Rachel E. Stern

Politics at the Boundary: Mixed Signals and the Chinese State

In this conceptual essay, the authors argue that one way to understand the Chinese state is to view it from below, from the perspective of people advocating change. The authors’ “state reflected in society” approach is illustrated with accounts of Chinese lawyers, journalists, and NGO leaders who operate at the boundary of the acceptable and are attentive to signals about what the authorities will tolerate. Their experiences suggest that mixed signals about the limits of the permissible is a key feature of the Chinese state. Beyond a number of well-patrolled “forbidden zones,” the Chinese state speaks with many voices and its bottom line is often unclear. At the border of the uncontroversial and the unacceptable, the Chinese state is both a high-capacity juggernaut capable of demarcating no-go zones and a hodgepodge of disparate actors ambivalent about what types of activism it can live with. Whether mixed signals are deliberate or accidental is hard to determine, but they do offer the authorities certain advantages by providing a low-cost way to contain dissent, gather information, and keep options open.

Amplifying Silence: Uncertainty and Control Parables in Contemporary China

Well-known tools of state coercion, such as administrative punishment, imprisonment, and violence, affect far fewer than 1% of Chinese journalists and lawyers. What, then, keeps the other 99% in line? Building on work detailing control strategies in illiberal states, the authors suggest that the answer is more complicated than the usual story of heavy-handed repression. Instead, deep-rooted uncertainty about the boundaries of permissible political action magnifies the effect of each crackdown. Unsure of the limits of state tolerance, lawyers and journalists frequently self-censor, effectively controlling themselves. But self-censorship does not always mean total retreat from political concerns. Rather, didactic stories about transgression help the politically inclined map the gray zone between (relatively) safe and unacceptably risky choices. For all but the most optimistic risk takers, these stories—which we call control parables—harden limits on activism by illustrating a set of prescriptions designed to prevent future clashes with authority. The rules for daily behavior, in short, are not handed down from the pinnacle of the state but jointly written (and rewritten) by Chinese public professionals and their government overseers.

The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the Local/Global Interface

Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justice at the global level, but how much local communities have adopted this language and what it means to them are far less clear. As individuals and local social movements take on human rights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning of rights to accommodate local understandings. At the same time, they retain aspects of the global framework as signs of a global modernity that they wish to share. How and when individuals in various social locations come to see themselves in terms of human rights is a complicated but critically important question for anthropologists of globalization as well as for human rights activists. Using the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a case study, this article argues that the localization of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated set of activist groups with different ideological orientations along with translators who bridge the gaps. As it explores the local appropriation of...Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justice at the global level, but how much local communities have adopted this language and what it means to them are far less clear. As individuals and local social movements take on human rights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning of rights to accommodate local understandings. At the same time, they retain aspects of the global framework as signs of a global modernity that they wish to share. How and when individuals in various social locations come to see themselves in terms of human rights is a complicated but critically important question for anthropologists of globalization as well as for human rights activists. Using the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a case study, this article argues that the localization of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated set of activist groups with different ideological orientations along with translators who bridge the gaps. As it explores the local appropriation of global cultural products, it reveals the instabilities of global and local and the importance of tracing the processes of translation and collaboration that make communication across this continuum possible.

From Dispute to Decision: Suing Polluters in China

This article traces a civil environmental lawsuit from dispute to decision to explore how environmental law works, as well as how lawyers and litigants try to work the law. Detailing ground-level encounters with a legal system promoted and carefully watched by political elites offers a fresh perspective on the ways the past 30 years of legal reforms have affected the experience of China’s court users. Amid accounts of financial stress, lawyer–client tensions and the hunt for elite allies, what emerges is a story of variation. Although plaintiffs and lawyers agree that environmental cases are hard and wringing concessions out of polluters requires remarkable persistence, the process sometimes creaks forward so that appraisals are conducted on time, help is solicited and compensation won. How Chinese courts work (and how well they work) depends on local circumstances, an insight that suggests that disaggregating expansive concepts like rule of law is a helpful way to explore complexity instead of glossing over it.

The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong

Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justice at the global level, but how much local communities have adopted this language and what it means to them are far less clear. As individuals and local social movements take on human rights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning of rights to accommodate local understandings. At the same time, they retain aspects of the global framework as signs of a global modernity that they wish to share. How and when individuals in various social locations come to see themselves in terms of human rights is a complicated but critically important question for anthropologists of globalization as well as for human rights activists. Using the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a case study, this article argues that the localization of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated set of activist groups with different ideological orientations along with translators who bridge the gaps. As it explores the local appropriation of...Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justice at the global level, but how much local communities have adopted this language and what it means to them are far less clear. As individuals and local social movements take on human rights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning of rights to accommodate local understandings. At the same time, they retain aspects of the global framework as signs of a global modernity that they wish to share. How and when individuals in various social locations come to see themselves in terms of human rights is a complicated but critically important question for anthropologists of globalization as well as for human rights activists. Using the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a case study, this article argues that the localization of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated set of activist groups with different ideological orientations along with translators who bridge the gaps. As it explores the local appropriation of global cultural products, it reveals the instabilities of global and local and the importance of tracing the processes of translation and collaboration that make communication across this continuum possible.