Mapping the Space for Protest in China

• In Event: 277 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Repression and Response

Abstract

Authoritarian China abounds with protests. Many of them seem to be tolerated. This is at odds with the conventional wisdom: Authoritarian regimes highly rely on repression to handle contention. This discrepancy raises a question: What types of protests are tolerated and what types are repressed by the Chinese regime? Existing studies do not provide statistical analysis of the boundaries between toleration and repression and most of them are case studies or only has regional data. Adopting the method of “protest event analysis” (PEA), I have generated and analyzed a dataset of 1418 protest events in China from 2001 to 2012. This is the first large nationwide data set of protests in contemporary China as far as I know. The data set demonstrates a substantial protest space in China today. By using binary and multinomial logistic regression models, I find very distinct patterns in the way authorities handled different kinds of contention. According to different forms of protests, I have drawn lines between state toleration and repression. Therefore, my research elaborates that contrary to conventional wisdom, contentious politics in China is not a simple story of repression. This study helps deepen our understanding about the complex relationships between the state and society as well as politics and resistance in authoritarian regimes.

Author

• Yao Li, Johns Hopkins University