Our knowledge accumulation of contentious politics in China has accelerated in recent years due to two laudable trends in the scholarship on this issue. First, authors have begun to engage the literature in the field more effectively, including general theories beyond China. Second, many authors have begun to frame their central questions and arguments in a way that facilitates verification or dismissal by other scholars.
Yongshun Cai's new book is a good example. It addresses a clearly framed question—why have some incidents of collective protest in China succeeded, while others have failed? In answering this question, Cai offers a lucid and theoretically informed analytical framework, in which he lays out the incentive structure for both protesters and the government (including central and local governments). Most arguments in the book can be readily tested by other scholars.
Unlike many other works on this topic, which have usually relied on in-depth interviews and survey data, this book has mainly used published materials. Except in Chapter 2 where the author uses a survey dataset to examine the magnitude and basic modes of collective resistance, he has relied primarily on a dataset of 266 events that he collected from newspapers, books, and websites. Event data from newspapers have often been used to study social movements and protests by scholars on other countries, but have been rarely used in a systematic way by China scholars. Because of the tight control by the Chinese government on the media and the Internet, newspaper and Internet reports on instances of collective resistance in China are generally regarded as severely incomplete, and a collection of such events from the media and Internet inevitably is but a very small and biased sample of a large number of actual incidents. This book, however, has shown that even such limited data sources can still yield important (albeit tentative) insights on contentious politics in China.
Cai's central argument is that “The resisters' chance of success lies in their ability to exploit the constraints facing the government or to (re)shape the latter's cost-benefit calculations in a way that suppressing or ignoring an act of resistance is not a feasible or desirable option” (p. 2). He then discusses in detail the important ways in which Chinese protesters have exerted pressure on local officials, often drawing on specific cases to illustrate his point. In line with some other scholars' observations, for instance, Cai contends that one of Chinese resisters' primary strategies is to seek intervention from upper-level authorities and secure external leverage from media exposure (Chapter 3). He has also explored a strategy that he calls “issue linkage,” whereby protesters accuse officials of misbehavior unrelated to their particular grievances in order to pressure officials to respond to their demands in a favorable way (Chapter 4).
Another resistance strategy identified by Cai, which has seldom been noted by other scholars, is to generate support from within the state or from the media through personal networks (Chapter 5). For example, protesters may contact individual officials to gain information and advice or contact journalists to increase the chances that the media will report their issues. Of course, one may contend that people with a really solid relationship to the elite may not need to stage collective resistance at all. Moreover, it is still not quite clear how much impact personal networks have actually had on the outcome of collective resistance.
The book has certainly not overlooked the role of disruption in collective resistance. It has confirmed a general perception that forceful disruptive activities can often be efficacious (Chapter 6); but it has also made a provocative argument that violent protest in China has often been ineffective or even counterproductive (Chapter 7).
Has collective resistance really made a difference in China? Many scholars have in recent years emphasized significant influence of collective protests on public policy in China. This book has reinforced this claim. It argues that collective protest has influenced not only policy implementation, but also policy adjustment (Chapter 8). To support this argument, Cai has compared recent policy adjustments in five areas: nonagricultural use of farm land, peasants' financial burdens, retrenchment of state-owned-enterprise (SOE) workers, retrenchment of collective enterprises, and house demolitions. He finds that the forcefulness of collective resistance is one of the key factors that account for the variation in policy responses to these problems. For example, as the author explains, SOE workers' forceful resistance is one of the main reasons why the Chinese government has responded to their demands more promptly than to other groups' demands.
In sum, the book is informative and insightful. Readers may still raise questions about its specific evidence, methods, and arguments, but no doubt it deserves careful reading by anyone who is interested in collective resistance in China.
