Where You Live Is Where You Stand: The Geography of Protest Choice in China

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

Abstract

Who chooses to protest in a stable authoritarian regime such as China? Our research tests several rival theories of protest activity for citizens across China. With data from the 2017 Public Satisfaction Survey with the Implementation of the Environmental Protection Law (PSS) across 10 cities in China, we make the following observations. First, the likelihood of citizens to consider protest as a viable choice of political participation is not only a function of individual factors, such as demographic characteristics, attitudes, and environmental awareness, but also correlated with the cities where they reside. Second, among a variety of city-level features, economic, environmental, cultural, and political, we employ Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and find that three factors‚ economic development, government openness, and distance to political centers, tend to condition citizens’ protest propensity. Importantly, the direction of influence from economic development in Chinese cities differs from those predictions relying on studies of democratic regimes or cross-country studies. Finally, a multi-level model analysis examines how city-level contexts interact with the individual-level predictors of protest choice. The findings demonstrate that individuals who live in economically less developed and politically distant cities are more likely to choose to protest, ceteris paribus. Moreover, being distant away from Beijing or provincial capitals further increases the propensity of the individuals who are well-informed. Yet we have not found evidence for a compounding effect of governmental openness and individual factors on citizens’ preference for protest.

Authors

• Juan Wang, McGill University

• Phoebe Mengxiao Tang, Drew University