The Hegemony of Harmony: Mechanisms of State Power and the Absorption of Popular Unrest in China

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk by Ching Kwan Lee.

Ching Kwan Lee - Professor of Sociology, UCLA

If the puzzle of the Chinese state in the 1980-90s was its capacity to fuel economic growth, since the 2000s, the puzzle has become its capacity to manage social conflicts and maintain stability amidst widespread protests by major social classes in the past decade. The China Studies literature depicts on the one hand an adaptive and resilient authoritarian state and on the other the rise of an assertive rights-conscious citizenry. Yet, without a theory of power between state and society, and lacking empirical data on the interaction between officials and citizens, the China scholarship is silent on the mechanisms and effects of the politics of stability maintenance. In this talk, using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in two cities – Shenzhen and Beijing, I analyze the molecular processes through which the “grassroots state” absorbs popular protests by workers, farmers and home-owners. Inside the trenches of these everyday wars of position, grassroots officials attempt to create consent through: (1) routinization of protest bargaining (material concessions), (2) devising and playing bureaucratic games (procedural consent), and (3) constructing an information and service-oriented state in the name of stability and security (moral leadership). Taking into account the lived experiences of both officials and citizens involved in these processes, I maintain that, contrary to existing views, stability preservation has come to rest on a precarious balance of consent and coercion that compromises both state authority and citizen rights.

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She obtained her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Michigan before moving to UCLA. She is author of Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007) and Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998). Her edited and co-edited books include From the Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers and the State in a Changing China (2011); Reclaiming Chinese Society: New Social Activism (2009), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (2007) and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (2007). She is currently working on two research projects: one on the “grassroots state” and class politics in China and the other examines Chinese investment and labor practices in Zambia’s copper mining and construction industries.