Lianjiang Li

• Chinese University of Hong Kong

Although contemporary China is a repressive state, protests and demonstrations have increased almost tenfold between 2005 and 2015. This is an astounding statistic when one considers that Marxist-Leninist regimes of the past tolerated little or no public dissent. How can protests become so common in an autocratic state? What are the trends of repre...

Bureaucrat-assisted contention in China is a type of collective action in which native-born officials help socioeconomic elites launch or sustain popular action against outsider party secretaries by leaking information and sabotaging repression. Bureaucrats who assist local influentials are neither elite allies nor institutional activists. Instead,...

The article argues that distrust in government reflects a preference for regime change in authoritarian China. It shows that individuals who have stronger distrust in government also have a stronger preference for multiparty electoral competition which runs against the gist of one-party rule and would be a stepping stone toward representative democ...

This paper argues that popular trust in the Chinese central government is significantly weaker than five national surveys suggest. The evidence comes from these surveys. First, the surveys show that between one- and two-thirds of respondents hold hierarchical trust, i.e. they have more trust in the central government than they do in local governmen...

This article proposes two explanations for why public confidence in China’s central authorities has appeared high and stable since the early 1990s. Drawing on interviews with petitioners in Beijing, it argues that trust in the Center is resilient in the sense that individuals who might be expected to lose trust often manage to retain it by redefini...

What precipitated the 2003-2006 “high tide” of petitioning Beijing and why did the tide wane? Interviews and archival sources suggest that a marked increase in petitioners coming to the Capital was at least in part a response to encouraging signals that emerged when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao adopted a more populist leadership style. Because the pres...

This paper examines the relationship between distrust in incumbent government leaders and demand for systemic changes in rural China. It finds that individuals who distrust government leaders’ commitment to the public interest have both stronger demand for leadership change and stronger preference for popular elections. It argues that distrust in g...

Do Chinese people have rights consciousness or only rules consciousness? Rules consciousness combines awareness of the necessity of having protection from rule-enforcement authorities with willingness to secure such protection through direct or indirect participation in rule-enforcement. Rights consciousness, on the other hand, combines awareness o...

Based on archival sources and interviews, this paper relates the untold story behind several township elections. It shows that these experiments were largely due to a discursive opening on expanding grassroots democracy and efforts by local leaders to promote their careers by taking the lead in initiating electoral reforms. It suggests that over tw...

Based on election observations and a two-wave panel survey, this paper offers a more rigorous test of the hypothesis that free and fair village elections may make Chinese villagers feel empowered. It shows that after the introduction of free elections, more villagers said that they would not vote in the next election for cadres who did not comply w...

Using interviews and survey data from four counties, this paper examines Chinese villagers' trust in the state. It shows that while some villagers seem to see a monolithic state that is either trustworthy or untrustworthy, more believe that there are substantial differences between higher and lower levels of the state. For the majority of responden...

Rural protest leaders in China play a number of roles. Among others, they lead the charge, shape collective claims, recruit activists and mobilize the public, devise and orchestrate acts of contention, and organize cross-community efforts. Protest leaders emerge in two main ways. Long-time public figures initiate popular action on their own or in r...

The paper examines the significance of distinguishing trust in government's commitment from trust in its competence for understanding the relationship between political trust and political participation. It finds that Chinese farmers have more trust in the central government's commitment to protect their rights and interests than in its capacity to...

Petitioning is the archetypal form of rightful resistance. But what if a petition falls on deaf ears? Some long-time protesters, seeing few alternatives and too proud to accept defeat, have turned to three more direct forms of confrontation: publicizing policies, demanding dialogues, and face-to-face confrontations with local officials. Direct acti...

Beijing may wish to keep the rural population as apolitical and passive as possible, but it must understand that this is fast becoming an impossible task.

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 f...

Protest outcomes in rural China are typically an outgrowth of interaction between activists, sympathetic elites, targets and the wider public. Popular agitation first alerts concerned officials to poor policy implementation and may prompt them to take corrective steps. As a result of participating in contention certain activists feel empowered and...

Bernstein and Lü present a powerful argument that the problem of “peasant burdens” cannot be resolved unless rural taxpayers are included as fully-fledged polity members whose interests are represented in both policy making and policy implementation. They do so by addressing two important puzzles. In chapters two to four, the authors examine the pa...

This article examines the dynamics of administrative litigation in rural China. It shows how local officials often attempt to preempt, derail or undermine administrative lawsuits by blocking access to official documents and regulations, pressuring courts to reject cases, failing to appear in court or perjuring themselves, discrediting attorneys, an...

Based on data collected in a survey conducted in six Chinese provinces at the end of 1997 and early 1998, this article offers a preliminary analysis of why some peasants wished to see Mao-style anti-corruption campaigns. It shows that the support for campaigns is negatively correlated with the respondents' evaluation of local officials' performance...

Using interviews, leadership speeches, and archival materials, this article reviews how autonomous villagers' committees appeared in Guangxi in the early 1980s and how they were transformed into a replacement for production brigades. It also examines the preferences of various actors involved in implementing village elections, including the Party O...

The paper reviews policy debate over village elections and attempts to abolish and rescue the reform after the student movement in 1989.

Based on in-depth interviews, survey data, and archival sources, this paper analyzes the origins of nostalgia for Maoist mass campaigns directed against corruption and other malfeasance engaged in by local officials. It argues that campaign nostalgia is an indicator of frustration and unmet expectations. Its origins trace to an unwillingness on the...

How do Chinese local officials define their tasks and distinguish between policies that must be executed and those they can safely ignore? Drawing on "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to implementation, we examine how much discretion rural leaders enjoy and how this discretion affects policy delivery. Archival sources and interviews show that s...

Using interviews with peasants and cadres in North China, compliant villagers (shunmin), recalcitrants (dingzihu), and policy-based resisters (diaomin) are distinguished by reference to their resistance routines (or lack of resistance). Compared to both violent acts and "everyday forms of resistance," policy-based resistance is typically less risky...

Interviews and archival research on the dynamics of cadre-mass contention show that lodging complaints is a common (and potentially effective) way for Chinese villagers to defy grassroots leaders. Even without meaningful democratization, structural changes in mass-elite relations enable villagers to resist arbitrary, predatory, and highhanded offic...

An ongoing debate over criteria for selecting Chinese people's congress deputies casts doubt on the democratic credentials of many reformers. Archival materials and interviews with Chinese legislative leaders, deputies, and staff demonstrate a range of views on how to improve "deputy quality." Some respondents emphasize deputy educational attainmen...

Drawing on in-depth interviews this paper shows that petitioners in Beijing often try three ways to retain their trust in the Center in spite of agonizing setbacks. First, they invest time and effort to see if the Center has learned about their cases and whether it is able and willing to help them. Second, they save their confidence by excluding au...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.