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The Paradox of Chinese Civil Society CURRENT HISTORY CURRENT HISTORY September 2014 “Contrary to conventional predictions, the growth of protest and civil society in contemporary China seems more conducive to the resilience of authoritarianism than to imminent democratization.” Citizen Contention and Campus Calm: The Paradox of Chinese Civil Society ELIZABETH J. PERRY ivil society in contemporary China presents state enterprises prompted laid-off and retired a perplexing paradox. Despite the brutal workers to lodge petitions and stage sit-ins at Csuppression of the 1989 Tiananmen upris- factories and government offices in opposition to ing, social contention and associational activism plant closures and paltry pensions. swelled over the ensuing years. One might have In the 2000s, as the negative side effects of expected the ruthless June Fourth repression of rapid economic reform became increasingly visi- the massive student movement to have deterred ble, environmental pollution sparked “not-in-my- subsequent dissent, but in fact the frequency of backyard” rallies among a growing middle class protest has steadily escalated in the past 25 years. anxious to protect its newly acquired property and Moreover, China today is host to countless grass- its health. State-sanctioned infrastructure devel- roots (as well as government-sponsored) nongov- opment and commercial real estate projects ignit- ernmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, ed angry remonstrations by displaced residents. and charities—not to mention a vibrant sphere Labor disputes erupted with calls for higher wages of online public debate. In contrast to 1989, a and better working conditions. Migrant workers nascent civil society can now be said to exist. demanded that their children be permitted to sit Nowhere is this organizing and societal for university entrance examinations in the cit- engagement more evident than among college ies where their parents labored. And yet, amid students. There are, however, few signs of anoth- the explosion of protest activity by seemingly all er student-led “democracy movement” looming manner of aggrieved citizens, China’s university on the horizon. Instead, university campuses in campuses have remained remarkably quiet. the People’s Republic of China (PRC) these days form a critical component of an apparently effec- THREAT AVERTED tive web of support and stability for the existing Averting campus unrest in China is no mean political system. feat. Over the course of the twentieth century, The scope and spread of protest in post-1989 every generation of Chinese university students China have been impressive. The early 1990s wit- played a catalytic role in a cycle of protest move- nessed a wave of violent tax riots by farmers com- ments that transformed the country’s political plaining of “unfair burdens.” When the central trajectory. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government responded to the rural unrest with traces its own origins to the May Fourth Movement a historic decision to abolish China’s centuries- of 1919, when nationalist students streamed out old agricultural tax, the locus of protest shifted of college campuses onto the streets to denounce from the countryside back to the cities. In the late Japan’s threat to Chinese sovereignty. Two years 1990s, the privatization and bankruptcy of many later, a small band of intellectuals—led by the dean and librarian of Peking University—founded the CCP to spearhead a revolution intended to ELIZABETH J. PERRY is a professor of government at Harvard restore China’s national pride. In the 1930s and University and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Her books include Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary 1940s, thousands of college students suspended Tradition (University of California Press, 2012). their studies to participate in the Communist 211 212 • CURRENT HISTORY • September 2014 revolution and its front organizations—first in the rise spelled the demise of Communist regimes war against Japan (1937–45) and then in the Civil from Bucharest to Budapest. On the other hand, War against the Nationalist Party (1945–49). the absence of a comparable level of autonomous Just a few years after the establishment of associational activity in Beijing was blamed for the People’s Republic in 1949, students rallied the durability of the PRC’s authoritarian political to Chairman Mao Zedong’s injunction to “let a system. hundred flowers bloom” by offering spirited criti- It is certainly true that the Tiananmen uprising cisms of the new socialist system; shocked by the occurred in the absence of a robust and indepen- depth of dissent, the PRC leadership unleashed a dent urban civil society of the type that is often draconian “anti-rightist campaign” in the sum- presumed to be a prerequisite for democratiza- mer of 1957. A decade later, campus protest tion. Although so-called “democracy salons” had again augured radical change when Mao called sprouted up on a number of Chinese univer- on student Red Guards to jumpstart his Great sity campuses in the 1980s, these were small and Proletarian Cultural Revolution. nebulous entities, closely monitored by the state’s In 1966, Beijing’s leading universities served as security apparatus. The millions of protesters who launching pads for Mao’s final revolutionary quest. marched in Beijing and other major Chinese cit- For the better part of the Cultural Revolution ies in the spring of 1989 were for the most part decade (1966–76), mass criticism and “class strug- mobilized not by new civil society associations, gle” supplanted classroom instruction as the main but instead via preexisting socialist institutions: campus activity. When the Tiananmen Uprising public universities, state-owned enterprises, offi- erupted only 13 years after the conclusion of the cial mass associations, and even government Cultural Revolution, it looked as though China’s and party agencies. When central leaders finally university students were once again poised to issued an unambiguous directive to demobilize spark a major political the movement, these orga- transformation. nizations quickly fell into But the bloody sup- University students are at present line and the protest crum- pression of June Fourth bled almost overnight. devoting more energy to community not only stymied the call Tracing the failure of for fundamental political service than to political mobilization. Tiananmen to the weak- reform on the part of mil- ness of Chinese civil soci- lions of protesters; it also ety heightens the paradox stemmed the generational tide of politically influ- of post-1989 developments, however. For the ential student protest that had punctuated China’s past quarter-century has not only seen a tor- entire twentieth century. For the past 25 years rent of popular protest in virtually all corners of now, Chinese campuses have remained unchar- Chinese society outside of academia; recent years acteristically tranquil. The anomaly appears even have also witnessed an unprecedented growth in starker in light of the cascade of momentous volunteerism and activism—that is, fledgling civil events, invigorated if not always instigated by society—which is particularly pronounced on col- restive students, that occurred elsewhere in the lege campuses. world during this same period: Eastern Europe’s Students and professors are at the forefront of revolutions of 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union, an extraordinary surge in associational participa- the Color Revolutions in former Soviet states, and tion and community service. Yet, further deepen- the Arab Spring, for example. ing the paradox of post-1989 trends, applications In the immediate aftermath of June Fourth, to join the CCP are also at an all-time high among journalistic and scholarly consensus in the university students and instructors. Contrary to West ascribed the disappointing failure of the conventional predictions, the growth of protest Tiananmen uprising—in contrast to the stun- and civil society in contemporary China seems ning success of anticommunist movements across more conducive to the resilience of authoritarian- Eastern Europe later that year—to the relative ism than to imminent democratization. weakness of Chinese civil society. On the one At the center of the PRC’s anomalous situation is hand, Poland’s Solidarity, Czechoslovakia’s Charter the compliance of its academics. The causes of this 77, and Hungary’s Danube Circle were applauded complicity are multiple. First, and most obvious, as part of an emerging urban civil society whose is the array of control mechanisms that the party- The Paradox of Chinese Civil Society • 213 state deploys to maintain order on university cam- sible for student work at all levels of the univer- puses. Second is a range of more subtle techniques sity structure. of cultural governance designed to produce politi- In recent years these control methods have been cal allegiance and regime loyalty among citizens “modernized” with the aid of new techniques and in general and students in particular. Third, and technologies. For example, as in the United States, arguably most important, are the various oppor- mental health facilities are now a staple feature tunities for regime-supportive civic engagement of Chinese college campuses. But in the PRC the and service afforded by the recent expansion of definition of “mental illness” is broadly construed civil society. Ironically, the increased associational to include ideas and inclinations that the state activity among Chinese students today is work- deems politically dangerous, and the results of
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