Product Description
Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.
Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts—such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures—while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to “silences” in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.
(20090601)
I’m not one for writing long reviews, so I’ll keep this simple. This a fantastic overview of the types of popular protest in China. It’s a great place to start for a student interested in Chinese contention starting in the reform era, even for those like me who honestly don’t know much about China and its history at all (I’m more of a Japan specialist, but I had to take a Chinese Politics course as part of my graduate studies).
Keep in mind that these are all very short essays on different topics related to protest so this is not the book to go to for someone looking to research any topic in depth. But when I had to write a literature review on the role of the Internet in Chinese contention, I was able to use Patricia Thornton’s and Guobin Yang’s articles as an introduction and look through their endnotes to find out where to learn more.
If you don’t read anything else, you must at least read Elizabeth Perry’s conclusion where she ties the popular protest described in the book to the protests that occurred in China’s past.
All in all, a great read for anyone with an active interest in contemporary China!
Rating: 5 / 5