, fewer violent and disruptive tactics were used, and the state was less likely to be targeted over time. At the city level, earlier implementation of digital surveillance systems predicts a larger decrease in protest activities over the study time period. The implementation of human-based surveillance system is a stronger predictor in reducing protest activities, compared with the implementation of digital surveillance systems. Overall,the Chinese government after 2013 has found a way to govern protest through soft preventive strategies, instead of hardliner repressions.

This article offers one of the most comprehensive quantitative evidence on the changes of protest activities in China in the past decade. It challenges the conventional understanding in the literature that the number of protests is still increasing in China, and provides evidences that the government has found a way to reduce protest activities. It also highlights the importance of surveillance systems in preventing protests, which should be of broader concern to researchers studying contentious politics outside China.

Author

• Han Zhang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology