Patricia M. Thornton

Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy

Social movement theorists have posited that it is not simply the existence of grievances but the manner in which they are interpreted and transmitted that contributes to the mobilization of dissent. Research conducted largely in liberal Western polities suggests that successful social movement “frames” clearly define problems, assign blame to a specific agent and suggest courses for remedial action. Yet dissenters in repressive authoritarian or totalitarian regimes face very different risks and political opportunity structures. Two popular contentious practices in contemporary China – ironic or ambiguous doorway hangings, and the body cultivation techniques of the recently outlawed sectarian group falun gong – demonstrate that ironic, ambiguous or metonymic frames represent adaptive strategies for the articulation of dissenting views in the face of repressive state power.

The Advance of the Party: Transformation or Takeover of Urban Grassroots Society?*

While existing scholarship focuses attention on the impact of state control and repression on Chinese civil society, the increasingly independent role of the Communist Party has been largely overlooked. This article reviews the Party’s drive to “comprehensively cover” grassroots society over the previous decade against the theoretical debate unfolding among Chinese scholars and Party theoreticians regarding the Party’s role with respect to civil society. Focusing on greater Shanghai, frequently cited as a national model of Party-building, I describe the Party’s advance and the emergence of Party-organized non-governmental organizations (PONGOs), a new hybrid form of social organization sponsored and supported by local Party committees. I argue that these developments invite a reconsideration of our understandings of the ongoing “associational revolution” and of the Party’s relationship to China’s flourishing “third realm.”

Disciplining the state : virtue, violence, and state-making in modern China

What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. State-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing process. This study maps the complex processes of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the Guomindangs Nanjing decade (1927-1937), and the Communist Partys Socialist Education Campaign (1962-1966). During each period, central authorities introduced - not without resistance - institutional change designed to extend the reach of central control over local political life. The successes and failures of state-building in each case rested largely upon the ability of each regime to construct itself as an autonomous moral agent both separate from and embedded in an imagined political community. Thornton offers a historical reading of the state-making process as a contest between central and local regimes of bureaucratic and discursive practice.

Crisis and Governance: SARS and the Resilience of the Chinese Body Politic

The article discusses the political utility of crisis as a mobilizational tool during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the winter of 2003. The handling of SARS and its aftermath by the Hu-Wen regime suggests powerful underlying continuities with the governing practices of the Mao era.

The New Life of the Party: Party-Building and Social Engineering in Greater Shanghai

While the 2004 introduction of a Party-organized trade union in Wal-Marts mainland China-based stores was widely reported, far less is known about official Party branches and committees in the non-state-owned sector. Well over 3.5 million Party members now work in “non-publicly owned enterprises”, a sector of the economy in which the Party has continued to expand. The Party is experimenting with new organizational arrangements and remaking its social agenda in order to increase its popularity, relevance and appeal, particularly among young urban professionals. This article outlines recent Party-building initiatives in the private sector over the last decade. Drawing upon membership and other data from over 1,000 local Party committees in non-publicly owned enterprises in greater Shanghai, I analyze contemporary “Party life” in “two new” branches—new social and new economic organizations since the adoption of market reform—as a reflection of the Partys possible future as it absorbs the “advanced forces” of an increasingly market-oriented China.

Mapping dynamic events: popular contention in China over space and time

Students of popular contention have long observed that social unrest mimics the forces of nature, likening it to a ‘prairie fire’ or observing a ‘snowball effect’ of strikes and work stoppages. Yet little is known or understood either about how unrest spreads across space over time or regional susceptibility to unrest. To test whether such metaphorical references may have empirical grounding, this project links historical data on two documented waves of social unrest during the Republican (1911–1949) and Reform (1978 to present) eras in Chinese history to static geographic information system maps, using ArcGIS Tracking Analyst. Building upon the hierarchical regional space model and G.W. Skinners work on macroregions in China, I test three hypotheses regarding the concentration and spread of contentious events within two macroregions during two 3-year waves of unrest in modern Chinese history. The use of animated data layers to capture and record dynamic events over time and space can help to determine whether patterns of unrest clustering and diffusion remain stable over time and to test whether spatial knots of ‘ungovernability’ – long a feature of Chinese bureaucratic lore – persist in the Peoples Republic, despite changes in regime type, economic fluctuations, and the passage of time.

The Cultural Revolution: Memories and Legacies 50 Years on

The year 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution in China, where controversy continues to rage over its meaning and its legacies. The Communist Party’s unequivocal condemnatory labelling of the entire movement as “a grave ‘left’ error ... responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic” has remained in place since 1981.1 Yet, even decades after the Party’s official resolution, the Cultural Revolution remains a lightning rod for contention, particularly in Chinese cyberspace.2 As a result, in March 2016, with the anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution still months away, the Party tabloid, Global Times (Huanqiu shibao 环球时报), issued an ominous warning against “small groups” that might seek to generate “a totally chaotic misunderstanding of the Cultural Revolution.” The editorial sternly reminded Global Times readers that “discussions strictly should not depart from the Party’s decided politics or thinking,”3 a prohibition that appears to have short-circuited both popular discussion and scholarly reflection on this critical watershed in 20th-century Chinese politics. This issue of The China Quarterly is not concerned with further excavation into what happened during that tumultuous decade; that has been amply covered in a wealth of new scholarship.4 Instead, we focus on how the Cultural Revolution is remembered today and what its legacies are, both in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well as elsewhere across the globe. Five decades after Mao declared the beginning of a new movement to “touch people to their very

The Cultural Revolution as a Crisis of Representation

The May 16 Notification, which set the agenda for the Cultural Revolution, named the movements key targets as those “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture.” The ensuing uprising of students and workers, many of whom claimed to be the loyal “representatives” of revolutionary and radical forces at the grassroots of society, exposed the fulminating crisis of political representation under CCP rule. This article considers the Cultural Revolution as a manifestation of a continuing crisis of representation within revolutionary socialism that remains unresolved to the present day, as demonstrated by the tepid popular response to Jiang Zemins “three represents” and widespread contemporary concerns about the Partys “representativeness” ( daibiaoxing 代表性) in the wake of market reform. Although the Cultural Revolution enabled both public debate of and political experimentation with new forms of representative politics, the movement failed to resolve the crisis. The Partys lingering disquiet regarding issues of representation thus remains one legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Melanie Manion

Publishers details for: Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong, by Melanie Manion, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. xii + 283 pp. US

Falun Gong's Challenge to China: Spiritual Practice or ‘Evil Cult’? (revised). By Danny Schechter. [New York: Akashic Books, 2001. 287 pp.

49.95 (hardcover).