Regime Reinforcing Noncompliance in Rural China

At Berkeley, Lily Tsai (MIT) argues that non-compliance is a way for citizens in China to make their feelings known.

Speaker: Lily L. Tsai, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Panelist/Discussant: Kevin O'Brien, Political Science, UC Berkeley

When relatively powerless individuals in nondemocratic systems refuse or fail to comply with government policies and regulations, we typically see their noncompliance as “everyday resistance” to the state. Yet, as the case of rural China illustrates, people in transitional political systems undergoing reform can often see individual noncompliance as a way of engaging rather than avoiding powerholders. This presentation argues that norms of regime-reinforcing noncompliance may partially substitute for formal democratic institutions for citizen participation in nondemocratic and transitional systems where such institutions are weak. These norms make noncompliance with policies and decisions that individuals see as misguided or inappropriate socially and politically acceptable when such noncompliance provides the state with information about citizen preferences and local conditions. This presentation draws on original data from a nationally representative survey of 2000 households in rural China and from multiple, intensive interviews conducted with twenty individuals randomly sampled from two villages.