Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Charting Changes in State-Society Relations

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Chinese Politics Mini-Conference

Session Description

This panel explores enduring themes in state-society relations in China, including non-compliance, policy experimentation, campaign-style governance, and legibility. Yet each of these papers challenges the conventional wisdom, throwing new light on well-known topics. In the first group of papers, James Kennedy develops a theory of “mutual non-compliance”, which is not a form of policy resistance or protest, but rather an important factor in local mediation at the grassroots level. Drawing on policy areas such as single child policy, grain procurement and domestic violence, he shows how local flexibility in policy implementation can contribute to relatively stable relations, while at the same time stricter policy execution can lead to unrest. Similarly, Shiqi Ma draws on the concept of ‘legibility’ to investigate slum demolitions. Challenging views that governments demolish slums simply to boost fiscal rents, this paper uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that a slum’s chances of survival decrease as it became less legible to the government.
A second group of papers challenges the narratives around important phenomenon. For instance, Nancy Yun Tang delves into the Young Feminist Activist-MeToo movement, showing how the movement’s (1) independence, (2) innovation, and (3) international connections differentiate it from previous generations of women’s rights advocates in China. These features also explain why the party-state cracked down on the movement, starting with the arrest of the Feminist Five in 2015. Adrian Zenz draws on new evidence from internal state documents to show how Xinjiang’s Re-Education Campaign evolved through experimentation under hierarchy, not through top down directives. This paper further argues that contrary to widespread perceptions, Chen Quanguo was not the “architect” but rather the “implementer” of a substantially pre-designed re-education campaign. Finally, Peter Lorentzen and Jieun Kim’s paper examines the drivers of blacklisting in the social credit system. Using a unique dataset of 9 million corporate and individual blacklist entries as of July 2020, they show that blacklisting almost always is a result of debt-related civil suits, predominantly related to property development. They find no evidence of blacklisting for political reasons. Together, these five papers force us to rethink major concepts and reexamine ordinary phenomenon, adding nuance to our views on how the state manages society in China.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Mutual Noncompliance: Uneven Implementation and Social Stability - John James Kennedy, University of Kansas

• The Chinese Young Feminist Activist: MeToo Movement’s Boundary - Nancy Tang

• Politicization of Slum Demolition: Evidence from the Satellite Images of Beijing - Shiqi Ma, Colorado College

• Charting the Policy Evolution of Xinjiang’s Re-education Campaign - Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

• China's Blacklists - Peter L. Lorentzen, University of San Francisco; Jieun Kim, NYU Shanghai

Chair

• William Hurst University of Cambridge

Discussants

• Teresa Wright California State University, Long Beach

• Kyle Alan Jaros University of Notre Dame