William Hurst

The chinese worker after socialism

Introduction 1. Regional political economy and labor reform 2. The roots of unemployment and the political economy of lay-offs 3. Remaking Chinas urban welfare and labor market policies 4. Pathways to re-employment 5. Contention, protest, and social order Conclusion.

Understanding Contentious Collective Action by Chinese Laid-Off Workers: The Importance of Regional Political Economy

Episodes of contentious collective action involving laid-off workers have erupted throughout China in recent years. With few exceptions, studies of Chinese laid-off workers’ contention have attempted to generalize from field research in very few⦓r even single⤜ocalities. This limitation has led to several debates that can frequently be addressed by examining differences in political economy among China’s industrial regions. Based on 19 months of fieldwork and over 100 in-depth interviews with workers, managers, and officials in nine Chinese cities, this article offers a systematic, sub-national comparative analysis of laid-off workers’ contention. The article also addresses broader issues in the analysis of social movements and contentious politics, a field that has too often failed to take such regional differences into account.

China’s Phantom Urbanisation and the Pathology of Ghost Cities

ABSTRACT This article examines the production of China’s “ghost cities” and constant urban expansion to challenge the dominant conceptual narrative of rural-to-urban migration as the driver of urbanisation. It argues that behind China’s “miraculous” urbanisation story is a powerful ideological commitment to urban growth as the “royal road” to modernity and assessment of political performance. Local governments have a wide-ranging “tool-kit” for pursuing urbanisation, ranging from administrative border-drawing to expropriation of rural land and investment in expanding urban infrastructures. Urbanisation is the destination to which all paths seem to lead. Indeed, local states pursue the construction of new urban space, even when doing so harms them financially. But why? The concept of phantom urbanisation names the process whereby constructing the aesthetic form of the urban is even more important to local state actors than economic, demographic or environmental repercussions.

The Judicial Cadre Evaluation System in China: From Quantification to Intra-State Legibility

Performance evaluation systems fundamentally shape the behavior of Chinese judges, but scholarship on the concrete implementation of these institutions is scarce. Relying on nearly 15 months of fieldwork in 6 cities in China, we explain how the judicial cadre evaluation system, as unified by the 2011 Guiding Opinion of the Supreme People’s Court, has been implemented. Over 30 indices quantitatively measure Chinese courts’ “fairness” (gongzheng 公正), “efficiency” (xiaolu 效率), and “impact” (xiaoguo 效果), incentivizing court leaders to pressure their subordinate judges to resolve disputes as quickly as possible without unduly angering litigants or other actors. Under the hyperquantified conditions of cadre evaluation, systemic praising and shaming bring about what we call “intra-state legibility,” leading to a variety of informal worker reactions to these tactics. This study not only uses interviews and new documentary evidence to add necessary detail to our understanding of cadre evaluation systems, it also engages debates in comparative law and politics regarding bureaucratic influence on authoritarian judicial behavior.

The City as the Focus: The Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Urban Politics

In the past, the study of cities too often played a supporting role in the field of Chinese politics. In recent years, scholars have increasingly placed various aspects of urban politics in the analytical spotlight. This article begins by outlining why urban politics is important in the study of China and ends by discussing how a discrete focus on urban politics can promote the integration of China into broader debates in political science. In between, it critically reviews some of the leading works and trends in subliteratures covering the functioning of city governments, the politics of various urban social groups, city case studies, and urban institutions and organizations.

Reassessing Collective Petitioning in Rural China: Civic Engagement, Extra-State Violence, and Regional Variation

Based on our analysis of a survey of over 100 villages across six provinces, in which we collected both quantitative data and in-depth interview responses, we argue that: 1) autonomous or quasi-independent organizations play a very important role in collective action, but one that is perhaps different from what other scholars have emphasized; 2) the presence of such groups may well foster good governance and help contain the scale of contention, but they likely increase the frequency of contention and are not a prerequisite for good governance as measured by expenditures or development goal attainment; 3) the mechanism of quasi-independent organizations disciplining the local state appears to be regionally bounded, with a much different set of relationships and incentives shaping state-society relations outside of Fujian Province; and 4) this alternative amounts to a symbiotic relationship between local governments and non-state violent actors, providing a contrast that carries broad implications for the study of China and subnational governance more generally.

Cases, Questions, and Comparison in Research on Contemporary Chinese Politics

This chapter outlines and makes the case for systematic subnational comparison in research on Chinese politics and beyond. Beginning with an overview of case study and small-n comparative analysis, and moving on to a specific example in the study of state sector lay-offs, the chapter illustrates the advantages of subnational comparison, especially at certain key points in the research cycle on particular topics.

The Power of the Past: Nostalgia and Popular Discontent in Contemporary China

How do workers view the Maoist past? What effects do their views have on the frequency and forms of their collective mobilization? These questions are not as simple as they appear. They have beguiled the field for some time, as scholars disagree over whether or not workers are nostalgic for some perceived better era of the past, and what importance this may or may not have.1 Before answering these questions, it is worthwhile first to trace what definitions of nostalgia have been offered in the study of Chinese politics generally and the study of workers in particular. In fact, it is clear that there are multiple widely felt subtypes of nostalgia in contemporary China.

Review Essay—Access to Justice in Post-Mao China: Assessing the Politics of Criminal and Administrative Law

Abstract Since the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976), post-Mao China has witnessed a sustained period of unprecedented legal reform. Criminal prosecutions and citizen lawsuits against the government, because they pit individual litigants against the authoritarian Chinese state, are two politically significant areas of law. We examine and critically assess the sociolegal scholarship on criminal and administrative legal reform as it has developed over the past few decades, with special attention to shifts in the conventional wisdom regarding legal reform and political liberalism in China and elsewhere. Additionally, we offer both theoretical and empirical suggestions for enhancing the explanatory power of sociolegal research in China.

Recession and the Politics of Class and Production in China

The article begins by analyzing the historical evolution of “class ideology” in China, especially since 1978. Next, it turns to the concrete effects of the recent and ongoing recession on the Chinese working class. It finds that the crisis affected rural–urban migrants far more substantially than it did workers in the formal (mostly state-owned) urban sector. While this situation presents numerous challenges (for the central state, a crisis of legitimacy; for the local state, a crisis of managing social unrest as well as providing welfare; and, for the workers, a crisis of survival), it also creates opportunities for new conceptualizations and practices of class-politics. In conclusion, we discuss the nascent articulation of a few of these opportunities in labor-union activity, protests, and emergent rights-awareness, and legal consciousness among workers, as well as the implications for Chinas model of economic development.