Rethinking Civil Society and Democracy: Lessons from Construction Workers in Beijing and Delhi

• In Event: 1223 - Open Topics in Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtable (60 min)
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 11: States, Citizenship and Civil Society

Abstract

Construction workers in China and India endure precarious working conditions. In my ethnographic study of construction workers in Beijing and Delhi, I find that the non-payment of wages can trigger workers in both cities to engage in visible, public acts of resistance. However, I also find that workers in Beijing, when compared to their counterparts in Delhi, are much more active in mobilizing within the spaces of civil society to fight for their rights. This may seem puzzling, given documentations of China’s authoritarian state controlling social activism and maintaining command over civil society, and given accounts from India of the success of subordinate groups in claim-making through using political spaces created by democratic institutions or by devising innovative forms of mobilizing within civil society.

In this paper, I move beyond dichotomous conceptualizations of civil society as strong or weak, and of state regimes as democratic or authoritarian. Instead, adopting a multidimensional theoretical framework which understands civil society in two dimensions – organizational strength and autonomy – and state regime in relation to two sources of state power – despotic power and infrastructural power –, I examine how construction workers in Beijing and Delhi have been more, or less, able to utilize civil society resources to fight against the non-payment of wages. Using the comparison between construction workers in the two cities, I qualify existing theories about the relationship between civil society and democracy. More specifically, I argue that it is important to consider how high infrastructural power not only radiates outward from the state as a form of control over civil society, but also empowers citizens to mobilize within civil society, even in non-democratic contexts, and sometimes in unconventional ways.

Author

• Irene Pang, Simon Fraser University