[MUSIC] Let's address the concluding modes of participation that reflect the 10 or the 12 that I originally put up at the beginning of this lecture. The first one is what we call unorganized collective action. And as I said, it's the concept of Zhou Xueguang who teaches at Stanford University. And he wrote a very famous article where he argued that sometimes, mass action in China is not unified, it's not organized group behavior. But it's the result of the fact that large numbers of spontaneous individual behaviors are triggered by changes in state society ties. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that people in China, particularly in the socialist era, lived under very similar constraints. And when those constraints were lifted, or the state controls were weakened, then people, independently, moved in, what turns out to be, a common direction. So for example, the decollectivization that happened in the Chinese countryside. People had lived in people's communes, they lived under all these constraints. All of a sudden, the communes got weaker. The boundaries, or the controls, of the local officials, got weaker. And suddenly everybody moved out of the communes. And if you were sitting up above somewhere on the moon looking down at the Earth, you would see, and looking at China, you would see hundreds of millions of people moving out of the people's communes. And you would be convinced that somehow it had been organized, but the truth was that it was never organized. Zhou Xueguang also uses this to explain the criticism of the communist party during the Spring 1957 Hundred Flowers campaign. And that, again once the party removed the constraints and says criticize the party tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people get involved and make criticisms. And in the end, in 1957, about 500,000 of them are arrested because the party was convinced that they had been conspiring and working together, but the truth was, it was highly unorganized. Another way that people participate, another mode, is what we would call passive resistance. So we've seen the example in 1973 of factory workers who were dissatisfied with the working conditions in the factories, and so they slowed down. One of my favorite stories is from 1986, when taxi drivers were suddenly allowed to introduce a contract system, allowing for their incomes to increase dramatically where as the bus drivers never got that kind of bonus. And so this huge gap developed between the incomes of taxi drivers and the incomes of bus drivers. And so the bus drivers started to drive very slowly and I remember watching people driving through Tiananmen Square. And this was their was, it was a slowdown to try and express their dissatisfaction with the salary gap. Another place, I was out in the countryside in 1986, and a local leader took collective land and gave it to his uncle. Which he could then plant to try and make some extra money and the villagers, in that village, just stopped farming. And that was the way that they could send the message to the top leadership in their township and they would come down and then stop this from happening. We see also unfortunately one common passive form of resistance is Tibetan monks, who set themselves on fire and died. And we've now seen about 110, maybe 120 Tibetan monks who have set themselves on fire in support of the Dalai Lama who they see as their spiritual leader. In socialist China in particular, less so today, but under the planned economy many resources, many opportunities, the right to have children, access to apartments, access to coupons for bicycles. All kinds of things like this were controlled by local officials. And this made the scope of politics very wide within the planned economy and so, you would approach officials, and try and get these benefits, which made this a kind of political activism or a kind of political activity. And so people would lobby officials to get access to these kinds of goods. And the officials would then have to respond to them. This was also a very important mode of political activism. We also can see, we've talked about this, petitions to upper levels of government. And I can show you here that the estimates were that in 2010, there were 9 million petitions that were put forward to the central government. I know of one case back in 1986 where I was doing field research, that villagers living outside of Nanjing petitioned the Nanjing city government, when the township government confiscated land on the edge of the township. And then allowed officials from far away villages to move to the edge of town because people wanted to live near the center of authority and there were movie theaters and stuff like that. So, they sent a petition with photographs of the land confiscation to the Nanjing party committee. Unfortunately, the Nanjing party committee sent those pictures back to the township and asked the Township government to resolve the problem, which clearly they wouldn't do because they were responsible for it. But one of the difficulties for this whole petition system, is that the likelihood of response is really only one in 1,000. Which is really a problem, because it means that if you do write these petitions, the likelihood of you getting any kind of compensation is extremely small. But you are likely to get quite frustrated. The last mode that we will talk about is policy evasion as a way of participation. If you think back to the original definition that I used of participation, one of the second definition was really to affect policy. Because you can't make policy if you're a citizen. But when those policies are advocated and come down from the central government, the one thing you can do is try to influence the way that they're introduced. And if you don't like them you can block them, and that's a major form of participation from my perspective. And when those policies are unpopular, then villagers or local people can contravene the central government. So for example, when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, back in the 2000s, was very concerned about the number of people who were dying in coal mines, he tried to close down the number of coal mines. Failed. Just resistance from the mine owners. When people have tried to implement birth control policies, there is strong resistance from people in the countryside. A local official told me that he used to take women, try and drag them up for third trimester abortions. And as he would do that women would line the path up to the commune hospital, the township hospital, and spit on him which was a way of trying to stop that from happening. During the cultural revolution there was a strategy, an effort to try and take away all kinds of private property in the countryside, but people would find ways to go up into the hills. The officials would allow them to go up into the hills and plant more fields. So this gives a kind of collusion between local officials and peasants in trying to resist the central governments efforts to take away the private sector. And we even know in fact, in a period during the Cultural Revolution, when there was a great emphasis on planting grain, we know, I've talked to people that locals would use strategies where they would plant grain along the main road where they know that the officials would come to inspect. But if you went off the main road, just slightly, you would find no grain anymore. People were growing much more valuable crops, but they were gambling that the officials would not go off the main road to check.
