THiS Workshop of Chinese Societies (2024 Spring)

Abstract

Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) claimed that China’s fight against covid demonstrated the strength of the party-state’s institutions. Critics pointed to the prevalent violation of individual rights and numerous individual sufferings in China’s lockdowns both in Wuhan in 2020 and in Shanghai in 2022, and beyond. Both views take the party-state as the only player that mattered in the largest lockdowns in human history. Nobody has examined the role of the society in China’s covid lockdown, except for the Chinese official narrative of “the people’s war” which emphasizes how the party-state was able to mobilize hundreds of millions of volunteers in its fight against the covid, raising a question about the autonomy of civic organizations, and whether they played any role in monitoring and resisting the party-state’s encroachment on individual rights. Based on in-depth fieldwork including over ninety interviews and neighborhood visits in Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenzhen and Zhengzhou, this Article reveals the state’s limited capacity to enforce neighborhood lockdowns, implement mass covid tests and provide food to neighborhoods under lockdowns. The cooperation of citizens, particularly homeowners, was essential to the state in maintaining its covid control system. When such homeowners, who were cooperators of the government, protested by law, the government had no choice but to give in. Dependence brought power. Neither the government nor homeowners were free from the constraints imposed on them by each other. The Chinese case demonstrates a new paradigm of state-society relationship that I call “cooperating to resist,” challenges our understanding of power and legality in authoritarian regimes, and sheds new light on the relationship between property and sovereignty, specifically why and how property law provides a safe space of resistance for citizens in an authoritarian regime.

Abstract

This research on Chinese Working Holiday Makers in Australia contributes to the cosmopolitanism debate, examining whether it is an exclusive privilege for global elites or a shared identity among peripheral groups. Utilizing one year of lived experience (2017-2018) and in-depth interviews from May to August 2023, I’ve noted the working holiday program’s role as a “cultural policy,” fostering a “cosmopolitan imaginary” among Chinese youth. Paradoxically, this pursuit exposes them to constraints, precarity, and exploitation in Australia. I argue that their vulnerability extends from the liminality experienced in China, revealing transnational class dynamics. This research enriches the discourse on transnational youth mobilities by focusing on the context of their home country. Lacking “common sense” in political, workplace, and gender domains, these youths feel alienated in mainstream Chinese society, disenchanted with the “Chinese Dream.” Their regional identity stigma tied to Hukou intersects with gender, class, age, education, and sexual orientation. Thus, they acknowledge that the working holiday visa offered them a vital “space,” physically, socially, mentally and psychologically, to “be yourself,” value their bodies, emotions, and feelings, pursue diverse lifestyles and workstyles, and “protect the light of their soul.” As aptly expressed by one participant: “While a replanted tree can die, humans who relocate can thrive—树挪死人挪活.” This recognition also affects how they perceive race and racism in Australia. Overall, this study challenges stereotypes of hyper-nationalistic Chinese diaspora, examining their nuanced, individualized connections with their home country through the exploration of the debate between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Abstract

How does resistance to racism manifest in a community’s organizational field? In this paper, I combine Du Bois’s concept of Double Consciousness with organizational field theory to build a field-level theory of racial resistance. While race scholarship has undertheorized community-based organizational ecosystems and fields, theories of organizational fields have not taken seriously the multifaceted role of race as a field-defining institution. I use insights from both of these traditions to explain why 19th century Chinese organizations formed such a sophisticated, interconnected, and complex organizational field that looked quite different from past and contemporary Chinese or U.S.-based organizational fields. I take a longitudinal, processual approach showing how this organizational field developed alongside the racialization of the Chinese community in the U.S. In doing so, this case shows how the agency of racial resistance forms at the community level and how a dynamic racialization process structures an organizational field.

Abstract

The Chinese grassroots bureaucracy today has been plauged by excessive paperwork that local cadres perceived as burdensome formalities. In this paper, by investigating the structural factors and the political logic underlying organizational red tape, I tackled the question of why formalism persists even though both the central leadership and grassroots bureaucrats dislike it. I discussed the specific components of the “paper mountain” and identified two kinds of paperwork that have overburdened grassroots cadres – excessive documentation (Trace-ism) and overproduction of forms (or statistical overload).

I attribute “Trace-ism” to three interrelated factors: First, due to the flawed performance measurement and distorted incentive scheme, documentation outweighs substantive work and outcomes in performance evaluations and inspections. Second, as the authoritarian political oversight of the bureaucracy can only rely on top-down and internal monitoring, grassroots bureaucrats are forced to document everything they do when the central principal desires to maximize control over local agents. Third, the politicization of governance and administrative tasks and the intensification of the accountability system has further incentivized risk-averse agents to turn to formalities and documentation as self-protective strategies.

The phenomenon that the grassroots bureaucracy has been flooded with statistical forms reveals the fundamental tension between the leadership’s ambition of building an all-seeing state and the limited informational capacity of the grassroots bureaucracy. Compounded by problems intrinsic to the bureaucratic system, the overproduction of forms and figures fails to generate better information that can help enhance governance quality. Despite the huge consumption of grassroots cadres’ time and energy, “statistical/big data management” gives the authorities only the illusion of greater control. Even worse, the prevalent statistical falsification and low-quality or distorted data can do more harm to state governance if they form the basis of policymaking. Drawning on extensive fieldwork and survey of grassroots cadres across China, this study enrichs our understandings of the Chinese bureaucratic system.