This book examines Mohism as a movement in early China, focusing on the Mohists’ pursuit of power. Fashioning themselves as grassroots activists, the Mohists hoped to impact the elite by gaining entry in its community and influencing it from within. To create a less violent world, they deployed strategies of persuasion and negotiation but did not discard counterviolence in their dealings with the ruling class. In executing their activism, the Mohists produced knowledge that allowed them to hone their nonviolent strategies as well as to mount armed resistance to aggression. In addition, the Mohists paid significant attention to the issue of personhood, constructing a self-cultivation tradition unsparing in its demands for overcoming human conditions that would impede their performance as activists. This book situates Mohism in the history of nonviolent activism, and in that of negotiation and conflict resolution.

In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of three ordinary Chinese citizens moved to extraordinary acts of courage: a peasant legal clerk who filed a class-action suit on behalf of overtaxed farmers, a young architect who defended the rights of dispossessed homeowners, and a bereaved woman who tried to find out why her elderly mother had been beaten to death in police custody. Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless façade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.

The recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.

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.

Environmental Activism, Social Media, and Protest in China: Becoming Activists over Wild Public Networks builds upon existing social movement scholarship in communication studies, China studies, and sociology by analyzing China’s vibrant contemporary environmental protests. Using news reports, social media feeds, and conversations with witnesses and participants in the protests, Elizabeth Brunner examines three important antiparaxylene (PX) protests: the 2007 protests in Xiamen, the 2011 protests in Dalian, and the 2014 protests in Maoming. Brunner argues for the treatment of protests as forces majeure and asserts the legitimacy of wild public networks. Brunner stresses that scholars must take a networked approach to social movements as new media become valid platforms for furthering social change, especially in areas where censorship is common.

How do weak activists organize under repression? This book theorizes a dynamic of contention called mobilizing without the masses.

The Battle for China’s Spirit is the first comprehensive analysis of its kind, focusing on seven major religious groups in China that together account for over 350 million believers: Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, and Falun Gong. The study examines the evolution of the Communist Party’s policies of religious control, how they are applied differently to diverse faith communities, and how citizens are responding to these policies. The study—which draws on hundreds of official documents and interviews with religious leaders, lay believers, and scholars—finds that Chinese government controls over religion have intensified since November 2012, seeping into new areas of daily life. Yet millions of religious believers defy official restrictions or engage in some form of direct protest, at times scoring significant victories. The report explores how these dynamics affect China’s overall social, political, and economic environment, while offering recommendations to both the Chinese government and international actors for how to increase the space for peaceful religious practice in a country where spirituality has been deeply embedded in its culture for millennia.