Indiana University doctoral student Erika Kuever, under the supervision of Dr. Richard Wilk, will undertake research on the relationship between consumer activism and citizenship in post-socialist countries. This will advance scholarly understandings of whether and how state-sponsored institutions can be used by citizens to challenge state power.
The research will focus on state-sponsored consumer organizations in China, which, despite their origins in the state itself, serve as the primary channel for citizens seeking redress for injustices encountered in the marketplace. The researcher will employ a mixed-methods social science approach. This will include participant observer in a consumer association, where she will carry out interviews with association employees and consumers, and conduct follow-up interviews with a stratified sample of consumers who have had their complaints successfully mediated by the association. She will also interview officials in other agencies charged with consumer protection, survey and analyze media accounts, hold consumer focus groups, and follow-up key national consumer issues.
This research is important because it will document how individuals interact with state resources to protect their families from dangerous products, while also contributing to social scientific understanding of the interaction between local politics and global consumer safety. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
My research on consumer rights in contemporary China investigated market-state-citizen relationships through the lens of claims for justice made through appeals to institutional and party-state actors. At present, state-sponsored consumer organizations serve as the primary channel for citizens seeking redress for injustices encountered in the marketplace, the only arbiters who can engage the state and the market on issues of "fairness." Although these organizations and the legal framework for the protection of consumer rights that justifies their existence were designed by party-state bureaucrats primarily as a means of self-preservation, they have laid the institutional and legal groundwork for a new activism grounded in the belief that empowered citizen-consumers can challenge state and market actors who infringe upon their consumer rights. As a participant observer in a Chinese consumer organization, I investigated a critical moment in state-society relations, asking if efforts by the Chinese state to buttress its authority will arm citizens with the tools to challenge that very authority. I broadened my survey through dozens of interviews with consumer rights lawyers, journalists and editors, and independent fake-fighters who use the consumer law to advocate for individual consumers, as well as through focus groups with ordinary citizens from a range of socio-economic backgrounds. Research on contemporary China influenced by theories of development which highlight the importance of a civic sphere has frequently concluded that a lack of non-state civic associations coupled with pervasive corruption and insecurity in the marketplace makes for a fragile state-citizen relationship which could undermine future economic growth. Such predictions ignore the possibility that state-sponsored institutions and officially promulgated ideologies calling for the protection of consumers could become tools used by citizens to engage with state and market actors, leading to a transformed civil sphere. By exploring the ways in which individual citizens and independent or professional advocates articulate consumer rights and how the state attempts to channel this discourse through laws and regulations and consumer protection institution, my research revealed the continuing influence of a socialist moral contract which imagines the state as not only responsible for managing society and protecting citizens, but as the only entity capable of doing so. Although pockets of alternative discourse exist which challenge the capacity of a party-state riddled with corruption and driven more by self-interest than an altruistic concern for citizen safety and satisfaction, the language of consumer rights, far from producing empowered citizen-consumers willing to challenge state and market actors who infringe upon their legal rights and interests, is permeated with ideas of historical injustices and global competitiveness, and narratives of economic and social development that justify the current regime.
