Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-l82ql Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-30T07:50:10.691Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Performing Authoritarian Citizenship: Public Transcripts in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2019

Greg Distelhorst  and
Diana Fu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How should we study citizenship in authoritarian regimes? We propose studying how citizenship is performed using the “public transcript”—communication between ordinary citizens and political authorities. The stakes of these strategic communications allow us to observe the roles citizens play to elicit assistance from authoritarian elites. We use this technique to study citizenship in contemporary China, analyzing evidence from an original database of over eight thousand appeals to local officials. These public transcripts reveal three ideal-type scripts of citizenship. First, we observe individuals performing subjecthood, positioning themselves as subalterns before benevolent rulers. We also identify an authoritarian legal citizenship that appeals to the formal legal commitments of the state. Finally, we find evidence for a socialist citizenship which appeals to the moral duties of officials to provide collective welfare. This approach eschews a classification scheme based on regime types, instead acknowledging that diverse performances of citizenship can coexist within a single state.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 106 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Replication data are available from the Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KE2AQU

The authors thank Margaret Boittin, Sarah Eaton, Peter Evans, Mary Gallagher, Christian Göbel, Genia Kostka, Cheol-Sung Lee, Sida Liu, Rana Mitter, Kevin O’Brien, Elizabeth Perry, Molly Roberts, Ed Steinfeld, Sidney Tarrow, Whitney Taylor, Jessica Teets, Rory Truex, Juan Wang, Melissa Williams, Dingxin Zhao, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at the American Political Science Association, Association of Asian Studies, Association of Chinese Political Studies, Brown University, Free University of Berlin, Göttingen University, National Sun Yat-Sen University, University of Vienna, and Zhejiang University for generous feedback on this research. They are also grateful for research assistance from Jiarui Cai, Elizabeth Ding, Emile Dirks, Yuxiao He, Yangyi Li, Yisen Lin, Grace Lin, Haoyao Ruan, Sharlene Song, and Yi Xie.

References

Allee, Mark. 1994. Law and Local Society in Late Imperial China: Northern Taiwan in the Nineteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bahry, Donna and Silver, Brian. 1990. “Soviet Citizen Participation on the Eve of Democratization.” American Political Science Review 84(3): 821–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balla, Steven J. 2012. “Information Technology, Political participation, and the Evolution of Chinese Policymaking.” Journal of Contemporary China 21(76): 655–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benford, Robert D. and Snow, David A.. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26(1): 611–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beissinger, Mark. 2007. “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions.” Perspectives on Politics 5(2): 259–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernhard, Michael. 1993. The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bernhard, Michael and Karakoc, Elcrem. 2007. “Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship.” World Politics 59(4): 539–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunce, Valerie and Wolchik, Sharon. 2009. “Debating the Color Revolutions: Getting Real About ‘Real Causes.’” Journal of Democracy 20(1): 69–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byman, Daniel and Lind, Jennifer. 2010. “Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy: Tools of Authoritarian Control in North Korea.” International Security 35(1): 44–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cai, Youngshun. 2010. Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Xi. 2012. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Jidong, Pan, Jennifer, and Xu, Yiqimg. 2016. Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China. American Journal of Political Science 60(2): 383–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheesman, Nick. 2015. Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Elizabeth F. 2009. Semi-citizenship in Democratic Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colton, Timothy. 2000. Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dalton, Russell. 2008. “Citizenship Norms and the Expansion of Political Participation” Political Studies 56: 76–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diamant, Neil, Lubman, Stanley B., and O’Brien, Kevin J.. 2005. Engaging the law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Dickson, Bruce. 2002. “Do Good Businessmen Make Good Citizens? An Emerging Collective Identity among China’s Private Entrepreneurs.” In The Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, ed. Perry, Elizabeth and Goldman, Merle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dimitrov, Martin. 2014. “What the Party Wanted to Know: Citizen complaints as a ‘barometer of public opinion’ in Communist Bulgaria.” Societies and Cultures 28(2): 271–295.Google Scholar
Distelhorst, Greg. 2017. “The Power of Empty Promises: Quasidemocratic Institutions and Activism in China.” Comparative Political Studies 50: 464–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Distelhorst, Greg and Hou, Yue. 2017. “Constituency Service under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China.” Journal of Politics 79(3): 1024–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eastman, David. 1957. “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems.” World Politics 9(3): 383–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ekiert, Grzegor and Kubik, Jan. 1999. Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1996. “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.” Slavic Review 55(1): 78–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Eli. 2014. Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Post-Socialist China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fu, Diana. 2017. “Fragmented Control: Governing Contentious Civil Society in China.” Governance, 30(3): 445–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fu, Diana. 2018. Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fu, Hualing and Cullen, Richard. 2008. “Weiquan (rights protection) Lawyering in an Authoritarian State: Building a Culture of Public-Interest Lawyering.” China Journal 59: 111–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallagher, Mary E. 2006. “Mobilizing the Law in China: ‘Informed Disenchantment’ and the Development of Legal Consciousness.” Law & Society Review 40(4): 783–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallagher, Mary E(2017). Authoritarian Legality: Law, Workers, and the State in Contemporary China. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Göbel, Christian and Chen, Xo. 2016. “The Mass Line Online: Electronic Petitions and Government Propaganda in China’s Civilizing Project.” Presented at the Seminar on Authoritarian Power and Practices in a Digital Age, University of Amsterdam, September 22–23.Google Scholar
Goldman, Merle. 2002. “The Reassertion of Political Citizenship in the Post-Mao Era: The Democracy Wall Movement.” In The Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, ed. Perry, Elizabeth and Goldman, Merle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goldman, Merle. 2005. From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hartford, Kathleen. 2005. “Dear Mayor: Online Communications with Local Governments in Hangzhou and Nanjing.” China Information 19(2): 217–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
He, Baogang. 2005. “Village Citizenship in China: A Case Study of Zhejiang.” Citizenship Studies 9(2): 205–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henken, Ted. 2017. “Cuba’s Digital Millennials: Independent Digital Media and Civil Society on the Island of the Disconnected.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 84(2): 429–56.Google Scholar
Henry, Laura A. 2009. “Redefining Citizenship in Russia: Political and Social Rights.” Problems of Post-Communism 56(6): 51–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, Laura A. 2012. “Complaint-Making as Political Participation in Contemporary Russia.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 45: 243–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howard, Marc M. 2002. “The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society.” Journal of Democracy 13(1): 157–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurst, William. 2004. “Understanding Contentious Collective Action by Chinese Laid-Off Workers: The Importance of Regional Political Economy.” Studies in Comparative International Development 39(2): 94–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isin, Engin. 2017. “Performative Citizenship.” In The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship , ed. Shachar, A., Baubock, R., Bloemraad, I., and Vink, M.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jowitt, Kenneth. 1991. “The New World Disorder.” Journal of Democracy 2(1): 11–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary., Pan, Jennifer, and Roberts, Margaret E.. 2013. How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression. American Political Science Review 107(2): 326–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary. 2014. “Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation.” Science 345(6199).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, Ching Kwan. 2007. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven and Way, Lucan A.. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Lianjiang. 2004. “Political Trust in Rural China.”Modern China 30(2): 228–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Lianjiang. 2010. “Rights Consciousness and Rules Consciousness in Contemporary China.” China Journal 64: 47–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Lianjiang. 2016. “Reassessing Trust in the Central Government: Evidence from Five National Surveys.” China Quarterly 225: 100–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, Sida and Halliday, Terrence C.. 2016. Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lorentzen, Peter and Scoggins, Suzanne. 2015. “Understanding China’s Rising Rights Consciousness.” China Quarterly 223: 638–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lubman, Stanley. 2000. Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Manby, Bronwen. 2013. Struggles for Citizenship in Africa. Zed Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System.” In Deliberative Politics, ed. Macedo, Stephen. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mann, Michael. 1987. “Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship.” Sociology 21(3): 339–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, Thomas H. 1950. “Citizenship and Social Class.” In Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. London, UK: Cambridge University PressGoogle Scholar
Mattingly, Daniel M. 2016. “Elite Capture: How Decentralization and Informal Institutions Weaken Property Rights in Rural China.” World Politics 68(3): 383–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michelson, Ethan. 2008. “Dear Lawyer Bao: Everyday Problems, Legal Advice, and State Power in China.” Social Problems 55(1): 43–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Migdal, Joel. 2001. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nathan, Andrew. 2013. “China at the Tipping Point? Foreseeing the Unforeseeable.” Journal of Democracy 24(1): 20–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Brien, Kevin J. 2002. “Villages, Elections, and Citizenship in Contemporary China.” In The Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, ed. Perry, Elizabeth and Goldman, Merle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjgiang, Li. 2006. Rightful Resistance in Rural China. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Elvin. 2015. “Complementary Institutions in Authoritarian Regimes: The Everyday Politics of Constituency Service in Singapore.” Journal of East Asian Studies 15: 361–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Lynette. 2018. “‘Thugs-for-Hire’: Subcontracting of State Coercion and State Capacity in China.” Perspectives on Politics 16(3): 680–95. doi:10.1017/S1537592718000981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peerenboom, Randall. 2002. China’s Long March toward Rule of Law. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth. 2001. “Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Popular Protest in Modern China.” Critical Asian Studies 33(2): 163–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth. 2008. “Chinese Conceptions of “Rights”: from Mencius to Mao—and Now.” Perspectives on Politics 6(1), 37–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth and Goldman, Merle, eds. 2002. The Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pils, Eva. 2014. China’s Human Rights Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pinto, Pedro Ramos. 2012 “‘Everyday Citizenship’ under Authoritarianism: The Cases of Spain and Portugal.” In Civil Society Activism under Authoritarian Rule: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Cavatorta, Francesco. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., and Airoldi, Edoardo M.. 2016. “A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 111(515)::988–1003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, Graeme B. (2009). ‘Managing Society: Protest, Civil Society, and Regime in Putin’s Russia.” Slavic Review 68(3): 528–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Solinger, Dorothy J. 1999. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Stern, Rachel E. 2013. Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Su, Zheng and Meng, Tianguang. 2016. “Selective Responsiveness: Online Public Demands and Government Responsiveness in Authoritarian China.” Social Science Research 59: 52–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tilly, Charles. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 2008. Contentious Performances. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Bryan S. 1990. “Outline of a Theory of Citizenship.” Sociology 24(2): 189–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vink, Maarten. 2017. “Comparing Citizenship Regimes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Shachar, Ayelet, Bauböck, Rainer, Bloemraad, Irene, and Vink, Maarten. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Yujua. 2014. Tying the Autocrat’s Hands. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1978 [1968]. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wedeen, Lisa. 2008. Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen. Chicago: University of Chicago PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whiting, Susan H. 2017. “Authoritarian ‘Rule of Law’ and Regime Legitimacy.” Comparative Political Studies 50(14): 1907–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Guobin 2009. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Yashar, Deborah. 2013. “Institutions and Citizenship: Reflections on the Illicit.” In Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship: The Latin American Experience, ed. Sznajder, M., Roniger, L., and Forment, C.. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Zhao, Dingxin. 2009. “The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China.” American Behavioral Scientist 533: 416–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Distelhorst and Fu Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KE2AQU
Link