CIAO DATE: 08/2013
Volume: 42, Issue: 2
July 2013
The Dilemma of Stability Preservation in China (PDF)
Chongyi Feng
Introduction to Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 2/2013: Preserving Stability: Process, Dimensions and Ideological Exercise
Preserving Stability and Rights Protection: Conflict or Coherence? (PDF)
Chongyi Feng
The creation of a new administrative institution known as the "Stability Preservation Office" at the central level, which is overseen by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and has branches at every local level, from streets and townships to enterprises, and has extraordinary powers to override other regular institutions and branches of government, is a clear indication that the Chinese government's efforts to preserve stability are not limited to the conventional business of crime control or public security. This paper traces the origin of the discourse and practice of preserving stability and the rights defence movement in China, investigating the interplay or interaction between the two. It examines the end and the means of stability preservation, explores whether the measures taken by the government to preserve stability or the rights protection actions taken by citizens are the root cause of social unrest, and whether the suppression of discontent or the improvement of human rights and social justice is the better way to achieve social stability in contemporary China. It contributes to our understanding of emerging state-society relations and the latest social and political trends in China.
Rationalising Stability Preservation through Mao's Not So Invisible Hand (PDF)
Susan Trevaskes
This paper considers the process of constructing the official discourse of weiwen (维稳, stability preservation) in the policing arena in the first decade of the 21st century. It focuses on the pivotal period after 2003 when policing priorities were shifted from "striking hard" at serious crime to pursuing weiwen to contain burgeoning protests and civil dissent, as a move to maintain stability in the early to mid years of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao harmonious society era. We observe how Mao has been central in this process. Stability preservation operations have been rationalised through Maoist ideology using some staples of Maoist discourse, particularly "social contradictions", and policing authorities have adopted key methodological aspects of Maoist campaign-style policing to embed this new weiwen focus in the everyday agendas of policing, while ever more "mass incidents" disrupt the maintenance of stability in China.
Rising Central Spending on Public Security and the Dilemma Facing Grassroots Officials in China (PDF)
Yue Xie
In response to worsening social instability in China, among grassroots communities in the poorer central and western provinces in particular, the Chinese central government has made budgetary arrangements, since 2003, to increase investment at the grassroots level to improve the capacity of local governments to maintain social order. However, this action by central government has created a dilemma for local cadres: how to perform their duty to maintain social stability while also balancing a heavy fiscal burden caused in part by the receipt of insufficient additional budgetary subsidies from higher government. This paper is an account of and an analysis of how local cadres in China perform their official duties when faced with this dilemma.
Maurizio Marinelli
This article focuses on the specific forms of power that are embodied in the properties and functions of formalised language, as it was used by Jiang Zemin in crucial political documents on the Party's policy towards intellectuals. This inquiry illuminates various possibilities for the normalisation and inculcation of formalised language in the understudied decade of the 1990s, when the mantra "without stability, nothing can be achieved" became a tautology. The internal constitution of the selected texts is examined with an eye to the dialogic interaction with the production and reception of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping's political discourses on intellectuals (Mao 1942; Deng 1978). The analysis of language practices and discursive formations in a comparative per-spective sheds light on the respective socio-political and historical contexts. It also reveals the extreme involution-devolution of formalised language in the Jiang Zemin era, when "preserving stability" was reaffirmed as a crucial concern of the Party leadership with the ultimate aim of preserving its monopoly of power.
Approaching Chinese Freedom: A Study in Absolute and Relative Values (PDF)
David Kelly
The rise of stability preservation to dominance in the political order coincided with a highly charged debate over "universal values" and a closely related discussion of a "China Model". This paper analyses the critique of universal values as a "wedge issue" that is used to pre-empt criticism of the party-state by appealing to nationalism and cultural essentialism. Taking freedom as a case in point of a universal value, it shows that, while more developed in the West, freedom has an authentic Chinese history with key watersheds in the late Qing reception of popular sovereignty and the ending of the Maoist era. The work of Wang Ruoshui, Qin Hui and Xu Jilin display some of the resources liberals now bring to "de-wedging" universal values, not least freedom. They share a refusal to regard "Western" values as essentially hostile to Chinese.
Protest Leadership and Repertoire: A Comparative Analysis of Peasant Protest in Hunan in the 1990s (PDF)
Wu Zhang
Based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork, this paper compares two cases of peasant protest against heavy taxes and fees in a northern Hunan county in the 1990s. It argues that peasant protest did not arise spontaneously. Rather, it erupted when leaders emerged who used central policy documents on lowering peasant taxes and fees to mobilise peasants. Protest leaders were articulate and public-spirited peasants who had received political training from the local party-state. Furthermore, the number of leaders, their education level, and their relationship with the local party-state explain why the repertoire and the scope of the two protests varied. Protests led by less educated veteran Communist Party cadres tended to be milder and smaller than those led by better-educated peasants more distant from the local party-state. This paper helps us to understand the process of peasant mobilisation in contemporary China and explains why peasant protest varies across cases.
Yao Li
Can citizens in an authoritarian country like China influence policy implementation? Two types of scholarship indicate ways that they can: The first proposes that policy implementation is carried out through a fragmented authoritarian system that requires consultation and cooperation among various government units, and this system is amenable to pressure from outside groups. The second examines institutional channels designed to handle grievances and bridge communication between citizens and the authorities. In this paper, I emphasize a link between these two bodies of scholarship, showing how protest channels are connected to the fragmented authoritarian system and how the imperative to maintain social stability leads higher-level authorities to resolve depart-mental conflicts in favour of protesters. I do this by examining a struggle against the privatization of a hospital in North China, a case that illustrates how protesters successfully employed both the petition system and the opportunities offered by the fragmented authoritarian system to develop powerful alliances, to peacefully pressure top local authorities to intervene and to overcome opposition in the local government, leading to finalizing the municipalization of the hospital.