China's Informal Tools of Grassroots Control

IF 1.3 Asia Policy Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1353/asp.2023.0012
M. Elfstrom
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Abstract

A t the time of writing, young Chinese are gathering in cities across China, as well as on university campuses around the world, to protest their country’s harsh “zero-Covid” policy. And they are raising demands that are bracingly political, including calls for freedom of speech, for an end to concentration camps for Uighurs, and for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to step down. With this historic upsurge seizing our attention, it is worth remembering that protests are actually extremely common in China but normally take a less overtly political form. Farmers clash with police over water pollution. Workers routinely strike over low wages. Homeowners demand compensation when city redevelopment projects threaten their apartments. In her excellent new book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China, Lynette H. Ong examines the “everyday state power” deployed to contain these instances of what James C. Scott has called “everyday resistance.” Focusing on conflicts related to urbanization, in particular, Ong theorizes two approaches used by local authorities: handing violence off to thugs-for-hire in an effort at ensuring deniability, and relying on volunteer brokers with different degrees of independence from the state to use personal relationships to “mobilize the masses” into supporting, or at least acquiescing to, government plans. Although one of these approaches is coercive and the other is largely persuasive, they both involve exercising power “via society itself” (p. 5). Ong’s volume adds to a growing body of work that explores the great variety of Chinese actors either on the far fringes of the state or in a gray zone between state and society that help the government realize its objectives.1 Anyone who has conducted research or done business or worked
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中国基层控制的非正式工具
在撰写本文时,中国年轻人聚集在中国各地的城市以及世界各地的大学校园,抗议中国严厉的“动态清零”政策。 随着这一历史性的高潮引起我们的注意,值得记住的是,抗议活动在中国实际上极为常见,但通常采取不那么公开的政治形式。农民因水污染问题与警方发生冲突。工人们经常因工资低而罢工。当城市重建项目威胁到他们的公寓时,房主们要求赔偿。在她的优秀新书《外包镇压:当代中国的日常国家权力》中,Lynette H.Ong探讨了为遏制詹姆斯·C·斯科特所说的“日常抵抗”而部署的“日常国家权力”,翁提出了地方当局使用的两种方法:将暴力交给暴徒雇佣,以确保否认;以及依靠独立于国家不同程度的志愿者经纪人,利用个人关系“动员群众”支持或至少默许政府计划。尽管其中一种方法是强制性的,另一种方法在很大程度上是有说服力的,但它们都涉及“通过社会本身”行使权力(第5页)。王的这本书增加了越来越多的作品,探索了处于国家边缘或国家与社会之间灰色地带的各种各样的中国行动者,帮助政府实现其目标。1任何进行过研究、做过生意或工作的人
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来源期刊
Asia Policy
Asia Policy Arts and Humanities-History
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
0.00%
发文量
55
期刊介绍: Asia Policy is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal presenting policy-relevant academic research on the Asia-Pacific that draws clear and concise conclusions useful to today’s policymakers.
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