BA2 Intro Contemporary China B - Lecture 4

Hi everyone welcome back to introduction to contemporary china b in this video we are going to now turn to our next block which deals with civil society issues in china and this first video i'm going to look at civil society and protest specifically we're going to talk about china's middle class whether there is such a thing as a middle class how do You define the middle class and then we're going to look at various kinds of protests in china including protest strategies and finally we're going to wrap it up by talking a bit about how

sustainable activism might be in the chinese context so let's take a look for those of you who took the ba1 introduction to contemporary china a it's been about a year now that we talked about civil society in China now while i don't want to rehash everything that we did in those lectures i do want to briefly make sure that we're all on the same page particularly if some of you did not take the course and also because it has been quite some time so let me first remind you of what the definition was that we

had of civil society and what some of the dynamics were that we talked about at the time so here's the definition i gave you then And it is that civil society is the wide array of non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations that have a presence in public life expressing the interests and values of their members or others based on ethical cultural political scientific religious or philanthropic considerations and our discussions then led us to the Topic of the public sphere and everything that was included in it which usually means various political associations non-governmental organizations but also social movements

churches clubs and so on and in the wider sense some people might include private enterprises but do recall that habermas the inventor of the idea Of the public sphere was rather skeptical whether anything related to the market should be included here but it would also include in some instances professional associations or the media but always in that tension with between market and state and what really constituted properly independent so all of these civic institutions then Stood in a complicated relationship with all those institutions that do not belong in the public sphere per se and that

don't count as civil society and that means everything that is in effect associated with the states so the executive and all of its branches the legislature but also the judiciary the issues we discussed at the time were the historical backdrop where harbor mars was drawing these Ideas from how he was describing effectively a setup that or a process that had taken place in the 18th century in particular in europe and northern europe and france and germany in coffee houses and salons where people would meet as part of this public sphere and the state would rapidly

figure out that what was discussed In those public areas through civil society actors was worth protecting because it provided deliberation it provided input into the governing process so the states then designed various mechanisms and policies in order to assure for example freedom of speech freedom of association and so on one of the takeaways at the time was that considering how much these concepts of public sphere and Civil society are grounded in european history and european philosophy is it then fair to apply them in different contexts for example in china and also considering how much the

public sphere and civil society are tied to discussions about democracy in europe does do they then even apply in say a authoritarian context on the other hand and that was the second takeaway many scholars Many activists many observers in china itself do use the term and they make a case that is very habamazian to make well basically to claim that china is in fact becoming more democratic in the way that people are at least able to perform a form of deliberate democracy if not voting and elections and so on this is then also an issue

we should return to today The various ways in which people discuss the idea of civil society in china and just look at the various different terminologies that exist in order to describe that idea of civil society and depending which term you pick you are trying to focus on something rather different none of these is an ideal translation of what hawamas was describing so we have gong min right so that is Really a almost literal translation of public sphere gun gong further down is quite similar but there's also the term shimin so really focusing on the

urban context and highlighting that when havamas was talking about the bourgeois public sphere he really meant the civil society happening in urban spaces he wasn't really talking about the countryside was he then there is a term that the chinese Authorities also use which is so basically the society that happens between citizens to distinguish from what the party does and how the party and the state influence certain aspects of society and what private citizens do and while that is an approximation of what harvard mars was talking about that distinction between private uh citizens and the public

sphere is or the public State i should say is already kind of marred with this idea that public sphere would be taken up by state and parties so you can see here how that's quite different and finally i have also listed here wenming so this idea that society would be civilized in some form as a civic type of society because a lot of the governance that happens particularly in cities Is circles around this idea of civic consciousness and making things whelming particularly taking care of citizens uh suj a topic that i hope we're going to

have a chance to talk about in a future lecture but in any case of this discussion this debate of what makes a proper citizen and that having a society that's functional demands that kind of propriety Just as a reminder i've again brought with me here the original quote i showed you a year ago of how jung habermas describes the public sphere and he wrote this the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public

authorities Themselves to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor now that's quite a mouthful but i think what we have to take away here from yoga harbor mars is again this dynamic between state authorities and the public and also the idea that private citizens would come together and form communities Of some sort so these are not atomized individuals as such they are creating the public sphere through their labor and that then also has an advantage for the state

there's more to say here particularly about the last couple of comments here by harvard last couple of phrases in this quote jung hamas in his early years when he started out as a philosopher and thinker Was still very heavily influenced by marx and you can see this here both in the way that he describes the public sphere as bourgeois and in the way that he focuses on commodity exchange and social labor these are things that don't play quite a strongly role in how our masters later were but they're interesting for us because in a moment

we are going to turn to this issue Of the middle class and the middle class in china which also suggests that possibly the public sphere emerges when people have at least a certain amount of income and consider themselves interested in new and potentially political issues so let me put that question straight to you what do you think describes the middle class what might a chinese Middle class look like and if you can pause here and just briefly jot down a couple of key terms of what you associate with middle class status that would be good

and then we're going to return and i'll show you a couple of details here all right now that you've taken a few notes let me show you how the chinese organizations that deal with statistics and with social science research define Middle class and china and then we can take it from there so the first comment here the first quote is from the chinese academy of social sciences which makes the case that middle class is families with assets valued from 18 000 us dollars to 36 200 us dollars so that's in the vicinity between 150 000

and 300 000 yen the national bureau for statistics also homes in on Income and it says that the middle class is defined by households with an annual income ranging from 7 250 us dollars to 62 500 us dollars so that's a massively different range it's 60 000 to 500 000 yen quite different from what the what the cass has to offer here as a definition so much like with the terminological and exactitude that surrounds terms like civil society When it comes to middle class we also have a problem here in how to define middle class

even the chinese institutions that are tasked with this don't actually agree what counts and what does not in any case whatever definition you use if you're tying it to income you're looking at a moving target because of the way that per capita gdp has increased in china and how in particular in urban areas people have Become more and more well off indeed you can see here how incomes have started to increase since the mid 90s roughly and have really started to skyrocket in the last 15 years or so now this does not mean that the

tide lifts all boats and that everyone has equally benefited from this increase in per capita gdp the Division between the rich and the poor has just gone further apart but that's uh another topic i want to first talk a little bit more about the segment of this supposed middle class and show you another statistic this one coming from the economist so these are numbers from 2012 based on 2010 real income so that is adjusted for inflation And you see here how the forecast for 2022 plays out in comparison and all of this is based on

annual disposable income of households so you can see how the income bracket that the economist considers to be upper middle class was fairly tiny in 2012 right so maybe let's see looks less than 20 i would say and by 2022 the economist was here forecasting that it would take up more than half Of the citizens notice also however how the bracket for the rich has been increasing and has been increasing more significantly than the bracket for the pull has been decreasing so maybe this already gives us some indication of how the scissors are parting but

i would have to show you the gdp coefficient and most recently i haven't seen any calculations for the last couple of years to show how much inequality actually Rains in the chinese context this growth then also translates to private consumption and that is the figure on the right hand side here and you can see how this might make the chinese authorities very happy especially since they have been trying to move away from an export focused industry to a more domestically focused industry where domestic consumption matters more and in the wake of the Trade war with

united states that becomes ever more important but again the caveat here that these statistics do not tell us anything about who exactly gets left behind in this growth spur and there are plenty people plenty of people who do particularly folks from rural environments migrant laborers people who are often quite young and who do not see themselves as having any Prospects here is another graphic that also resembles the data i just showed you in terms of what it shows here you can also see how the upper middle class is growing and the lower middle class is

decreasing so the assumption here then is that people from the lower middle class have moved into the upper middle class and overall The number of poor has decreased significantly and this is data that comes both from the national bureau of statistics and mckinsey now while all of this may seem quite promising not all observers are necessarily as optimistic the south china morning polls for example in 2018 published a report also based on national bureau of statistics data Showing how again the income brackets were going growing apart and how in particular disposable income was decreasing so

disposable income is the money that you have left over at the end of the month after paying all your fixed costs and your taxes the money you can actually use in order to consume and you can see here how especially in the low and lower middle class Up to middle class areas the disposal disposable income has decreased significantly whereas for the upper middle class and the rich that has not been the case and that is deeply worrying it's also worrying because it shows that people with less income are hardly able anymore to really finance fixed

costs as for example owning a property or renting And paying monthly fees of this sort and then having money left over in order to spend it so especially for the poor this is becoming an increasing problem but it reaches all the way up to what statisticians then consider to be the middle class with many more people feeling frustrated that they cannot buy property i want to show you one final set of data and then i think we're Good on the statistics front and i'm going to show you a couple of more interesting more illustrative examples

in a moment but for the time being let us briefly talk about a survey that three scholars conducted in 2018 in which they interviewed university students at the undergraduate level in shanghai and basically asked them what do you think a middle class is in china do you think You're part of the middle middle class do you have aspirations to be part of the middle class so their approach wasn't to say we're defining the middle class based on certain income brackets we're defining the middle class subjectively based on what people who live in that society think

is the middle class now we don't have to get into the statistical calculations but what matters here Is that the numbers the higher they are the more relevant they were for the students when they were asked do you consider this to be an attribute of the middle class and do you think this is part of your life goals and you see here the spread of opinions on this things that simply do not matter so much for that age group for example owning stock or being able to buy designer clothing Accessories and so on but everyone

seems to have their eye on importantly securing a job and being able to own your own home or your own apartment so this isn't all that new because previous generations also have this idea of home car and family some of the most important things that would matter and securing a job is the access point to all of these things that family matters sends something you See in the second table which is the top issue that people consider to be their life goal following this is good relationship with friends and the ability to expand on knowledge

of new things but that also means to experience new things so you know to travel and generally to enter what is now called an experience economy after we've had the industry and The industrial economy and then the service industry we're now increasingly looking at a type of service industry that provides people with experiences and this is true in most advanced economies so in shanghai one of the most highly advanced places in china it shouldn't be too surprising that we also then see this quite importantly here the idea of amassing wealth does not seem to matter

To this group of students and also patriotism doesn't matter all that much and this is an intriguing finding because there's been many debates in chinese studies and in the press for that matter of whether the new nationalism that we see coming out of china is driven by young students and generally young people and there's now increasingly survey data that suggests that is not The case that is more the people in their 30s or 40s that drive nationalism in china one other issue that i want to bring up and one that isn't visible in this table

but that is visible in tables from this report is that overall chinese students of this age and with their aspirations heading towards having a good family and a stable job and so on Do not seem to associate wealth and belonging to a middle class with any kind of political goals in fact they consider party membership to be very very low on the index of what matters in order to achieve financial success they also consider political change relatively unrelated and potentially unimportant to their lives what they care about Is uh yeah their family their friends relatively

good consumer life and the idea for them is that hard work and determination will get them there that seems to have been the biggest determinator for many of these students if you work hard you'll have a payoff later this data is from before 2018 so i believe this survey was conducted the year before and uh an open question then is whether the students who at that time Felt that hard work and determination was going to get from all the things that society had promised them whether they still believe this now and also whether young students

in school still believe this now considering that china is locked into a into a trade war with the united states and that this is having financial consequences we're already seeing or have seen for several years now the consequences in Lower income brackets where a lot of people feel extremely disillusioned and have no thoughts about ambitions and thinking that they can achieve this kind of lifestyle because they've simply given up there's an entire class of uh young to middle aged men who consider themselves the loser generation of china and who also feel that they will never

get for example a family because of the way that gender imbalances work in china And they are simply too poor to be attractive to women and so that is a very depressing situation for many men to be in if the chinese economy were to experience a serious downturn it will be possible that people who are now still believing in this chinese dream would not necessarily do so uh anymore and then we would have to see what that would mean for an entire disillusioned young generation of people Even in urban centers like shanghai or beijing the

state meanwhile is still selling the idea of the good life and has done so for some time now these are pictures that are 10 years old but i still have the impression that the state is trying to appease citizens through consumption and the promise of consumption now this is an image i took all four images i took at the shanghai expo in 2010 In the china pavilion so the massive monument in the middle of the shanghai expo where the chinese state and the chinese communist party by extension were showcasing what china was all about in

2010 and one of the exhibit areas that i personally found most interesting was this walk through various chinese living rooms throughout history or throughout modern history we should say for the last 40 years or so So uh starting in 1978 and note that there's no room before the end of the cultural revolution you know starting at that time and then what economic progress has wrought so you see in 1978 what people consider to be important like for example having stole these uh pictures up from the mao era having a family picture up so those were

sort of the ambitions And in the 1980s suddenly it shifts and you have first consumer items and you have a fridge right you have a refrigerator and maybe a fan in the apartment and then in 1998 that turns around to having a computer as one of the major achievements and possibly an air conditioning unit and in 2008 we then have the flat screen the mobile phone the tablet and all these wonderful Achievements with its focus on domestic consumption the state is most certainly still pushing people to understand this as the marker of success and of

freedom and liberty and i don't know if you recall that we talked about the 12 socialist core values that the chinese communist party promotes and one of them is in fact liberty and many people then interpret liberty as the liberty to consume and buy things This is a short video from cbs that looks at one of the biggest malls in the world in the city of chengdu so let's take a quick look at what that looks like china's fourth largest city that would be chengdu now has the world's largest stand-alone building it's not that tall

but everything about it is big seth doan and his team were the first american news crews to be allowed inside In a country with skylines the dazzle from hong kong to shanghai the city of chengdu population 14 million is making its mark with the new century global center people pose inside as if it's a monument not a mall though this much marvel could put many monuments to shame it is a shrine to shopping and certainly a shrine to size The company that built this building says it's 1.9 million square meters that's more than 20 million

square feet when you measure it by floor space area it beats every other building in the world it's big enough to get this hold 20 sydney opera houses or three pentagons when we visited workers were still putting on the finishing touches But the private developers animation revealed what's in store a hotel an imax theater an aquarium as well as an elaborate water park and even a beach with nearly a thousand feet of coastline beachgoers can view an oceanscape on screen even standing in front of it it's hard to grasp how big this led screen is

it's 150 meters from end to end that's about 50 stories high to compare The statue of liberty is just about 30 stories high some of the 150 plus stores have already opened but many here seemed more drawn by the spectacle a glass bridge hangs five stories up with a sign not for people with heart conditions or women in skirts what do you think of this building my stage i think it's beautiful Architects told us in china building big is a sign of success in achievement we always use football fields as a way to get our

arms around big measurements but this building is so big even that doesn't help imagine around 329 football fields could fit in here what would you say to americans who would look at this and say my gosh this is just too big it's it's excessive Young yi told us well welcome to china that's amazing thank you sir welcome to china indeed for cbs this morning seth doan chengdu 14 million people and they can do that's right who knew million people you can't do that in a weekend anthony no we're gonna need to take a couple weeks

or so so a useful takeaway here is how consumption gets produced In china and that should then also raise some questions at least about what the middle class is interested in we've seen now some of the statistical or some of the statistical survey data about chinese youths in a city like shanghai and what they care about indeed many people who have examined the chinese middle class have alleged that they are not particularly political and that their yeah their demand for Choices really has been crowded out by consumer culture one of the major contentions in chinese

studies is then whether the people who either self-identify as middle class or are associated with the middle class by for instance scholars whether these people are political or whether at least they are political in the sense that habamas would have recognized when he designed this idea of the civil Society as a contentious counterpoint to the state so let us move to the question of how protest works in china and who fuels different kinds of protests there these days let us first look at some data that is a bit dated which comes from 2011 and i'm

showing it to you here because it shows how throughout the 2000s starting really in the 90s there's an Increase in what in china is called mass incidence so these are incidents with i believe there's a certain number when something counts as a mass incident like a dozen people or so but it ranges all the way up to of course thousands of potential demonstrators so this number has increased steadily and then really peaks in the late noughties under the tower and wenjabau government and this Is particularly interesting because it tells us i think two things it

doesn't actually tell us much about the causes for these protests or the way that potentially there were more grievances it does tell us that during this time it was more possible to protest it also maybe should indicate for us a little bit where concepts from that era like The harmonious society and the idea of stability politics come from because it is clear that the chinese communist party must have been concerned with the mass incidents they were registering and the second thing that is important to note here is that under xi jinping the administration is much

more wary of mass incidents and protests and looks back at the routine tower and wenjiabao era as a time When the government effectively dropped the ball at least from the perspective of the more authoritarians in the chinese communist party and that then also explains some of these strongman politics that we have discussed in the previous block when we talked about xi jinping still when we look at more recent data we see that also under xi jinping's rule there have been large numbers of Protests or strikes almost on a daily basis throughout the 2010s so in

that sense chinese society is extremely contentious and we do see at least groups of people pushing up against what is potentially then state-mandated politics but frequently these protests are also about economic situations or they are about local grievances so we probably Shouldn't derive from these number of protests some kind of larger social movement still sometimes these protests can take on sizes that frighten officials so much so that they pull back certain policies or that they clandestinely expand those policies when they think they're not being watched anymore that they step up their security measures and start

centering like crazy and that was the Case in 2013 during an incident that i mentioned in the first year when i showed you an image of the anti-px protest in kunming and at that time the gathering crowd convinced quite a few people that the government might step back and not build the chemical plan as had been the case elsewhere like in ningbo and in xiamen where such protests were very successful but in this case the government actually Expanded its plans and later introduced all sorts of public security measures but let's take a look here at

how these protests or what these protests look like in practice they love their city and they most certainly don't love a plan to open up a petrochemical plant nearby we the people of kunming cherish our blue skies and white clouds and our good air If you want to build a refining plant with a capacity of 10 million tonnes where we live we absolutely oppose it [Applause] [Music] two and a half thousand people joined the protest on thursday all demanding that the government halt its project for an oil refinery 35 kilometers away the plant's also set

to produce various Fertilizers and chemicals and many people here fear it or pollute local water sources we don't need species what we need is a healthy and peaceful country kunming's mayor has said the government will listen to public opinion before going ahead with the plan part of a huge project to pump petroleum and gas from myanmar but when his deputy hubo tried to address the crowd he was shunned Here he tells a protester he wants to explain the refinery project the blunt reply what we want is health and environmental protection last year demonstrations led to

plans for a petrochemical project in ningbo in eastern china being suspended recent scandals over food safety and the fact that so far the government's not releasing the environmental evaluations for kunming mean these protests are likely to Continue nadine baba al-jazeera so a protest of the sword isn't always successful but an important question here is is it political does it influence things in society in other ways and that is not just true for this kind of protest is true for any kind of protest that has a very specific grievance or target and deals with things in

people's Backyards you may recall from the first year lecture the story of the chongqing nail house from 2007 a story that is usually associated with nimbi protests so not in my backyard protest this was the story of owners of a store who refused to leave their property even though the construction company that had bought everything else on that block had already started construction On new buildings in that area and what was left was then this needle of dirt with the single building on it and the reason this is not in my backyard protest is because

this was clearly a case of the people living there fighting for precisely their little plot of of land and of their little store and that may seem quite heroic and at the time also the press picked it up as a heroic story of These people fighting against the state system but when you look a bit more closely they did abandon the place afterwards when they were offered an appropriate amount of money or what they consider to be an appropriate amount of money and that then put an end to this protest and that is quite often

the case in china where networks of activists or foreign observers take a Look at a particular kind of protest or an example of protest and assume that it is a an example of contestation of contention against the state and often at the level of the national state and that may not always be true very often these are small scale issues and grievances and that doesn't mean that they are not relevant but it means that they don't necessarily add up to the kind of citizen resistance That many people want to make it of course this is

not to say that there aren't various kinds of activities activism civic engagement that we should consider political though usually probably better spell with a lower case peanut with the capital p that insinuates uh revolution and large scale change most people in china are more readily available to take to the streets or To engage in activities that are lower ksp politics or the sort of things that affect their communities and their local societies and that go up maximally against the local state but not usually against the national state and you've also seen that in the literature

in one case one of the authors also describes these activities as quote unquote apolitical and we do need Uh indeed the quotation marks around the word apolitical because often they are quite political because of the way that they engage with social issues with grievances with various kinds of injustices and so on and they may have long-term effect even if they seem small scale some kind of civil society activities then sit quite awkwardly at the intersection between What may seemingly be quote unquote a political activities and those that can quickly become political or controversial and even

challenge state power to the point where certain activists get thrown in jail issues surrounding gender and sexuality are a good example where for example lgbt protests tend to be relatively uncontroversial i mean that's Not to say that there aren't plenty of people in china who are conservative enough to fight against lgbt rights but overall it is not the sort of issue that attacks the state directly or that threatens the government feminist issues on the other hand tend to have more of an edge at least more recently the feminist five are a good example i don't

want to get too much into feminism in China yet because we have a special dedicated session specifically on this topic but it goes to show how different the narratives are of the feminists who are protesting in this case against domestic violence and the state narrative which has a very different understanding of what quote unquote female empowerment might mean usually on the grounds that female empowerment just means that women Should also be able to work just as much and do the same kind of overtime as men and souls should just be treated like men on the

basis of what is normal for men and that is not you know feminist ideal so in that sense feminist discourse often jars so heavily with the official discourse that it becomes a serious danger in general however The kind of issues that are about either lifestyles or about small scale injustices also including environmental issues or animal rights issues tend to fly fairly well under the radar because they either also coincide with the interests of cater some caters are also animal friends some caters are concerned about lgbt rights and other caters are For instance concerned about the

environment because they have to live in the exact same polluted environment so issues like that are more easily easily launched and take off better and they can potentially inspire a particular consciousness about what activity might be conceivable in a otherwise restrictive political environment in china so let me Just give you an example of activism that is most certainly lowercase p for political or even apolitical in that sense but that still gets something done they may not look happy but they've been saved from a worse fate thanks to a rare rescue organized by activists on social

networking sites in china more than 500 dogs being trucked to a slaughterhouse for their meat were rescued by animal lovers Who responded to online appeals and blocked the vehicle on a suburban beijing highway in the meantime conditions were grim lee wei manages the capital animal welfare association [Music] i saw some were injured or sick for example some were having pus discharged from their eyes some have external injuries on their bodies caused by the loading and squeezing and Fighting in the cages when i looked them together i saw at least one dog dead the standoff reportedly

had lasted around 15 hours friday continuing through the night until the transportation company agreed to release the animals in exchange for a hundred fifteen thousand yuan more than seventeen thousand u s dollars mostly put up by a pet company and an animal charity The dogs with serious injuries were taken to the dongxing animal hospital in the center of the city but virtually all needed treatment of some kind according to director zhu mingke the main sickness these dogs have got is canine distemper and parvo virus many of them were extremely dehydrated basically every single dog had

external injuries we need to handle activists said a third Of the dogs were expensive breeds and the majority were tame speculating they were stolen family pets but police dismissed such accusations saying paperwork for the shipment was in order and authorities reminded the activist animal lovers they were breaking the law by obstructing traffic when they blocked the truck still the bold action has sparked a debate about animal rights in a country where new sensibilities Clash with old traditions in china there still is not a law to protect the animals in the general sense we only have

a law to protect wild animals we hope the government can make this law and let it come into force as soon as possible so these animals will not be killed the rescued dogs will be put up for adoption karen sloan the associated press there's of course quite a lot to unpack here i just want to draw your attention To maybe two issues the first is that ultimately money speaks right so in this particular case the issue was resolved because an organization was able to put up a large amount of money that raises some questions as

to how sustainable activities like this then really are ultimately the people who are trading these dogs did not suffer any negative consequences if anything They got rewarded so they're going away without any fine or any prosecution of any kind uh just to probably go and steal additional dogs and then ship them over to be turned into meat again for money and so has something really changed long term other than of course saving this particular wagon of animals at the same time and that really then is the second point is that i don't think we should

scoff at The middle class sensibilities and the methods of solving this particular problem a problem did get solved and ultimately what is changing here is also the sensibilities of a potentially large number of people over time who are considering new things to be worth their time and energy and investment now granted this particular example is almost 10 years old and yet it comes at A time where it was still quite uncommon for people to stand up for animal rights in china and i would argue that over the last years in particular with the expansion of

dog ownership in china there has been much more readiness to consider animal rights an issue whereas before that may not have been the case so bourgeois as these issues may seem They ultimately still hold the potential for a shift in consciousness and yes this is a middle class concern most poor people migrant laborers and so on they have other issues to worry about than whether to save dogs but it is not just the animal rights issue that is at stake here because you also get all kinds of attempts to care for things around you in

middle Class china that includes animal rights but it also includes for instance the attempt to help homeless people in certain urban environments to help the children of migrant laborers and so on and one of the articles this has been indeed covered as a attempt to create care rather than necessarily opposition to the state so that brings me to this week's Readings if you have not read these yet now be an excellent time to pause the video turn to these sources and go through them and take some notes you will find them i think useful also

for your video pitch so for your own pitch to examine how you might organize something like a protest effectively in china considering what you've now learned in any case there are of course things that Aren't particularly good about these articles and i'm giving a little bit of an overview in a moment of what i thought was worth taking away in the context of our discussion now but there's also things that are not so useful so my question for you here might be yes well what did you think didn't work quite so well in these articles

and maybe you want to pause and here also just take a couple Of notes and consider this question so just starting off with some of the things that these articles might lack glycem colleagues i think do overall an excellent job bringing together different kinds of data in order to distill it into a broader theoretical argument about what matters in activism in china today having said that most of that data is now quite dated And this is a problem across the board with civil society and protests and activism research you've seen this in the first year

i there also had articles for you to read that were already quite dated and it's quite conceivable that it's simply too difficult at the moment for scholars to take a look at what the situation looks like in 2018 1920 what data they could be using and doing that without Stepping on anyone's tolls in for example local government so that this is very difficult research to do i don't have an answer of why it is we're looking at this kind of dated research but it's telling that glice and colleagues article was published in 2019 and yet

they're using data that in some cases is 10 years old that should not put us off from some of the conclusions the article in itself Is very good it is quite difficult i know for some of you that might be still quite a challenge there's a lot of theoretical arguments in it engagement with literature you're probably not aware of like for example discursive uh issues uh la claus and move for instance of post-marxist arguments feel free to look these things up also on wikipedia they tend to be short useful articles on who these People are

and what they've been working on but as long as you understand the general gist i think we're okay at this level in the second year of the ba for lit what some of the issues here might be is that as well it's a relatively small scale study this is not by any means a deal breaker and lit also points out that it is only a single case study that is not representative For broader processes but we should be aware that this is a relatively small contained issue within xiamen but let's get to some of the

things that these articles can teach us and for that i have noted down a couple of activism strategies that come out of these two research articles things that people do in order to get their point across Redress grievances of some sort and mobilize so think for a moment about what some of the issues are that you've now learned about i have noted down these some of these are from the articles some of them i have added because i think they are worth also mentioning for time reasons i'm not going to be expansive about how i

talk about this You will recognize i think on the top right the collaboration with authorities that we already talked about in the past and that you also see in these articles where people talk frequently about embedded activism in the field of civil society research in china and one of the articles contends that maybe we're looking at a shift from embedded activism to something new But that is also an open question to the left of that i have noted here positioning as a major strategy for activist groups so that means both in terms of how to

select certain issues how to pick something that is important but not too controversial as to get someone shut down and that then also translates into the types of activities that might be useful So large scale protests can be risky but something more low low-key can usually work and that also then depends on the time when the activity takes place or certainly not during a contested period of political activity like the national people's congress meeting and then the scale also matters so these are all the issues that an activist or activist group has to Consider before

they start some kind of activity two further related issues and these both also come from the article by gleiss and colleagues uh first of all what kind of level of advocacy do activist groups select are we for instance talking about horizontal activism where the activists are part of the community or group that's being represented as well This is as the article also points out frequently the case with lgbt plus rights where the activists themselves are part of that group of their community also queer activists themselves and then stand in not just for the group but

are able to speak from their own position this is then quite different from for instance activism on behalf of homeless people where the people who Are doing the activism are often middle class folks who don't necessarily understand the sensibilities of what it is like to live in the street but who you know their heart is in the right place they mean well and they're trying to do something positive through their advocacy and here then also the line is very difficult to draw between what is advocacy and what is Quote unquote care where care usually flies

under the radar of the authorities or where the authorities sometimes systematically and willingly outsource the responsibility for care because they feel that their local capacities the local state isn't capable of solving the problem so they let societal actors take care of the issue advocacy on the other hand can be more contentious the other related issue from this study Is identity formation so advocacy also translates into the construction of both personal identity of the activist group identity of the level of the advocates or of the activist group and uh identity of the people who are being

represented and these three things interact in complicated ways overall in the kind of activism that is described here we usually see non-confrontational and low-key Activities one activity that i don't think is in the article but correct me if i'm wrong is the activity of the walkabouts and i don't know if you've heard about this so sometimes activists who want to protest without actually protesting organize so-called walkabouts and that means that through especially social media they contact that network and they suggest to everyone who's interested in This issue to simply go for a walk in a

designated area in order to increase the number of people there now that's a very clever and to no small degree subversive way of organizing a protest because the authorities tend to show up to such events worry that someone might pack out a sign and start shouting slogans and so on but as long as no one does the authorities really can't do anything Because everyone's just there for you know shopping now you might say that doesn't actually have any lasting impact because nothing actually gets done you cannot tell which of the people in the street are

just at uh i don't know nanjing loo in shanghai for a walk or who are there for shopping or who are there because they care about the issue but ultimately the fact that people do Go out and signal to each other often than through social media i'm here i was also doing something that day means that there is a potential to again construct different norms different values and a different consciousness about what it means to care about things since we're on the issue of social media i should mention the article by lit which has in

it several examples of how The activists in that specific case in that legal dispute in xiamen were using social media also reaching out to traditional media in order to get their point across in the hope that it would scale because most activists in china are aware that once their activities become covered by the press and get spread for social media they have more leverage this can scare particularly local officials It can bring the issue to the attention of higher ranking officials who in order to still assure stability in china step in and make a particular

issue go away not through repression but often through appeasement in that particular case the environmental activist decided to seek legal recourse and that is a relatively Recent phenomenon that activists would try and use the legal system against the people who have designed that legal system and to hold those who are creating the so-called rule of law when in china often enough it's rule by law rule of law but who are claiming the the concept of rule of law for their activities to take them at face value and to throw that rhetoric Back at them so

essentially to reappropriate the official discourse of law and take legal action against officials that can then also include documenting the malfeasances of officials testing local abilities to respond to certain issues holding those who make statements accountable pointing out their contradictory statements for instance also filming and Photographing them doing certain activities and again putting that on social media all of these are activities that are relatively new in the sense that they came with increased technological access for instance through mobile phones where all of these activities fail usually activism takes on one of two forms and that

is provided it doesn't entirely give up But one is to go largely underground and to carry on the sentiment and the frustration of not having achieved anything to the next issue and that is why at the bottom here i have listed hidden transcripts hidden transcripts are ways of speaking about something that the opposition cannot quite understand for example by using the exact same discourse or language by using the same words by turning the Words into something ironic using a lot of sarcasm and so on in order to still keep the discussion going among those who

are inside the discourse who are already initiated into this topic and without for example sensors noticing the kind of issues that you've i'm sure also seen for instance using terms like river crab to actually mean harmony because it sounds the same but it's different Characters that is a good example of using a hidden transcript so that is kind of the backstage underground approach in other cases sometimes protest and activism can turn extreme this can mean organized mass protests but it can also mean at its most extreme something like for instance suicide so you have activists

who throw themselves off buildings so this is the case with For example people are demonstrating against very poor labor conditions in order to draw attention to the conditions in a certain factory who throw themselves off a roof uh so much so that for example at foxconn where this has happened quite a lot they ended up putting out nets at the signs of the buildings to stop people from throwing themselves off the roof Another example is religious activists but also sometimes extremely aggrieved migrant workers who light themselves on fire in a particular photogenic way somewhere in

a location with a lot of people in order to draw attention to their plight and it hardly gets more extreme than that so as you can see here there's plenty of different strategies that people take In order to go up against the status quo regardless of what kind of issue area we're actually talking about now we shouldn't automatically assume that anything like protest or civic activity leads to the kind of civic consciousness that then in turn inspires quote unquote liberal reforms but we should consider that maybe there is some consciousness building and that that leads

to change Whether is the kind of change that liberals usually expect for example at the scale of widespread democratization throughout china that is very unlikely but it might lead to small changes at the local level or in particular in urban environments this is where environmental protests are then such an excellent example because even though they don't always succeed they seem to on the one hand inspire People to take similar action elsewhere and they create a repertoire of strategies that people learn from each other that they copy that are saved in online spheres where others can

look them up whether it is in the form of the equivalent of a google document or a network of people who can help each other out for wechat so there's a whole lot going on in the environmental There i call it a movement in in the environmental protest sector to the point where we might even consider thinking about it as a sort of social movement so an issue i want to leave you with here at the end of today's talk is whether or not in china we are seeing a move from the kind of embedded

activism that involves the authorities or that comes from within the state and Officially approved party system to what we might then call disembedded activism where of course there are still relations that get maintained with the state and the activities aren't necessarily designed to be confrontational but they aren't always in line with party and state policies either a related open question then is whether the kind of disembedded activism that we're now talking about The sort of strategies that we've covered whether they are primarily the activities again of middle class chinese in urban centers with particular kinds

of interests that doesn't make that group of people bad people per se it may make them seem a little bit more self-interested than they might need to be in order to address larger concerns but we just Discuss how maybe these activities do scale but do they scale to issues that are not in the interest of the middle class one such issue might be labor disputes so on the one hand you do have indeed middle class activists who tried to take the side of migrant laborers and help them out but would a large group of people

from that segment of societies or from that Growing quote unquote middle class be willing to really stand up for the what must be roughly 120 million disenfranchised workers what would that mean what would be the solution to that kind of problem and might it actually mean having to step back on some of the luxury and some of the consumption that has fueled so much of urban china and that simply needs to go elsewhere for example through wealth dis Redistribution would that be something that the middle class is willing to sacrifice for and again an open

question so that concludes today's lecture on protests and activism in china next week we're going to stick with the topic of civil society and also with protest but we're going to look at the hong kong context and what has been happening there more recently so i'll see you then