Introduction
In recent years, there has been much discussion over the resilience or vulnerability of authoritarian rule in China. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, many scholars predicted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was approaching its almost inevitable end. The rigid and hierarchical Leninist party structure, as demonstrated by the collapse of communist regimes across Europe and Eurasia, lacked the flexibility needed to response the demands of a dynamic rapidly changing society.Footnote 1 It thus either needed to embrace serious political reforms that would create a more open and inclusive political system or face the prospect of a sudden, even revolutionary collapse.Footnote 2 Since that time, the CCP has defied such predictions of its collapse and tenaciously held onto power, leaving scholars to propose a range of explanations for its survival. These explanations have included the effectiveness of institutional reform within the party-state, the CCP's success in promoting economic growth and development, and the party's successful cooptation of rising social and economic forces.Footnote 3 Such adaptations have strengthened the CCP and its grip on power, allowing it to survive and even thrive amidst sweeping social and economic changes in China.
Over the last decade, new developments have again raised questions about the CCP's ongoing resilience. The party has faced social dislocations associated with rapid economic growth, struggled to rein in official corruption, and faced an increasingly assertive and technologically equipped public. It has also failed to address widening socio-economic inequality, growing health threats, and an environmental crisis.Footnote 4 These factors have fuelled a wave of social unrest over the last two decades, marked by a rapid growth in the number of collective petitions filed and a surge in the number of mass incidents reported by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS).Footnote 5 However, these acts of contention have largely remained localized, parochial actions, targeting local officials, focusing on material, community-specific grievances, and have not been coordinated across localities or social sectors.Footnote 6 These characteristics have distinguished parochial forms of unrest from national protest movements, which maintain sustained interaction with the national state, apply broadly inclusive frames, involve broad coalitions of social actors cutting across societal divisions, and are coordinated at the national level.Footnote 7 The prevalence of parochial protests has important implications for the resilience of the CCP regime. When protests remain parochial in nature and fail to undergo ‘upward scale shift’—transitioning into national protest movements—they are less threatening to the stability of authoritarian regimes.Footnote 8 Such parochial protests can even serve to alert the party's national leadership of local corruption and official malfeasance, even offering alternative, legitimacy-enhancing channels for public inputs into the political system.Footnote 9 Thus, because protests in China have been overwhelmingly parochial in nature, the CCP has remained resilient, in spite of the growing frequency of protests.
The following article investigates the current state of popular contention in China by looking at the case of the 2014–15 teachers’ strike, which originated in central China, before rapidly spreading into the Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest parts of the country. It applies the China Labor Bulletin’s strike map dataset (2011–15), which derives data on specific labour actions from English- and Chinese-language news sources as well as social media,Footnote 10 to explore the tactics, demands, estimated number of participants, and temporal-spatial placement of protest incidents.Footnote 11 These data are supplemented with an investigation of additional news reports and social media postings by protest participants as well as interviews with experts on social unrest in China during the summer of 2015. The eight-month wave of contention, which stretched across 19 provinces, autonomous regions, and provincial-level municipalities and included 89 separate incidents, suggests that, in China's increasingly dynamic, information environment where even parochial protests can rapidly diffuse across the country, the binary modes of contention frequently applied in research—parochial and nationalFootnote 12—need to be supplemented with a third variant of protest: the ‘widespread’ protest.Footnote 13 Widespread protests resemble parochial protests in that they target local officials and are oriented around material, group-specific grievances. But, instead of remaining restricted to one location, widespread protests diffuse across provincial boundaries, allowing claimants in unconnected sites to adopt tactics, symbols, and other material from initiating sites as they seek redress for similar grievances in their own localities. As noted by Yang, ‘a widespread protest must have multiple collective action events in at least two provincial areas is that, by the definition, a widespread protest thus can be a cross-provincial issue involving the central government, which is more likely to affect the authority and policies of the CCP’.Footnote 14 Unlike national protest movements, diffusion across communities does not necessarily involve direct coordination or brokerage between connected sites. Rather, in the case of the 2014–15 teachers’ strike, the wave was characterized by ‘non-relational diffusion’ in which claimants broadcast their actions on social and traditional media, inspiring similarly aggrieved claimants in other communities to emulate their actions.Footnote 15 While coordination across social sectors and geographic sites could not be established, claimants in locations across the country appeared to emulate the tactics and slogans of earlier protests, which included strikes, demonstrations, and active media campaigns in news outlets and social media, and encouraged solidarity by posting and sharing images of demonstrations on social media and discussing the plight of teachers as a profession and the need for collective action in online forums. Quantitative data derived from media reports revealed an unprecedented surge of contentious collective action among teachers during the autumn, winter, and spring of 2014–15, as well as commonalities among geographically dispersed protesters in terms of demands and tactics. These developments suggest that unrest that previously remained localized increasingly has the ability to rapidly diffuse geographically in China's digitally connected society.
Political opportunities and the parochial contention in China
Over the last two decades, a growing body of literature has investigated China's surge of social unrest in the post-Tiananmen era. Protests during this period of time have followed a basic pattern in which contention is framed around community-specific claims, claimants confront and apply pressure primarily on local officials, and coordination across localities or socio-economic sectors does not occur. While popular contention has been frequent, it has generally appeared in the form of ‘cellular activism’Footnote 16 or ‘parochial protests’.Footnote 17 Protesters have limited their claim-making to a specific worksite or community rather than linking up with similarly aggrieved groups in other areas or social sectors and achieving higher coordination. Their interactions with the state have occurred at the local level, and local officials have been responsible for making tactical decisions about their response to protesters, which may involve applying repression or offering concessions.Footnote 18
In explaining why popular protest in China has remained in a parochial, localized form, scholars of contentious politics have most often explained this outcome by applying a common conceptual toolkit associated with the political process approach to contentious politics.Footnote 19 This has included examinations of framing,Footnote 20 mobilizing structures,Footnote 21 and the political opportunity structuresFootnote 22 in which they operate. These factors are highly interactive with one another. In China, political power within the authoritarian state is fragmented and decentralized. The centre delegates decision-making over the state's response to contention to local officials, who in turn are punished and rewarded for their ability to prevent and manage social unrest with promotions, demotions, or firing within the cadre management system.Footnote 23 Aware of the pressures faced by local cadres from above, citizens frequently frame their grievances in a fashion that asserts their loyalty to the CCP and the state, appealing to higher-level cadres for help and depicting local officials as violators of central laws and directives.Footnote 24 Because of restrictions on the creation of formal organizations, protests are generally mobilized through pre-existing informal networks and solidarities, which are activated by politically savvy protest leaders.Footnote 25 As the result of media censorship and targeted repression aimed at more widely coordinated actions,Footnote 26 they are dissuaded by the heavy costs of coordination that cuts across the social sector or geography and instead focus on community-specific issues. Such actions, which generally begin with legally sanctioned activities, such as petitioning, branch out into disruptive ‘trouble-making’ activities that are designed to attract the attention of higher authorities and place pressure on local officials to give in to their demands.Footnote 27
As noted by Xi Chen, these kinds of parochial protests have become commonplace and even ‘routinized’ components of the political bargaining process in China.Footnote 28 Notably, however, in recent years, some parochial protests have begun to appear in initiating sites, drawing regional or national attention in official, foreign, and/or social media, before diffusing to new sites across the country. In cases of widespread contention, claimants have not forged formal organizational linkages or coordinated their actions in a direct way. Rather, similarly aggrieved claimants in different geographic locations have emulated tactics that have proven effective in other sites. In the following investigation of the 2014–15 cross-regional teachers’ strike, claimants learned about their comrades’ plights at other sites and forged online solidarities with them in chatrooms and other social media, often inspiring them to organize collective action in their own sites. Using the example of the 2014–15 teachers’ strike, this article examines how protest actors have used group (teacher) specific online forums to broadcast their messages and build solidarity with similarly aggrieved populations online and also actively promoted their protest actions in traditional media outlets. These tactics have both put pressure on local officials and school administrators to give in to their demands and encouraged the diffusion of collective action across protest sites.
The 2014–15 teachers’ strike
Somewhat paradoxically, the situation of China's teachers over the last three decades has been characterized simultaneously by reverence and respect in society, extreme scrutiny by administrators, parents and students, and growing social and economic insecurity. China's Confucian traditions have placed a high value on education and teachers. Historically, teachers have played an important role in society, as they enable students to develop the intellectual tools and knowledge needed to advance in the world and also the moral qualities needed to participate in a society characterized by order and harmony. Because of their own high level of educational attainment and their valued role in the social order, teachers have traditionally been revered and respected. As noted by Gao (2008), this high social standing has been both a curse and a blessing for teachers in the modern era. With their high position in society, public expectations of the abilities and moral integrity of teachers have been exceptionally high, and teachers who fail to achieve these expectations have suffered shame and public persecution.Footnote 29 While public persecution of educators in the vein of the Cultural Revolution has not been repeated in the Reform Era, educators in more recent years have struggled to meet the performance expectations of parents seeking to see their children advance through a highly competitive, exam-driven education system.Footnote 30
Teachers have also struggled with economic insecurities. In addition to challenges often linked to the profession—long hours of work, low pay, and the demands of parents, students, and administrators—teachers have also seen their positions made more precarious through policy reforms in recent decades. Prior to the mid-1990s, teachers enjoyed stable, permanent positions funded by local governments. But, since that point, decentralizing reforms have given local administrators more flexibility with employment practices in educational institutions. Particularly in rural and poor communities, this has allowed the hiring of new teachers on a non-permanent contract basis, creating a segmented workforce divided between teachers with benefits and permanent status participating in the编制 (bianzhi) system and more flexible contract teachers. The latter are often treated as ‘substitute’ or ‘temporary’ employees, even if they have worked at the same position for years.Footnote 31 Reforms have also allowed the implementation of teacher accountability systems, under which teachers must demonstrate their abilities through evaluations, student test scores, and heavy documentation of their teaching materials. Such systems add an additional burden of paperwork and record-keeping to the tasks of teachers; they also place teachers under the heavy and perpetual scrutiny of administrators who may terminate their employment and cut their wages or benefits with little or no recourse.Footnote 32 The decentralization of public spending on education has also led to wide disparities in educational spending and teacher pay across localities—and consequently the impoverishment of teachers in more poorly funded or managed schools.Footnote 33 Studies looking at the job satisfaction of teachers in China have found that high stress, heavy workloads, limited professional support, and low or delinquent wages are leading drivers of discontent in the profession, often pushing individuals to leave teaching altogether.Footnote 34 In fact, a recent study by Liu and Onwuegbuzie found that over 40 per cent of teachers surveyed reported that they would leave the profession for another job if the opportunity presented itself.Footnote 35
Despite the reports of high levels of discontent among teachers, contentious collective action by teachers in China has been rare. To use Albert Hirschman's well-known framework, ‘exit’ has been the typical course of action for discontented teachers in China, with ‘voice’ being utilized less frequently.Footnote 36 This is notable, as mass incidents in many other areas of society have become commonplace in China over the last several decades, particularly among workers in manufacturing and transportation as well as among urban homeowners and rural peasants resisting land expropriation.Footnote 37 This relative inaction by teachers changed abruptly in the autumn of 2014 to the spring of 2015, when there was a sudden surge of labour actions by teachers, initiating Henan and Hubei but soon spreading rapidly across the country. According to the China Labor Bulletin’s strike database, which provides event data on labour actions that have been observed in Chinese new outlets or social media, there were an average of 2.47 strikes per month in the education sector from February 2011 (the earliest month for which data are provided) to August 2014.Footnote 38 In September 2014, nine labour actions were recorded in the education sector, with a growing number of incidents taking place in October (12 incidents) and November (14). The number of incidents peaked in December (17) and January 2015 (15) before declining in February (6), March (10), April (9), and May (4). Thus, from September 2014 to April 2015, China experienced an average of 11.13 labour actions—a rate 450 per cent higher than the monthly average for the preceding three years.Footnote 39 In addition to the rise in the overall number of incidents, the 2014–15 wave of strikes also set records (for the education sector) in terms of the number of large labour actions involving more than 1,000 participants. Since 2011, there have only been 11 recorded incidents involving more than 1,000 participants; of these, nine took place from September 2014 to April 2015. One action, a series of strikes and demonstrations in Heilongjiang, involved more than 20,000 participants—a record-breaking number for the education sector.
The first widely publicized labour action by teachers occurred on 9 September 2014, when over 100 teachers in Xiaogan, Hubei, went on strike, carrying banners and organizing a demonstration outside of their high school. The teachers complained that, even as long-serving employees of the institution, they were not placed on the local government's payroll under the bianzhi system. On 4 September, the administration, without giving prior notice to the faculty, announced the recruitment of 50 new teachers who would be hired under the bianzhi system. This suggested to the faculty that many current teachers might face layoffs.Footnote 40 At the time, over 140 of the school's 300 teachers were outside the bianzhi system. On 9 October, the teachers wrote a petition protesting the recruitment drive and delivered it the school principal.Footnote 41 After their initial demands were refused, the teachers went on strike and organized a series of demonstrations at the school's main gate. These demonstrations ran until 12 September, with teachers taking photos of their demonstration and posting images on social media, and also holding meetings with reporters that were published in various news outlets.Footnote 42 One anonymous teacher interviewed by reporters connected the action against the recruitment drive to larger issues facing the teachers at the school:
The group of teachers I am in was hired from 2002 to 2012. When the school just moved we were receiving 700 RMB per month. The school urged us to share the burden by not asking for raises because of their debts. We all worked hard for the reputation of the school without asking for much in return. However, now the [school's] debts have been paid back but the teachers are not receiving what they deserve.Footnote 43
On the night of 12 September, the fourth day of the strike, the teachers met with a special committee representing the Xiaogan Bureau of Education. At the meeting, the principal publicly apologized for his behaviour when the petition was delivered to him and agreed to delay the recruitment drive until after the end of the school year. The school administration indicated that it would also revisit other issues, such as the wages of the teachers, at a later date. The teachers were reportedly satisfied at having their most immediate demand—the recruitment drive—halted and were ready to compromise on other issues for the time being. As communicated in interviews with the traditional media, some teachers indicated they felt a sense of guilt for not attending to their students and pressure from parents, motivating them to break off the strike and return to their classes.Footnote 44
The protest action at Xiaogan thus succeeded in delaying the recruitment drive. During the strike, the teachers applied a combination of online and offline tools and tactics to better coordinate their actions, resist efforts by the administration to suppress the action, and spread their message beyond the school and into the wider community. The teachers repeatedly took photos of their demonstrations, holding banners bearing their slogans and demands, and uploaded and shared the images on social media. They also used texting and instant messaging to coordinate actions among teachers at the school. Notably, the same platforms were also used by administrators in an attempt to intimidate and divide teachers. In mounting their online/offline campaign, the Xiaogan teachers gave special attention to how the action was being received in the wider public, both monitoring the public reaction on social media and also broadcasting their message to formal news outlets, holding interviews, and reaching out to potential supporters online. Xiaogan teachers reported that, during the protest, they were conducting ‘research’ on the public's reaction to the action, reading comments on social media and in response to news articles covering the strike, to learn that most online reactions were supportive of the teachers’ plight as a ‘disadvantaged group’ despite some critical voices questioning the teachers and their motives.Footnote 45 Such efforts helped maintain solidarity within the group and also provided encouragement to participants, as they became aware of the generally supportive attitudes of the wider public.Footnote 46
The strike in Xiaogan, which was broadcast in national and international media, as well as Chinese social media, was followed by a geographically clustered wave of labour actions in Hubei and Henan. The wave included actions in Yongcheng, Henan (8 October); Enshi, Hubei (8 October); Suizhou, Hubei (10 October); Lichuan, Hubei (15 October); and Xiangyang, Hubei (17 October). Teachers also organized labour actions in distant locations such as Zhenjiang, Jiangsu (10 September); Ziyang, Sichuan (23 September); Yulin, Shaanxi (9 October); Guangzhou, Guangdong (20 October); Liangshan, Sichuan (21 October); Baotou, Inner Mongolia (22 October); Xiamen, Fujian (24 October); Kunming, Yunnan (29 October); and Suzhou, Jiangsu (30 October). The strikes, including those located in neighbouring sites in Henan and Hubei and those further afield, tended to adopt common characteristics. In terms of tactics, they involved strikes (in 70.6 per cent of the September–October actions) and demonstrations (58.8 per cent), the presentation of collective petitions to school administrators and local officials, and the use of social media—primarily Weibo—to post and circulate images of protest actions in cyberspace.Footnote 47 The demands of protesters in these early September and October strikes most frequently centred on the issue of wage arrears (identified in over 41.1 per cent of the cases), with payroll/bianzhi status (29.4 per cent) and housing issues (23.5 per cent) also emerging as common grievances.
These early actions in the autumn of 2014, which spread nationally but concentrated in Henan and Hubei, preceded a large peak in protests (both in frequency of incidents and the number of overall participants) in the winter of 2014–15. The largest and most well-known labour action during this stage occurred in China's northern province of Heilongjiang. In January of 2014, the Zhaodong City government had announced its intention to raise teachers’ salaries and also provide compensation for work-related travel in snowy, inclement weather. After nearly a year, the city government failed to provide the benefits it had promised. Following the surge of teachers’ strikes in other areas of the country in September and October 2014, teachers in Zhaodong issued a petition on 14 November demanding the local government fulfil its promises and also revise its policy of having teachers fully pay into their pensions and housing allowances. These actions, the teachers argued, had violated China's labour laws.Footnote 48 The petition was also posted online and circulated rapidly throughout Chinese social media. After the local government's initial response failed to appease the teachers, a second petition was issued on the 16th.Footnote 49 Immediately thereafter, 8,000 teachers carried out a three-day strike, refusing to enter their classrooms. The strikers utilized the traditional media to broadcast their demands, speaking to the national magazine, Caixin, and also giving interviews on local radio.Footnote 50 They also used social media to coordinate their actions with teachers from surrounding areas, creating chatrooms to have discussions with other teachers, and posting the wage scales for teachers in various local schools to strengthen their claim that they were underpaid and received fewer benefits than their colleagues in other areas.Footnote 51 Images of strike activity and teachers demonstrating with banners were also posted and shared in social media. By 20 November, officials from the local administration negotiated a settlement with the teachers, involving a raise of over 770 RMB per month and an official investigation in working conditions. The strikers then returned to their classrooms the next day.Footnote 52 Emulating and innovating upon tactics used elsewhere in China, the teachers presented a formal petition to local authorities, followed by a strike action, street demonstrations, and a campaign in formal media outlets and online. In a week of contentious collective action, the Zhaodong teachers successfully achieved a significant portion of their demands. The Zhaodong action also triggered labour actions in the surrounding area with large teacher strikes appearing in the vicinity of nearby Harbin City. Of the Harbin protests, one occurred in Shuangcheng District on 24 November with 6,000 participants, another took place in Yilan County with 4,000 participants, and a final strike took place on 24 November in Shangzhi District with 3,000 participants.Footnote 53 In each of the protests, teachers demanded an end to required pension payments, the payment of cold-weather allowances, and the raising of salaries, arguing that teachers in neighbouring areas were paid higher salaries.Footnote 54 All told, the four November strike actions in Heilongjiang involved over 20,000 teachers.Footnote 55
Of note, the teachers in the Heilongjiang protests, like their counterparts in earlier protest actions, were remarkably savvy in terms of using a combination of street protests, social media, and official news outlets to attract wider public attention and place pressure on the local administration to give in to their demands. The 14 and 16 November petitions were also posted online in social media, on national platforms such as Tianya and Baidu, as well as local online forums for Zhaodong and Harbin. Participants also posted and shared a video of a 17 November demonstration entitled ‘The massive strike of 8,000 teachers in Heilongjiang Zhaodong’.Footnote 56 The Yilan demonstration resulted in some violent clashes between protesters and the police when the latter began arresting participants and seizing banners. Videos and images of the altercations and demonstrators shouting ‘Release them’ were posted and shared on social media, and the arrested teachers were released from detention later in the day.Footnote 57 By 18 November, traditional media from outlets such as The Paper, The Observer News, QQ News, Phoenix News, and Sina arrived at the protest sites to interview participants and record the demonstrations.Footnote 58
In Yilan, Shangzhi, and Shuangcheng, protesters demonstrated outside of local offices in their respective districts. According to one teacher, the demonstrations outside of government offices were specifically designed and timed to attract the attention of provincial and national authorities, who would then put pressure on local administrators to deal with the unrest: ‘They say that if you protest for three straight days, your case will be reported to the provincial government. . .and if you protest for four straight days, your case will be reported to the central government.’Footnote 59 Such statements fit with the observations of scholar Cai Yongshun, who has noted that protests in contemporary China with large numbers of participants have been much more successful than smaller actions. Those with over 4,000 participants have had much higher levels of success, showing that ‘a big disturbance leads to a big solution’.Footnote 60 The fact that this reality was noted by teacher participants in the recent strike wave reveals the high level of strategic thinking involved in organizing the labour actions, as organizers carefully calibrated their message and tactics to appeal to higher-level authorities. They also anticipated the length and size of protest needed to attract the attention of higher offices. Moreover, in the Heilongjiang protests, organizers and participants were very deliberate in their use of media-friendly tactics. They wrote up a specific list of demands, which was jointly presented to local administrators and circulated online in an open-letter format. They utilized online forums for teachers to press their demands beyond individual workplaces and appeal to similarly aggrieved teachers in other schools and districts within the region. Such efforts likely intensified the pressure placed on higher-ranking officials to quickly resolve the actions through concessions, as the discontent was beginning to spread rapidly online and inspire new street actions throughout the region. The viral nature of online/offline labour actions by teachers culminated in a wave of unrest involving an unprecedented 20,000 participants in the greater Heilongjiang area during mid-November 2014. This reflected the power of such tactics when adapted to a population cluster characterized by similar grievances, connected by social media platforms, and receptive to similar symbols and messaging.
Following the teacher strikes recorded in October (12 total incidents) and November (14), the number of incidents observed across the country increased slightly to 17 and 15 in December 2014 and January 2015, respectively, before declining in the following months: February (six total incidents), March (ten), April (nine), and May (four).Footnote 61 The 2014–15 teachers’ strikes followed some similar patterns in terms of both the demands of participants and the tactics applied. After disaggregating and categorizing events data on protest demands provided in the China Labor Bulletin, a few patterns become apparent.Footnote 62 Of the 89 incidents of teacher strikes recorded between September 2014 and April 2015, wage arrears (54.5 per cent of all cases) and pay increases (40.9 per cent) were most common. These demands were followed by payroll issues (10.2 per cent), namely the refusal of local governments to list local teachers on their payrolls; proposed layoffs or school restructuring (11.4 per cent); grievances related to social security or pension contributions and payments (10.2 per cent); grievances connected to working conditions (9.0 per cent); overtime issues (8.0 per cent); housing issues (5.7 per cent); demands related to ‘equal pay for equal work’ (5.7 per cent); and other assorted issues (1.1 per cent).Footnote 63 In terms of tactics, most actions involved a combination of both demonstrations (63.6 per cent) and strikes (52.2 per cent), while more disruptive actions, such as sit-ins (27.2 per cent) and roadblocks (1.1 per cent), were less common.Footnote 64 These offline actions were frequently combined with social media campaigns on microblogging sites, such as Sina and Tianya, where teachers would post photos of street demonstrations, often featuring teachers marching with red slogan-bearing banners or evidence of physical abuse by administrators or security forces.Footnote 65 Moreover, teachers would vent their frustrations over pay, working conditions, and other grievances in Internet forums.Footnote 66 In these venues, they would frequently post and share photos of strike actions and often share information about the pay and benefits received by teachers in various provinces and schools. Such activities provided inspiration for new labour actions around the country, and information about pay and working conditions disseminated online helped provide practical leverage for underpaid teachers and faculties in their negotiations with local officials and school administrators.
Implications
The 2014–15 wave of teachers’ strikes has a number of implications for the study of popular contention in China. Most critically, it suggests that unrest in China during the age of social media has challenged the dichotomy between parochial unrest and nationwide protest movements. Since 1989, China's protest landscape has been characterized by frequent and intense localized protests, which apply a repertoire of contention aimed at pressuring local officials. Protesters do not generally reach out beyond their local communities or social sector, but rather organize contention within existing social networks and focus on material, group-specific grievances. National protest movements, in which demands and tactics are aimed at national targets and involve a higher level of coordination across geographic locations and social groups, have been conspicuously absent. As a consequence of the high level of decentralization in the Chinese state, in which local officials have been delegated a substantial degree of autonomy in managing social unrest through concessions and/or repression, and the state's heavy repression of more broadly coordinated social organizations,Footnote 67 such as the Charter 08 initiative, the aborted Jasmine Spring in 2012, or, most dramatically, the heterodox religious group Falun Dafa, popular claimants have shied away from overtly political messages or actions coordinated across geography or social group. Instead, claimants have learned, through repeated interactions with the state, that important victories can be won if actions are couched in either pro-regime or apolitical terms and targeted against local officials rather than authorities.
Despite the absence of national-level coordination, the teachers’ strikes reveals that even localized protests targeted against local officials and oriented around group-specific claims can rapidly diffuse across geographic sites. Importantly, such diffusion occurs without direct coordination between protest sites and is closely linked the growing accessibility of social media in China. Sidney Tarrow describes three specific pathways of diffusion that allow contention to spread across sites. Through ‘relational diffusion’, new parties that adopt modes of contention are connected to the initiating site by pre-existing, personal ties. In ‘mediated diffusion’, new sites that emulate contention do not have pre-existing personal ties to the initiating site, but rather rely on third-party brokers to maintain connections between the sites. Finally, with ‘non-relational diffusion’, actors learn about contention at other sites through ‘impersonal means’, such as the media. They thus learn of contention without direct or brokered connections with other sites.Footnote 68 In the case of teachers’ strikes in China, the parties involved—teachers—faced a similar set of challenges. These included low pay, precarious working conditions, and the heavy scrutiny of both teachers and administrators. Thus, when teachers organized contentious labour actions at initiating sites, such as Xiaogan, Hubei, they publicized their efforts online and in traditional media outlets. When they succeeded in securing demanded concessions, this provided inspiration to similarly aggrieved teachers in other locations, resulting in non-relational diffusion. The slogans and messaging of such protests had great resonance with other teachers and the tactics, often involving strikes, demonstrations, and social media campaigns, were readily accessible. Social media, which enabled the circulation of posted images of demonstrations and the online discussion of ongoing protests among teachers, helped these contentious performances reach a captive audience:
Because of the development and spread of social media, the use of these strikes is readily available to those who have a mobile phone. Teachers are fully aware that their colleagues in other parts of China are taking action, and it's bringing positive results for them. Some teachers have gotten a pay raise, albeit a small one, out of this.
Jeffrey Crothall, China Labor Bulletin, 8 December 2014.Footnote 69
This form of non-relational diffusion is possible as the result of a structural opening in the CCP's information management regime, which allowed information related to unrest to spread to new, geographically disparate protest sites. During the 2014–15 teacher strikes, protesters frequently broadcast their messages and images of demonstrations on social media platforms, such as Weibo, and also spoke with local and national traditional media outlets, including magazines such as Caixin and local radio and newspapers. As noted by King, Pan, and Roberts, CCP censors have tolerated ‘negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies’ in the public space, instead censoring public expressions that have ‘the potential to generate collective action’.Footnote 70 Interestingly, even as protests spread from initiating sites in Hubei and Henan, a large volume of images and messages remained online and available in the press, despite their clear collective action potential. The ability of teachers to publicly broadcast their messages was likely the result of several factors. First, the protests focused on material, community-specific grievances and targeted local officials—city and county-level administrators and school principals. They did not criticize the CCP, its central leadership, or the political regime. While suppressing information and protests aimed at the centre, the CCP has tolerated collective actions aimed at low-ranking officials, as such actions can help enhance regime legitimacy and provide a useful feedback mechanism for the national leadership by exposing official corruption and malfeasance in an otherwise opaque media environment and closed political system.Footnote 71 Second, the protests remained within a specific occupational group—teachers—and did not spread to other groups. Research has indicated that protests that extend across occupational groups and news associated with such events are viewed with suspicion by CCP authorities at all levels and face harsh repression, whereas contention within a particular group, such as teachers, students, coal miners, or factory workers, has faced relatively fewer constraints.Footnote 72 Finally, public statements associated with the teachers’ strikes benefited from the viral nature of social media technologies. In China, regime control over the Internet and traditional media is managed through national, provincial, and local level governments, which have particular organizational interests and may effectively coordinate their efforts to suppress information. As noted by Xiao Qiang, citing an anti-pollution protest in Xiamen in 2007, subnational officials often work vigorously to censor content related to local unrest only to find that the content finds its way to servers or traditional media outlets hosted in different provinces.Footnote 73 Because of the affordances provided through the emergence of social media platforms, particularly microblogs, users can instantly post and share images and information related to strikes and demonstrations with other users, who can in turn re-post and share information with others. This means that local censors who seek to suppress information (before it can attract the attention of similarly aggrieved citizens as well as the critical eye of higher-level officials) by shutting down websites and social media accounts containing news and information with collective action potential often find that users can easily create new accounts and/or re-post content on servers outside of their jurisdiction. An analysis of online posts related to the large strikes in Heilongjiang reveals that, from 14 to 19 November, Sina Weibo had 3,500 discussion threads related to the Heilongjiang protests, 300 blog posts, 500 Internet news stories, and over 20,000 comments on stories covering the actions.Footnote 74 Weibo blog posts related to the strike in Zhaodong, rapidly increased from three and five posts on the 14th and 15th, respectively, to 18 on the 16th, 76 on the 17th, and 2,427 on the 18th, declining to 941 on the 19th.Footnote 75 The Zhaodong protest, which was publicized both in social media and formal news outlets, then triggered protests in the greater Harbin area.
Social media have thus played multiple roles, inspiring teachers to carry out their own strikes in different geographic locations, enabling claimants to draw wider attention to their actions and increase the pressure placed on local officials to give in to their demands, and helping to reinforce solidarities among teachers across geographic sites. At the present, it is unclear whether such solidarities that are developed through online communication will enable purely non-relational diffusion to evolve into relational diffusion or even higher-level coordination. It is clear, however, that ‘parochial’ protests that are focused on community-specific grievances are increasingly less bound by geography in the digital age, as even limited actions such as the early teachers’ strikes in Hubei and Henan rapidly diffused to other previously unconnected sites. Through such a process, localized parochial protests became a cross-regional widespread protest. While not coordinated, the protests drew inspiration from one another, were organized around similar demands and grievances, and adopted common slogans and repertoires of contention. Participants, moreover, utilized social media as a mechanism for broadcasting and strengthening their claims and for finding support among sympathy and support from fellow teachers on online forums. The 2014–15 strikes are particularly notable as teachers—a social group not previously known for their involvement in contentious collective action—were rapidly mobilized into action in the wake of a handful of successful early cases. The wave peaked in Heilongjiang, when an unprecedented 20,000 teachers took to the streets in a series of geographically connected actions, before dissipating in the late spring. This rapid level of mobilization in a previously marginal protest group suggests that social media have a significant, not fully realized potential to enable substantial waves of cross-regional widespread protests into the fewer, even if signs of national-level coordination remain absent in case of popular contention in contemporary China.
