The Rise of the Stability State

The Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley presents a discussion of the direction of legal reform in China's policing and control institutions

Speaker: Rachel Stern, Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science, Boalt Law School, UC Berkeley

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” (weiwen) operations have become a priority for local Chinese authorities. Public security chiefs have risen in bureaucratic influence. Funding and personnel for state operations aimed at controlling citizen petitioners and social protest have surged. And control of the institutions responsible for addressing these issues has been vested in progressively more senior Party political-legal authorities.

But China remains far from a simple police state. To be sure, state authorities harass, detain, and arrest individuals they deem a threat to their rule. And vast numbers of state agents and informally recruited personnel have been employed to keep watch over selected political dissidents, citizen activists, and public interest lawyers. But heightened official sensitivity to social unrest has also led to state concessions to mobilized groups of aggrieved citizens, facilitated strategies of “rightful resistance” among petitioners, and prompted state authorities to revive Maoist-era populist judging practices and mediation institutions at the expense of late-20th century legal reforms.

This article argues that the birth of these trends dates to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those that of the 1980s. They 1) increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, 2) expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and 3) altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social protest. Over the past twenty years, these practices have flowered into an extensive weiwen apparatus, where
local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social protest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.