How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention.

Het uitgangspunt van dit boek is dat Chinese individuen van hun eigen inzet uit moeten kunnen gaan, ongeacht de beperkingen die hen door de staat worden opgelegd. Om hun belangen beter te kunnen verdedigen sluiten sommige individuen zich aan bij sociale bewegingen, die tot sociale protesten kunnen leiden.

The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

Introduction: repression and mobilization : insights from political science and sociology / Christian Davenport -- Protest mobilization, protest repression, and their interaction / Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy -- Precarious regimes and matchup problems in the explanation of repressive policy / Vince Boudreau -- The dictator's dilemma / Ronald A. Francisco -- When activists ask for trouble : state-dissident interactions and the New Left cycle of resistance in the United States and Japan / Gilda Zwerman and Patricia Steinhoff -- Talking the walk : speech acts and resistance in authoritarian regimes / Hank Johnston -- Soft repression : ridicule, stigma, and silencing in gender-based movements / Myra Marx Ferree -- Repression and the public sphere : discursive opportunities for repression against the extreme right in Germany in the 1990s / Ruud Koopmans -- On the quantification of horror : notes from the field / Patrick Ball -- Repression, mobilization, and explanation / Charles Tilly -- How to organize your mechanisms : research programs, stylized facts, and historical narratives / Mark Lichbach.

Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China's western borderlands are awash in a wave of ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through on-the-ground interviews and firsthand observations, the international experts in this volume create an invaluable record of the conflicts and protests as they have unfolded—the most extensive chronicle of events to date. The authors examine the factors driving the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and the political strategies used to suppress them. They also explain why certain areas have seen higher concentrations of ethnic-based violence than others. Essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the origins of unrest in contemporary Tibet and Xinjiang, this volume considers the role of propaganda and education as generators and sources of conflict. It links interethnic strife to economic growth and connects environmental degradation to increased instability. It captures the subtle difference between violence in urban Xinjiang and conflict in rural Tibet, with detailed portraits of everyday individuals caught among the pressures of politics, history, personal interest, and global movements with local resonance.

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. “Cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence, have emerged as a political and cultural phenomenon. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. She finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation. Lora-Wainwright uses the term “resigned activism” as a lens through which to view villagers' perceptions and the diverse forms of environmental engagement that result. These range from picketing at the factory gate to quieter individual or family-oriented actions. Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of “resigned activism” in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China's economic power.

Social science theories of contentious politics have been based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from the European and American experience, and classic texts in the field make no mention of either the Chinese Communist revolution or the Cultural Revolution -- surely two of the most momentous social movements of the twentieth century. Moreover, China's record of popular upheaval stretches back well beyond this century, indeed all the way back to the third century B.C. This book, by bringing together studies of protest that span the imperial, Republican, and Communist eras, introduces Chinese patterns and provides a forum to consider ways in which contentious politics in China might serve to reinforce, refine or reshape theories derived from Western cases.