SUNY Series in Global Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019. xiv, 234 pp. (B&W photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-7621-6.
Shih-Diing Liu’s new book, The Politics of People: Protest Cultures in China, is a monograph finished with courage and ambition, especially since social scientists often avoid venturing into research on elements of culture that are hard to capture. It is also one among very few bold attempts to examine, together, the contentious politics of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. The elegance with which Liu weaves these stories and the case details he presents are good reasons to include his volume in both area studies and theoretical reading lists.
This book is divided into three sections. Section 1 examines the relations between “body and state,” with the first chapter on “embodied practices of citizenship” and the second on “migrant workers’ right to appear.” On the political uses of the body, the author introduces various forms of embodied action, such as walking collectively, covering faces, kneeling down, mobilizing participation of the elderly and children, protesting nakedly, threatening with death, resisting through suicides, deploying funeral symbols, and staging unapproved mourning. All these tactics, most of which have been examined by previous studies, do carry dramatic characteristics, and therefore it is reasonable that the author revisits them from a performative perspective. Liu does a good job of analyzing those familiar forms of protest through a new theoretical angle.
In chapter 2, the author dives into an original but somewhat thin analysis of how migrant employees of a company called Artigas launched their protest, aiming to show “how the body serves as a temporary site of political self-expression” and “how collective bodily presence exerts limited yet crucial performative force” (82–83). These are wonderfully framed questions, but the promised discussion of embodied actions and performative tactics is not well-delivered. More importantly, for a book on protest cultures in China, readers might reasonably wonder why only migrant workers, rather than other social groups—for instance the peasants who account for fully half of the population—were selected for examination.
Section 2, which includes chapters 3 and 4, is on the “politics of articulation.” Chapter 3 uses an “interactive political process approach” to “discover the mechanisms shaping why a protest emerges and how it unfolds” (87). Liu is on strong ground when he contends that the appropriation of the state’s symbolic resources (such as discourses, slogans, and directives)—which provides necessary legitimacy and leverage for struggle (88)—is the most important characteristic of protests staged in mainland China. While this is not theoretically groundbreaking (Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li got there first with their “rightful resistance” framework), the added empirical meat is valuable.
Elements of performative politics are easier to grasp in chapters 4, 5, and 6, perhaps because the protests in Hong Kong and Macau are more dramatic in themselves, or perhaps the author is more familiar with these two cities (due to more media reports and relatively easy access to interviewees), which makes it possible for him to offer readers more information on embodied actions there. Chapter 4 compares Hong Kong’s 2011 occupy movement with the one that emerged in 2014, showing how a distinctly new political form vis-à-vis the state was invented through the practice of popular participation, encampment, consensus-making, and new modes of self-governance. He also demonstrates how protesters utilized everyday resources to construct the movements’ meanings, turning the spaces of appearance into temporary sites of cultural performance (139).
Chapters 5 and 6 make up section 3, which is on cultural resistance. Chapter 5 treats “political protest as artistic practice.” It examines the specific roles that art and aesthetics play in mainland China’s and Hong Kong’s popular political activities (with more attention paid to the latter). Chapter 6 introduces Macau’s cyberpolitics, showing that the manipulation of images, egao in Chinese and “spoofing” or “mocking” in English, allows citizens to “voice dissent and contest the authorized meanings and discourses produced by the government” (177).
When presented with a book on protest cultures in China, readers would normally expect to see a monograph overwhelmingly focused on the country’s mainland. The author’s inclusion of Hong Kong and Macau is laudable but sometimes hard to follow because the book lacks a rigorously constructed, integrative theoretical framework for systematically comparing the protest cultures of the three regions. Although the author makes good use of performativity and associated concepts, an explicit discussion of how this book has contributed to political culture theory in general would have been welcomed.
All in all, Shih-Diing Liu’s book is a welcome addition to the studies of contentious politics in China. Readers, particularly those interested in how protest cultures in Hong Kong and Macau contribute to performative resistance throughout greater China, will find much to enjoy.
Yanhua Deng
Nanjing University, Nanjing