In China, tens of thousands of strikes, protests, and riots over workplace issues are estimated to occur annually. What is the political impact of this turmoil? Dominant analyses assume that rising unrest is not fundamentally altering the Chinese political system. This project assesses another interpretation, namely that worker activism is gradually transforming the Party-state from below, but in a potentially contradictory manner, spurring a strengthening of the coercive capacity of local governments, on the one hand, while forcing officials to side with labor against capital in formally adjudicated disputes and to publicly reframe the role of workers in a more positive light, on the other.
To test this hypothesis, the project will first employ an original, crowd-sourced and georeferenced dataset of strikes, protests, and riots by workers across China, as well as GIS maps of county-level demographic and economic data, to identify those causes of labor unrest that might also correlate with government policy. Next, it will use a time series dataset drawn from official sources to analyze the relationship between provincial-level labor dispute rates and both spending on the anti-riot People's Armed Police (PAP) and outcomes of labor dispute mediation, arbitration, and litigation (i.e., the balance between pro-worker, pro-employer, and mixed rulings), controlling for those variables that were significant in the first round of analysis. Finally, to examine subtle changes in government rhetoric and to understand the precise mechanisms potentially linking unrest and policy outcomes, interviews will be conducted and media reports and state press releases collected in provinces that lie along the regression line of disputes and PAP spending but that vary in their levels of unrest.
This research will have important ramifications for our understanding of the long-term viability of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the role of social movements under authoritarianism more generally. To date, the emphasis of researchers has largely been on how state structures shape dissent, not the reverse, and on movement "successes" versus "failures." The project will examine alternatives to prevailing top-down narratives of state-society relations and explore how concessions and repression can combine in unexpected ways, encouraging further unrest even as unrest is clamped down upon more forcefully. The project will prove valuable outside of academic circles. Its findings should provide guidance to activists in the international labor movement regarding how best to support their counterparts in China. Following the dramatic events of the Arab Spring, democracy promotion experts in government and civil society ought to find the results of the project useful in gauging the openings?and barriers?to reform in single-party states. Finally, at a time when spending on domestic "stability maintenance" has outstripped the entire Chinese defense budget, this research will inform debates among security analysts regarding Beijing's internal and external priorities and the interaction between the two.
