Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780197555675.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. US$24.00, paper. ISBN 9780197628775.
The multiyear trajectory of China’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic entailed many surprises for casual China watchers, but few for trained scholars of Chinese politics. In the pandemic’s early stages, officials in Wuhan suppressed information about the outbreak, early missteps that eventually attracted ire from governments and societies worldwide, not to mention sanction from China’s leaders in Beijing who removed senior officials in Hubei Province in 2020. As public memorials appeared for the whistleblower ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, who died of COVID complications after being punished for “rumourmongering,” some began to wonder if the outbreak might be the Chinese regime’s analogue of the Chernobyl meltdown that exposed a sclerotic bureaucracy and gave the lie to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s claim it could effectively govern.
Then, by late spring 2020, Xi Jinping had announced he was taking “personal responsibility” for the pandemic, and many the world over lauded the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) approach of harsh but effective lockdowns that enabled life as usual for those within China’s borders. By 2022, however, while most of the world had moved on from pandemic restrictions, China remained functionally closed to the rest of the world as severe lockdowns continued for parts of the country, most notably in Shanghai in the spring of 2022. At the end of 2022, Xi assumed a third term, unprecedented in China’s reform era, and Chinese citizens from Urumqi to Shanghai had taken to the streets in masks holding blank white paper to protest the “Dynamic Zero COVID” policy, even shouting slogans like, “Xi Jinping, step down!” and “CCP, step down!” The slogans alone were a remarkable departure from protest dynamics that have appealed to, rather than against, CCP rule to address various grievances.
Why, in a regime that is constantly collecting information about its citizens and their preferences as well as surveilling and repressing them, did citizens act so brazenly? Two recent books by accomplished scholars of Chinese and comparative politics provide answers to these questions, though both were conceived well before the world had heard of COVID, and they address a broader question: How does the CCP regime connect with and control the citizenry? The books are very different. Lynette Ong’s Outsourcing Repression focuses on how local parts of the Chinese state secure compliance with urban governments’ voracious desire for land. Dimitar Gueorguiev’s Retrofitting Leninism examines the dynamics of citizen participation and feedback in contemporary China. With their differences, they showcase the possibilities for understanding state-society relations in China, highlight how China has changed under Xi, and converge on a critical issue about which the field knows both a lot and not enough: the level of trust between state and society and, relatedly, the legitimacy of the CCP.
The basic insight of Ong’s book is in the title: she finds that the CCP manages to effect unpopular land policies against the wishes of citizens by outsourcing repression to what she calls “thugs for hire.” The logic is easy to comprehend: the CCP wants to deflect blame for unpopular enforcement of policies, and therefore seek “plausible deniability and evasion of accountability” (75) by engaging third-party agents to do the dirty work, including violent eviction, degradation of property, and so forth. On the flip side, when the CCP wants to elicit citizen compliance it seeks to persuade by “mobilizing the masses” using trusted third-party actors. The theoretical argument is simple, but the contribution of the book is in the empirics. As Ong laments in the conclusion, readers benefit from her work in an era of relative openness, which yields a depth of narrative as she relates the stories of villages and an understanding of mechanisms and responses through the eyes of villagers.
The book contributes to a large literature on dispossession and the political economy of land finance in China, a story with a new chapter in progress as local government debt challenges public service delivery and households’ desire for wealth accumulation. Although Ong is right that data are harder to come by, it appears that protests have shifted from contestation over land grabs to ones about incomplete housing projects and bank failures. Do we expect to see the state’s desire for social order in these arenas also addressed by thugs for hire? Third-party actors may well intimidate protestors, organizers, or their relatives, as work on protest has long documented, but it is hard to imagine that thugs would be as effective at achieving state goals and deflecting blame in these more complicated social and political economic problems. Likewise, can citizens be persuaded through mobilization to accept economic outcomes that may bankrupt their families? I confess it is hard to imagine.
That Ong’s argument may richly describe land protest dynamics but may not travel to other state goals does not reduce the importance of the book. But it does challenge one of the core conceptual ideas—that, as the book’s subtitle suggests, outsourcing repression or mobilizing the masses, constitute “everyday state power in contemporary China.” She takes inspiration from James C. Scott’s work on everyday resistance, forms of quotidian non-cooperation in the context of repression. But is hiring thugs to wrest land from peasants, or even mobilizing rural citizens to accede to state demands to relinquish land, “everyday” state power? Most historians and social scientists would see these reconfigurations of property rights, violent or nonviolent, as extraordinary. Ong’s statistical data on protest events and rights violations almost by definition represent noteworthy exercises of state power rather than everyday repression.
Why does the distinction between everyday state power and exceptional practices of repression matter? Because understanding the regime’s relative reliance on repression versus routinized compliance gets at the strength of the regime. One might imagine everyday state power as manifest in citizen compliance with regime policies because they either find them legitimate (e.g., ‘The CCP has a right to implement policies even when I don’t like them’) or because the face of state power is so omnipresent that they see no point to resisting, what Lisa Wedeen called “disciplinary-symbolic power” in her seminal book on Hafez Al-Asad’s patently absurd but powerful cult of personality in Syria (Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, University of Chicago Press, 1999). That Ong has documented the use of thugs for hire seems less an illustration of everyday state power and more evidence that perhaps the CCP faces a “crisis of legitimacy” in which “repression alone” stands between CCP power and the people’s wishes (Andrew Nathan, “An Anxious 100th Birthday for China’s Communist Party,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2021).
Issues of trust, compliance, and legitimacy are at the forefront of Gueorguiev’s book on popular participation in the People’s Republic of China. He asks the question: “Why would Chinese citizens participate in a system that ultimately curtails their freedoms?” (3). Understanding participation as voicing opinions when solicited, submitting proposals to local people’s congresses, involvement in participatory budgeting, and so forth, his book is not about repression but rather what he terms “controlled inclusion,” the way in which the CCP has reoriented the party-state to not just control society but to include and respond to social preferences. The CCP “controls inclusion” by organizing and channeling citizen input in ways that China scholars will find familiar: issues are siloed and localized, social groups are delineated according to the regime’s schemas rather than constituted by social processes, and inputs are solicited based on regime needs rather than some open-ended process that empowers citizens.
But Geuorguiev finds that the inputs matter, at least to an extent. He probes eclectic evidence —data on consultation in the policy process, a policy experiment in coastal Zhejiang—to argue that soliciting input can decrease policy instability (chapter 6) and enhance perceptions of local, but not central, governments (chapter 7). Much of the data are original, especially the survey data from the China Policy Barometer that Gueorguiev has run, an online opt-in sample. Many social scientists find these survey methods problematic, and the book could use an appendix, but nonetheless the evidence is creative, and the eclecticism reflects the work of a skilled researcher examining difficult topics in an increasingly closed regime. The book’s most interesting thread is the one on technology and political trust, the focus of chapter 8. Here, Geuorguiev’s survey data show that the social credit system seems to have the effect of reducing trust in others and making citizens feel less trusted by the state. Gueorguiev concludes that the introduction of technology—“digital Leninism”—“may one day render the Party…politically irrelevant” (189).
Gueorguiev’s book has a lamenting tone from start to finish. Like Ong, he endeavours to describe the politics he uncovers as temporally bound. Ong notes in her conclusion that the CCP has become increasingly repressive in more direct ways (170–171), and Gueorguiev suggests that technology and, indeed, repression may “further distance the people of China from one another and from their government” as the “quest for control and optimization” seems to supersede the imperfect but nonetheless meaningful ways in which the regime had incorporated citizen input (208).
Both books leave us with good answers to how inclusion, mobilization, and repression have functioned, and with equally good questions about state-society relations in the future. The best questions are the hardest to answer for social scientists: Do citizens trust the regime? Are state-society relations stable in China? To their immense credit, neither author makes an overarching argument about “authoritarian resilience” or “durability.” Ong focuses on the cost efficiency of outsourced repression, and Gueorguiev on the contours of “controlled inclusion” that harness social forces without empowering them, but Gueorguiev concludes he has “grown pessimistic about the sustainability of controlled inclusion” (208) and Ong that “blatant repression … makes the question of sustainability a lot less certain” (181). What’s more, Gueorguiev suggests public opinion work in China is “on the rise,” but that the focus on questions of “trust” should give way to ones of policy preference. I agree, though not because “the intellectual potential of such broad-ranging concepts is dwindling” (208). As Ong observes, the CCP is built on mobilization, and 75 years of campaigns, propaganda, and saturation of society with CCP language has as indelible an effect on Chinese citizens as Asad’s nonsensical but ubiquitous cult of personality had on Syrians. It may be impossible to assess trust by asking Chinese citizens if they trust the government because they have skills of “adept dissimulation” (Gordon Bennett, Yundong, University of California Press, 1976) to survive in a climate of politicization and mobilization.
I am reminded by Ong’s book of a meme that circulated on the Chinese internet in 2011, a bygone era of online speech. The situation was absurd: the Batman-playing actor Christian Bale had attempted to visit Chen Guangcheng, the blind human rights lawyer imprisoned in a village in Shandong, and was beaten up by what Ong calls thugs (173). The meme, fueled by the unique physical presentation of one of the “thugs” (really, plainclothes police), had the guards’ images superimposed on all sorts of global vistas. In the end, indeed the People’s Liberation Army did not confront Batman directly, but was the regime’s deniability plausible, reducing costs and increasing “everyday power” of the CCP? The meme, and its eventual suppression, suggests a darkly comic but nonetheless meaningful hint of weakness of the regime, just as Wedeen argued that “illicit jokes, tolerated comedy skits, and transgressive cartoons” may have foreshadowed the Syrian uprising that occurred a decade after her book’s publication (Lisa Wedeen, “Symposium Response to Commentators Honoring Ambiguities of Domination,” PS, Political Science & Politics 55, no. 1 [2022]: 1). The episode suggests not that trust and legitimacy are concepts too broad to study, but they are hard to study and measure, and cost-benefit analyses of repression and inclusion tactics may not at all get at how the Chinese body politic makes meaning of the regime’s various tools.
Meg Rithmire
Harvard University, Boston