Mountains & Mobilization: Appalachia and North China in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: The Pluralistic Politics of Resource Extraction

Abstract

This paper compares the political economy of and history of popular unrest in Appalachia and North China. Although the countries involved obviously differ on a host of dimensions, not the least regime type, these two particular regions within them share much in common. After genocide opened up the Appalachians to European settlement, poor immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland subsistence farmed on difficult to cultivate mountain plots(Caudill 1962, chap. 1), while arid and rugged North China was the site of devastating famines into the late nineteenth century (Li 2007). The coal industry, vital to the industrialization and defense of the United States and China alike, subsequently made these regions national investment priorities (Eller 2013; Wu 2015). Yet, neither coal nor subsequent state-led anti-poverty initiatives succeeded in preventing the Appalachia or North China from continuing to lag behind their countries economically—and coal, in particular, fed crooked local political machines in both places (Eller 2013; Wang 2009). Social movements in these two regions, meanwhile, developed along a somewhat different trajectory from the U.S. and China as a whole. Mine worker organizing in Appalachia peaked early, in the 1920s, with showdowns like the Battle of Blair Mountain (Green 2015; Shogan 2006). North China was the site of intense guerilla warfare and Communist Party recruitment during WWII (Yang 2017). As captured by the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset (see McAdam and Su 2002), unrest in places like West Virginia spiked the 1970s just as social mobilization in America more generally was dipping. The China Strikes dataset shows unrest in Shanxi Province rising in the early 2000s, ahead of China’s national wave of labor activism (Elfstrom 2017). My paper will examine the distinctive structural conditions and contentious politics of these areas using protest event data from the aforementioned collections, was well as others like the Mapping American Social Movements project, alongside historical news reports and secondary literature.

By delving into a variety of issues, including underdevelopment, resource extraction, corruption, and political efficacy, in parts of the world that are rarely studied together, the paper epitomizes the emphasis in this year’s APAS theme statement on “complex issues that do not respect… geographic boundaries.” It also answers the same statement’s call for greater methodological pluralism. My approach is essentially comparative historical analysis: qualitatively approaching big questions with “a concern for causal analysis, an emphasis on processes over time, and the use of systematic and contextualized comparison” (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003, 10). However, rather than employing the sort of broad, cross-national juxtaposition that is typical of this approach, I have chosen to analyze specific regions from within two countries. If the countries represent “most different” cases on many dimensions, the regions that are the focus of this paper show the similar outcomes that can result from shared conditions amidst more general dissimilarities (on most similar and most different research designs, see Przeworski and Teune 1970). Hurst (2017) has argued for precisely this method of matching “subnational units or phenomena across national boundaries” as a means of exploring Chinese politics in a deeper and more regionally-attuned manner than much recent scholarship, while at the same time placing the country in a global perspective, thereby testing “the limits and scope of generalizability not only in terms of broad causal arguments but also very precisely of specific causal mechanisms.” The paper’s findings should add to important discussions in American politics and China studies concerning socioeconomic dislocation, populism, and the power of marginalized people.

Author

• Manfred Elfstrom, University of British Columbia, Okanagan