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Local Governments and the Suppression of Popular Resistance in China

Yongshun Cai

ABSTRACT Local governments are responsible for dealing with many of the instances of resistance in China, and an important mode of response which they use is suppression. This article examines the rationale behind local governments use of this mode of response. It shows that Chinese citizens who stage resistance are in a weak legal position because their actions often violate the law or government regulations. Given local governments discretion in interpreting citizens action, suppression becomes the option when concessions are difficult to make and citizen resistance threatens social stability, policy implementation or local officials images. However, suppression has not stopped popular resistance, and it remains a channel through which citizens defend or pursue their legitimate rights in China.

China has seen numerous instances of collective resistance in recent years. The Ministry of Public Security admitted that the police department investigated 87,000 cases of social disruption involving more than 15 participants in 2005.1 These incidents have become a serious concern for the party-state.2 The Chinese government has used a range of responses to deal with them, including concessions, suppression or a combination of the two when ignoring them is not possible. Compared with governments in democracies, authoritarian governments are supposed to be more sensitive to popular resistance and therefore more likely to use suppression.3 In China, the 1989 Tiananmen incident and the falun gong case have shown that suppression remains an effective and important method of dealing with collective actions that are believed to challenge the party-states authority. However, suppression is not limited to the settlement of regime-threatening actions. It has also been used to deal with actions concerning legitimate or lawful claims. OBrien and Li suggest that rightful resistance may be repressed when resisters fail to receive support from the central government.4 Bernstein and Lu
1 Nanfang ribao, 23 March 2006. 2 Jae Ho Chung, Hongyi Lai and Ming Xia, Mounting challenges to governance in China: surveying collective protestors, religious sects and criminal organizations, China Journal, No. 56 (2006), pp. 1 31. 3 Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly, Threat (and opportunity): popular action and state response in the dynamics of contentious action, in Ronald R. Aminzade et al. (eds.), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17994. 4 Kevin OBrien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
# The China Quarterly, 2008 doi:10.1017/S0305741008000027

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also find that it was not uncommon for peasant resistance to tax or fee collection to be cracked down on by local officials.5 This mode of response has also been used to deal with resistance by other groups, including workers and homeowners.6 Despite the existing research, however, a few important issues have not been adequately addressed. Given that suppression has been used to deal with almost all social groups that have staged resistance, what are the common factors that affect the governments use of this method when it deals with different groups of resisters? On the other hand, despite suppression, popular resistance has continuously recurred in China. Why has this mode of response failed to deter resistance? An analysis of the use of suppression contributes to our understanding of how the Chinese government has maintained social stability amid numerous social conflicts, as well as providing insight into the limits of suppression. This article addresses these two issues based on an analysis of 66 cases of collective action that occurred in 20 provinces in China between 1995 and 2006 (see Appendix). There have been many reports on instances of resistance in China, but information on the outcomes of such resistance is rather limited and unsystematic. The 66 cases were collected using the criterion that there was information on both the use of suppression and the outcome of the resistance. While it is difficult to assess whether or not these cases are representative, the collection includes cases in which suppression was used by the local government at each level from the township to the provincial level. Overall, these cases provide important clues regarding the rationale behind local governments use of suppression. An analysis of the cases shows that Chinese citizens who stage resistance are in a weak legal position because their actions often violate the law or government regulations. Local governments in China are responsible for handling most of the instances of resistance. Given their power, suppression becomes the option when popular resistance poses a threat or multiple threats to local governments important goals, while concessions are difficult to make and tolerance encourages more resistance. However, although repression is an important reason why the numerous incidents have not posed an insurmountable challenge to social stability in China, it has not prevented popular resistance because of the factors that create opportunities for resistance and facilitate mobilization.

Popular Resistance and Suppression as a Mode of Response

Chinese citizens stage collective resistance for complex reasons,7 but their resistance is often based on legitimate or lawful claims. As central government
5 Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lu, Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5. 6 Yongshun Cai, State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China: The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 6. 7 Different groups of people have resisted for different reasons. These groups include workers, peasants, homeowners, students, demobilized soldiers, retrenched employees of state agencies and individual business people. Chen Jinsheng, Quntixingshijian yanjiu baogao (Research Report on Instances of Collective Action) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 2004).

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Table 1: Modes of Action and the Types of Demands (N566)

Modes of action
Petition Protest/demonstration Confrontation Attacking state agencies

Cases
21 16 15 14

Types of demands
Economic welfare Officials malfeasance or corruption Dispute over government policies Addressing civil disputes Village elections Others Unspecified

Cases
29 12 8 4 3 7 3

Source: Authors collection.

officials admit, Chinese citizens often take action because their rights are ignored or violated.8 In the 66 cases we collected (see Table 1), the reasons for resistance include economic welfare benefits, cadres abuse of power or corruption, certain local government policies that affect citizens rights (such as government regulation on the valid period of a business licence), and citizens demands for government intervention in civil disputes. Among these reasons, economic welfare particularly compensation for peasants who lost farmland and for workers affected by the reform of public enterprises was the most important reason for resistance. The modes of resistance range from collective petitions to attacks on state agencies. Not surprisingly, these instances of resistance were mostly directed against local governments at the city and lower levels. Because local officials are assigned the responsibility of maintaining social stability,9 they have a strong incentive to prevent popular resistance. Local officials can silence the disgruntled by accommodating their demands, but making concessions can be difficult. Our cases show that local governments face three types of difficulties when they make concessions. The first is that addressing citizens grievances may require financial resources. For example, as discussed below, local governments reluctance to pay reasonable compensation to farmers who lose their farmland is an important source of conflicts in China today. Second, addressing certain grievances requires the local government to change its policies or practices. Before the tax-for-fee reform in rural China, it was not uncommon for some local governments to impose extra fees on peasants. Despite peasant resistance, these governments did not give up this practice because of fiscal pressure.10 The third type of difficulty, related to the second, is that making concessions to citizens sometimes necessitates disciplining local officials who are responsible for citizens grievances and resistance. This is not easy because it will demoralize

8 Wang Yongqian, Pojie qunzhong xinfang bada redian (An analysis of the eight central issues of peoples complaints), Banyue tan (Biweekly Forum), No. 21 (2003), pp. 2326. 9 Maria Edin, State capacity and local agent control in China: CCP cadre management from a township perspective, The China Quarterly, No. 173 (2003), pp. 3572. 10 Bernstein and Lu, Taxation without Representation.

Local Governments and the Suppression of Popular Resistance

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some officials. Consequently, when local governments believe that it is costly to make concessions, citizens will encounter serious difficulties in their resistance. Nevertheless, the difficulty in making concessions is relative to the risk faced by local officials in dealing with popular resistance. The most serious risk is intervention from higher-level authorities, including the central authorities, because this is often a sign of the local governments failure to maintain social stability, or their abuse of power. Therefore, if popular resistance causes social disorder and triggers (or threatens) intervention from higher-level authorities, local governments are likely to make concessions in order to stop the resistance and/or pre-empt intervention from above. Needless to say, intervention from higher-level authorities is highly conditional. The central government is likely to intervene only when it feels the pressure of protecting social stability or regime legitimacy. In collective resistance, the number of participants, media exposure and casualties are found to be important factors that affect whether the central government will intervene. Large-scale protests, those that involve serious casualties or those that are exposed by the media are more likely to trigger intervention.11 However, many protests are small scale, receive no media coverage and do not involve casualties. Such protests are exclusively handled by local governments. Suppression becomes the option when concessions are difficult to make and tolerance results in persistent resistance. Yet local governments face constraints in choosing the mode of suppression.

The Modes of Suppression

The Chinese government has claimed that most instances of collective resistance in China are internal conflicts among the people (renmin neibu maodun ).12 The central government has therefore issued strict regulations on the use of force in dealing with popular resistance. The most important criterion affecting the use of force is the nature of the resistance. The central government reiterated its policy in 1998 when the State Council issued a directive stipulating the methods of handling gatherings, demonstrations, protests and petitions.13 An act is seen as political or destructive and therefore intolerable if it is an attempt to overthrow the political system or the Party, if it threatens the territorial integrity of the country, if it attacks state agencies, or if it destroys important infrastructures or facilities. Hence, state agencies should handle popular resistance based on the following considerations: if the participants
11 Yongshun Cai, Disruptive collective action in China in the reform era, paper presented at the conference Popular Contention in China, Berkeley, October 2006. The government also tends to respond when citizens use lawsuits that involve a large number of people. See Yuen Yuen Tang, When peasants sue en masse, China: An International Journal, No. 3 (2005), pp. 2449. 12 The Research Group, Zhongguo zhuanxingqi quntixing tufazhijian duice yanjiu (Study on the Measures to Deal with Mass Incidents in China during the Transitional Period) (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe), p. 2. 13 Ji Zhengfeng, Yufang he chuzhi qunti xing shijian de duice xuanze (The choice of modes to deal with mass events), Lilun yu shijian (Theory and Practice), No. 16 (1999), pp. 3031.

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demands are political; if there is organized violence; if there is intentional confrontation; and if there is support from overseas. In dealing with collective action, the authorities need to know the aims of the action, the main organizers and their political backgrounds, and whether or not the action crosses work units or places. Police officers are expected to protect important facilities and important Party and government agencies with force if necessary. However, force should not be used to deal with peaceful action with legitimate demands. As repeated in the directive on the settlement of social unrest issued by the Ministry of Public Security in 2002, the mobilization of police officers and the use of equipment and weapons must strictly follow regulated procedures.14 There should be caution in employing armed force, in using weapons, and in employing compulsory measures.15 This is so that the police avoid misusing force and exacerbating popular ire.16 Higher-level local governments have also restricted the use of force in dealing with citizen resistance.17 Nevertheless, these regulations have not entirely prevented the use of force resulting in serious casualties. There have been several cases in which the police opened fire on citizens.18 Because opening fire on unarmed citizens in nonregime-threatening resistance is unacceptable to the central party-state, local officials incur serious risks.19 Violent crackdowns are thus exceptions instead of the norm. In many cases serious casualties are not the result of local governments intentional use of bloody suppression but of unanticipated escalation of the confrontation between participants and local officials and/or police officers. Given the risk of violent suppression, a more commonly used mode is to impose punishment on selective participants, in most cases the activists or the leaders. Schumpeter suggests that collectives act almost exclusively by
14 Long Xianlei, Jianchi yifazhiguo fanglue tuoshan chuzhi quntixing shijian (Sticking to rule by law and appropriately handling instances of collective action), Gongan yanjiu (Research on Public Security), No. 12 (2001), pp. 5053. 15 Fan Fuming, Quntixing lanche duandao shijian de tedian he yufang chuzhi duice (Characteristics of collective action in blocking railways and some countermeasures), Shanghai gongan gaodeng zhuanke xuexiao xuebao (Journal of Shanghai Public Security Academy), No. 3 (2001), pp. 3034. 16 Murray Scott Tanner, China rethinks unrest, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2004), pp. 13756. 17 Hunan sheng tuoshan chuli quntixing shijian (Hunan province handles mass action properly), Neican xuanbia (Selected Materials), No. 11 (2000), pp. 2022. 18 One case occurred in a village in Yujiang county in Jiangxi province in March 2001 in which more than 600 police and riot police stormed the village which had resisted tax collection and opened fire on unarmed peasants, killing two and wounding at least 18. A more recent case took place in Dongzhou, a village in Shanwei city in Guangdong province. A deadly confrontation between villagers and police officers occurred on 6 December 2005, during which, according to the official account, three peasants were shot dead and eight were wounded. Erik Eckholm, Chinese raid defiant village, killing two, amid rural unrest, The New York Times, 20 April 2001; Howard French, 20 reported killed as Chinese unrest escalates, The New York Times, 9 December 2005. 19 In the Shanwei case, a deputy head of the city public security bureau was disciplined. The provincial Party secretary warned local officials at a meeting that those who failed to follow the land use procedures and triggered peasants collective resistance to land use would be removed. Nanfang ribao (Southern Daily), 5 January 2006.

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29

accepting leadership this is the dominant mechanism of practically any collective action.20 In China, the lack of organizations for mobilizing participants in collective resistance sometimes leads individual participants to act as organizers or co-ordinators. These people help disseminate information, inspire confidence in participants and bear more risks than ordinary participants.21 Therefore, an important way of deterring resistance is to impose exemplary punishment by selectively punishing protest organizers, leaders or activists.22 It is also the central governments policy to limit the punishment to activists in mass actions: to isolate and punish the minority and to win over, divide and educate the majority.23 Local governments have adopted two approaches in dealing with activists or leaders in collective action. First, some grassroots officials resort to the illegal method of hiring thugs to harass or attack the activists or leaders. For example, local governments may hire local thugs to attack homeowners who resist housing demolition or peasants who resist the occupation of their farmland. In a survey of 632 peasants petitioning in Beijing, 54 per cent reported that local officials hired thugs to harass or hurt them.24 More commonly, local governments use legal punishment. The existing law and regulations provide a convenient basis for imposing punishment because most instances of collective action are illegal. Collective petitions (jiti shangfang ) are a basic mode of collective resistance,25 but the number of participants in each should not exceed five. Demonstrations and assemblies are illegal without the approval of the government, but such approvals are very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. Protests can be interpreted as disrupting social order, and confronting officials or police officers can be seen as preventing law enforcement or the performance of government duties. According to Article 290 of the Criminal Law, a person commits the crime of assembling the masses to attack state agencies if the action they have organized prevents the state agencys operation and causes serious losses; a person commits the crime of assembling the masses to disrupt social order if the consequence of the action is serious, disrupting the order of work, production, business or school and causing serious losses. In the case of disrupting the social order, the leader can be sentenced to three to seven years in jail, and the other activists to up to three years in jail. In the case of attacking state agencies, the leader can be sentenced to five to ten years in jail, and the other activists to up to five years in jail.

20 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 270. 21 Cai, State and Laid-Off Workers, ch. 6. 22 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 95. 23 The Research Group, Zhongguo xinfang xiezhen (A Record of Peoples Petitions in China) (Beijing: Gongren chubanshe, 1998), p. 103. 24 Yu Jianrong, Zhongguo xinfang zhidu pipan (Criticisms of the petition system in China), Zhongguo gaige (China Reform), No. 2 (2005), pp. 2628; Zhongguo qingnian bao, 8 December 2004. 25 Chen Jinsheng, Research Report on Instances of Collective Action.

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Table 2: The Punishment of Participants

Modes of punishment
Detained Arrested Sentenced to jail Total

People Type of accusations

308 25 265 597 Assembling the masses to: attack state agencies (a) disrupt social order (b) disrupt traffic Illegal assembly/demonstration Subverting the government Illegal detention of state agents Multiple accusations: (a) and others (b) and others

Cases
24 12 2 3 1 1 7 3 53

Total number of cases

Source: Authors collection.

66

Participants stage resistance precisely to prompt the government to pay attention to their grievances. It is natural for them to target the government or to disrupt the social order in order to generate sufficient pressure. When taking such actions, however, they can be accused of attacking state agencies or disrupting the social order. In the 66 cases we collected (Table 2), about 600 participants were punished: 264 people were sentenced to jail for up to 15 years; one was sentenced to death; 308 were detained; and 25 were arrested and were very likely to be tried in courts later. In 53 of the 66 cases, the activists were accused of violating criminal law (the crimes in the other 13 cases were not specified). In 46 of the 53 cases, the activists or leaders were accused of assembling the masses to attack state agencies or to disrupt the social order.26 Our collection shows that the punishment of participants is selective, mainly targeting the initiators, activists or leaders.27 Participants are normally unable to defend themselves successfully in the courts. China adopts a two-instance system in which a litigant or a defendant can appeal to the higher-level court for a retrial if the ruling in the first hearing is not acceptable. Among the 66 cases, only in seven cases were the results of the appeals to the appellate courts reported, and all seven appeals were rejected.

The Use of Suppression

An analysis of local governments use of suppression reveals the states capacity in maintaining social stability amid the numerous social conflicts in China; it
26 Among the 66 cases, there was only one political crime (the worker protests in Liaoyang, Liaoning province in 2002) in which the two leaders were accused of subverting the government and were jailed for four years and seven years respectively. 27 Not all the 66 cases report the exact the number of participants. Our estimate of the total number of participants in all the cases is between 165,000 and 170,000. It seems that only a very small proportion was punished. This is largely due to the small number of participants being disciplined in large-scale riots. In the Hanyuan case discussed later, for example, only 28 of the 100,000 participants were jailed.

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also points to local officials autonomy, pressure and strategies of survival. The bottom line for local governments tolerance of popular resistance is that it does not threaten local officials performance especially in maintaining social stability and/or local developmental goals.

Maintaining social order

The fundamental role of a government is to maintain social stability or public order, so a basic function of the law is social control.28 Those who seriously disrupt the social order may be punished in any society in light of the law. In China, local governments rarely tolerate incidents in which participants use violence, damage public or private property, and/or injure or even kill state agents or other citizens.29 For example, in a district in Guangdong province, a few villagers who had conflicts with the township government, together with students who were resentful about high tuition fees, held a demonstration in February 2001. Their demonstration also attracted some bystanders who joined in. After they marched to the township government, the demonstration turned into a riot. The participants attacked the township government, burned down 107 rooms, and took more than 20 motorcycles and other property belonging to government employees. As a result, 23 participants were punished, with one sentenced to jail for ten years.30 Violence is commonly used by participants in riots which are not organized by any person partly because the participants underestimate the risk involved. In dealing with such incidents, local governments do not face serious moral pressure when they use suppression. In contrast, protesters are in a morally weak position. As elsewhere, their use of violence or disruptive modes of action merely hastens and ensures its failure because its actions increase the hostility around it and invite the legitimate action of authorities against it.31 In recent years, a number of large-scale riots have occurred, and activists were commonly punished. In eight of the cases we collected, the participants were punished because they took a large-scale action (often with the number of participants exceeding 5,000) that caused chaos or serious confrontations with the police. In June 2005 in Chizhou () city in Anhui province, a car carrying the owner of a private hospital crashed into a high-school student riding a bike. The student was beaten when he argued with the people in the car and asked them to take him to a hospital for a medical examination. The businessmans bullying behaviour triggered a riot of 10,000 people in which police cars were torched, six police offices were wounded and a nearby department store was looted. After more
28 Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998). 29 The use of violence was not new in socialist China. See Elizabeth Perry, Rural violence in socialist China, The China Quarterly, No. 103 (1985), pp. 41440. 30 Pingdingshan ribao, 2 January 2002. 31 Willaim Gamson, The success of the unruly, in Doug McAdam and David Snow (eds.), Social Movements (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 35764.

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than 700 police arrived, the ten-hour riot was brought under control, and nine participants were put in labour camps.32 In another high-profile riot that occurred in Wanzhou () in Chongqing in 2004,33 a conflict between a migrant worker and a couple led to a riot with tens of thousands of participants. In the riot, a police van was set ablaze. The participants broke into the compound of the district government, smashing windows and destroying documents, computers and office furniture. At least 40 participants were arrested.34 Clearly, the punishment of activists in such cases promotes the governments reputation for not tolerating destructive action. Not all instances, however, are repressed because they involve violence or serious violation of the law. Of the 66 cases we collected, most of them (more than 70 per cent) did not involve violence or damage to property. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, even non-violent modes of resistance are often illegal according to the law or government regulations. Indeed, most instances of collective resistance in China can be seen as boundary-spanning in the sense that they may violate the law but do not necessarily cause serious damage.35 Whether or not the participants have crossed the line drawn by the law is subject to the interpretation of the government. According to criminal law, participants will be seriously punished if their action causes serious damage or losses. In reality, however, they may be seriously punished even if their action has not caused damage. In one case in a county in the Guangxi autonomous region, a group of villagers did not agree with the courts ruling over the ownership of a piece of land, so they resisted. In January 2005, the local government arrested 27 activists. More than 200 villagers approached the county authority asking for the release of these people. But they were accused of attacking the state agency and over 110 villagers were detained. Seventeen were sentenced to jail for up to eight years, ten were sent to labour camps for up to two years, and another 82 were released after each paid bail of between 2,000 and 8,000 yuan. By repressing peasant resistance, the local government claimed that it succeeded in achieving the goal of building a harmonious society.36 Suppressing resistance that has not caused serious damage indicates the pressure faced by local governments. Tolerating such resistance may lead to its persistence or escalation, which eventually disrupts social order or attracts attention from higher-level authorities. If this happens, the resistance will not only encourage greater defiance but also signal local officials failure to maintain social stability. An official of the provincial peoples congress of Henan thus explains local governments use of suppression:

32 Nanfang dushi bao, 2 July 2005. 33 Joseph Kahn, For China masses, an increasingly short fuse, International Herald Tribune, 31 December 2004; Police cars torched as 10,000 riot, South China Morning Post, 21 October 2004. 34 Chongqing chenbao, 20 October 2004. 35 Kevin OBrien, Neither transgressive nor contained: boundary-spanning contention in China, Mobilization: An International Journal, No. 8 (2003), pp. 5164. 36 Takungbao, 19 January 2006.

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The law has to serve the interests of the ruling class. The protection of and sympathy for citizens is possible only to a limited extent. Arresting resisters often reflects the will of the major party and government leaders who wish to reduce the number of instances of resistance and thereby the pressure on social stability by punishing a limited number of people.37

Ensuring policy implementation

Deterring boundary-spanning resistance is also common in policy implementation. Some incidents are suppressed not because they threaten the social order but mainly because they hinder local governments implementation of certain policies. In China, citizens lack regular and effective channels to exercise influence on government decisions. Some of the policies made by the central or local governments thus ignore citizens rights. In addition, local governments may ignore citizens rights by distorting the central governments policies.38 In recent years, local governments enforcement of certain policies has triggered numerous instances of resistance. However, citizen resistance is likely to be suppressed when local governments believe that the implementation of the policies is too important to be challenged. Confrontations between local governments and peasants used to be common in the collection of taxes and fees in rural China.39 Although local cadres might be beaten by peasants, it was more common for peasants to be detained, tortured or even killed by local officials.40 For example, between 1994 and 1996 at least 47 peasants died during tax and fee collection, although the casualties might not have been intentionally caused by the local officials.41 Such suppression greatly upset the central government, and it then made it very clear that any local official who caused serious casualties during tax and fee collection would be punished. This, however, did not prevent local governments from punishing some disobedient peasants through the courts. In a county in Anhui province, peasants had a conflict with local officials because of the collection of the agricultural tax in 2003. Nine peasants were accused of preventing state agents from performing their duties and were sentenced to between six months and eight-and-a-half years in jail.42 In recent years, the governments use of suppression has been particularly obvious in the nonagricultural use of farmland. Local governments take farmland away from peasants for different purposes: constructing public projects, releasing the land to external investors, or selling it for revenue
37 Li Junde, Shangfang youzui (Petitioning is a crime?), Liaowang (Perspective), 7 April 2003. 38 Kevin OBrien and Lianjiang Li, Selective policy implementation in rural China, Comparative Politics, Vol. 31 (1999), pp. 16786. 39 Bernstein and Lu, Taxation without Representation, pp. 12036. 40 Chen Guidi and Chun Tao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (Survey of Chinese Peasants) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2003), chs. 13. 41 Li Maolan, Zhongguo nongmin fudan wenti yanjiu (Research on Peasants Financial Burdens in China) (Taiyuan: Shanxi jingji chubanshe, 1996), p. 127; Liang Jun, Cunmin zizhi (Villagers Self Governance) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000), p. 18. 42 See http://www.bbzy.org/detail.jsp?title5&lsho54446, accessed 12 November 2005.

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generation. In doing so, local officials have a strong incentive to underpay the peasants.43 Not surprisingly, land use has been the most conflict-generating issue in rural China since the rural tax reform. Given peasants high stakes in their farmland, the degree of violent confrontation can be very serious. According to an account of 130 mass confrontations between peasants and the police in 2004, 87 (about 67 per cent) were due to land use. Among these 87 conflicts, 48 occurred because peasants tried to prevent construction on the land that had been taken away from them. Hundreds of peasants were wounded, three were killed and more than 160 were detained.44 In the 66 cases we collected, 29 concerned economic welfare (Table 1), and 14 of the 29 were about compensation for peasants who lost their farmland. For example, in a city in Shanxi province, the local government seized a piece of farmland from a village in 2003, but this was met with strong resistance by the peasants. The local government sent hundreds of police officers to the village to suppress the resistance several times, but they were confronted by the peasants each time. In the end, the local government arrested 27 villagers and put them in jail for up to 15 years.45 The nonagricultural use of farmland is an example of citizens difficulties in protecting their rights in China. Once an encroachment upon citizens rights has occurred, it is very difficult to address the injustice ex post.46 When the local government feels that it is too costly to address citizens grievances, it may refuse to respond. Citizens may then either appeal to higher-level authorities or take more drastic action by continuing with the resistance. Appealing to higher-level authorities is often not helpful. Indeed, most confrontations over land use result from fruitless peaceful resistance such as petitions. However, when peasants take drastic action, they face serious risks.47 Examples include the Shanwei () case in Guangdong in 2005 in which three peasants were shot and another eight were wounded. Another high-profile case occurred in Hanyuan (), Sichuan province. In October 2004, about 100,000 peasants in the county protested against the low compensation for their farmland and homes lost due to the construction of a dam. The government sent about 1,500 police officers to maintain order. Violent confrontations occurred between the peasants and police, resulting in the deaths of citizens and police officers.48 After

43 Yongshun Cai, Collective ownership or cadres ownership? Nonagricultural use of farmland in China, The China Quarterly, No. 175 (2003), pp. 66280; Xiaolin Guo, Land expropriation and rural conflicts in China, The China Quarterly, No. 166 (2001), pp. 42239; David Zweig, The externalities of development: can new political institutions manage rural conflict? in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 12042. 44 Yu Jianrong, Tudi chengwei zhongguo nongcun shouyao wenti (Land becomes the most conflictgenerating issue in rural China), Liaowang dongfang (Oriental Outlook), 9 September 2004, pp. 2223. 45 Beijng yule xinbao, 17 January 2005. 46 Cai, Collective ownership or cadres ownership? 47 Yu Jianrong, Land becomes the most conflict-generating issue. 48 Shi Jiangtao, Peasants in upstream fight to halt dam, South China Morning Post, 4 January 2005.

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both the central and provincial government intervened and made concessions, 28 peasants were sentenced to jail and one was executed.49 Suppressing resistance to policy implementation reveals local governments perception of the high costs of making concessions and the limited risk from repression. Indeed, policy implementation has become a major source of social conflicts in China. In the reform of public enterprises, for example, it is not unusual for local governments and managers to adopt modes of reform that ignore workers interests.50 In recent years, housing demolition has become an important source of conflict in urban areas. To carry out urban renewal or city construction, local governments often require homeowners to move elsewhere without providing reasonable compensation, thereby triggering numerous instances of resistance. Suppression is the option when local governments refuse to offer more compensation and homeowners refuse to give up their resistance.51

Protecting the governments image

Popular resistance sometimes generates multiple pressures on local governments by threatening social order and policy implementation. Nevertheless, what upsets local leaders the most is the threat to their performance or image. This pressure of image protection has been fully reflected in local governments suppression of citizens petitions to higher-level authorities, especially the central and provincial authorities. In 2006, the National Complaints Bureau (guojia xinfangju ) reported the number of petitions during 2005, after the new directive on petitions promulgated by the State Council had been in force for one year. According to the bureau, the number of petitions received by complaint agencies at the county level and above declined from 13.7 million in 2004 to 12.6 million in 2005, or by 8 per cent. The bureau highlighted the enhanced responsiveness of state authorities and complaint agencies when it explained the decline. It also admitted that petitioners are now more reasonable (that is, peaceful) when choosing their mode of petition.52 There is no reason to believe that the bureaus explanation for the decline is inaccurate, although the reasons for it may be more complex than the bureau suggested.53

49 Yaan ribao, 27 March 2006. 50 Feng Chen, Industrial restructuring and workers resistance in China, Modern China, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2003), pp. 23762. 51 Yongshun Cai, Civil resistance and rule of law in China: the case of defending homeowners rights, in Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman (eds.), Grassroots Politics in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 17495. 52 See http://news.sohu.com/20060429/n243070831.shtml, accessed 1 May 2006. 53 The decline might also result from the disappearance of some previously important sources of conflicts, such as the abolition of the agricultural tax and the completion of the privatization of most small and medium-sized public enterprises. For example, the rural tax-for-fee reform reduced peasant resistance. Chen and Chun, Survey of Chinese Peasants.

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When the bureaus statement was published online in China, some internet users made comments. In May 2006, some 126 comments were posted on two Chinese websites (sohu.com and china.com) within only a few days. These are unlikely to be representative of public opinion as a whole, but it merits mention that not a single comment was positive about the bureaus explanation for the decline. Most comments mocked, blamed or criticized the government or the political system. Some said that the decline was because the people had lost confidence in the petition system, the petitioners were stopped or caught by the police, or they were threatened. Petitioners had become more reasonable because they would be punished if their modes of petition were seen as unacceptable. One wrote: Damn it. It is apparently the result of suppression. Shame on the government that claims a decline in petitions. Another wrote: This type of self-deceiving news makes me sick. And another: This society is now upside down. Lawful petitions can be interpreted as making trouble, but those who really make trouble are often exempted because the government does not dare to punish them.54 In most cases, collective petitions to the central or provincial governments neither involve violence nor seriously threaten social stability. However, because local officials have a strong incentive to prevent higher-level authorities from detecting their failure to maintain local stability, they are particularly intolerant towards those citizens who approach higher-level authorities, especially at the provincial or central levels. In eight of 21 petition cases we collected, the participants were punished because they appealed to the central and provincial authorities in an unacceptable manner. In 2005, 11 people from a city in Shaanxi province (which is hundreds of miles away from the provincial capital city) went to appeal to the provincial authorities. When they were told to return the next day to report their problems, the petitioners refused to leave and were said to have a confrontation with the security guards. A district court in the city then sentenced them to jail for up to four years.55 Appealing to central authorities in Beijing is even riskier. In 2005, five people from Shanxi province went to appeal to the central authorities but were accused of violating the rules. All of them were ruled guilty in the local court in Shanxi and were sentenced to jail for three to five-and-a-half years.56 In another example, in a county in Henan province, the peasants from a village appealed to state authorities at the county, city, provincial and central levels because of the issue of village elections in 2002. The county government arrested five villagers on the charge of disrupting the social order. The five peasants were first paraded in the townships in the county and then were sentenced to jail for up to five years each.57

54 See http://comment.china.com/html/13/288/010.html; http://comment2.news.sohu.com/viewcomments. action?id5243070831, accessed 2 May 2006. 55 Huashangbao, 19 January 2006. 56 Shanxi ribao, 13 September 2005. 57 http://news3.xinhuanet.com/focus/2003-04/16/content_833579.htm, accessed 21 March 2006.

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Some higher-level local governments have tolerated or even supported lowerlevel governments suppression because petitions to central authorities also affect the higher-level local governments image.58 In a village in Shanxi province, the villagers appealed to local and central authorities because of low compensation for their land that had been taken away. After fruitless petitions to the city government, they approached the Ministry of Land and Resources in 2005 but were told to return home. In 2006, 23 villagers went to Beijing again to petition, but they were stopped by the police in Beijing. Their action upset both the city and provincial governments. The city police bureau was ordered to investigate the case, and it formed a taskforce consisting of more than 30 police officers. Under the correct leadership of the city and provincial Party committees and governments, police officers expended great efforts to gather evidence in several places, including Beijing. After obtaining a large amount of evidence on their attacking state agencies, the police arrested the two people.59 Some desperate petitioners have been punished because of their protests or petitioning in so-called important places in Beijing, such as Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai. In 2003, more than 100 petitioners held a demonstration in Tiananmen Square. Two were arrested on the charge of holding an illegal assembly. Also in 2003, when dozens of petitioners approached the central government in Zhongnanhai, they were stopped by the police. Two were detained on the charge of assembling the masses to disrupt the social order.60 In recent years, taking action in important places in Beijing has been increasingly intolerable to the central and local governments. The city government in Beijing regulated in 2004 that those who gather or protest in important places will be sent to the complaint departments by the police. Those who violate laws will be turned in to the state agencies of their places of residence.61 This regulation places at serious risk those who present petitions in Beijing. Once they are taken back to their places of residence, they are very likely to be punished by local governments, as the above cases show. Today, petitioners in China even have difficulty travelling to Beijing because of harassment by local governments.62 However, the tolerance or even encouragement of suppression by higher-level authorities, including the central government, damages regime legitimacy. Repeated failures undermine citizens confidence and trust in the political system. Worse, the higher-level authorities tolerance protects abusive and corrupt local officials. Many of the citizens grievances involve the corruption of local officials. For example, in the reform of public enterprises and land use in urban and rural areas, it is not unusual for
58 Yongshun Cai, Managed participation in China, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 119, No. 3 (2004), pp. 42551. Carl Minzner, Xinfang: an alternative to the formal Chinese judicial system, Stanford Journal of International Law, Vol. 42 (2006), pp. 10379. 59 http://www.yinzi.cn/sx/ShangLuo/news/2006/03/1910031421.html, accessed 2 April 2006. 60 Beijing yule xinbao, 7 January 2004. 61 Beijing qingnian bao, 3 April 2004. 62 Cai, Managed participation in China.

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local officials to receive kickbacks from businesses.63 When citizens appeal to higher-level authorities for help, corrupt officials are strongly motivated to repress such petitions by all possible means. Under these circumstances, the lack of intervention from above protects or even emboldens corrupt and abusive officials while profoundly disappointing the citizens.

The Limits of Suppression

As elsewhere, suppression has not prevented citizen resistance in China. In fact, the number of instances of resistance has increased in recent years. Although the literature on political opportunity structure suggests that suppression generally works,64 it does not always deter resistance for complex reasons. In China, there are several limitations to the use of suppression. First, there is a limit to local governments capacity. Changes within the political and administrative structures in China may have contributed to the rise of citizen resistance. Bernstein and Lu hold that the declining effectiveness of state control weakened the ability of rural public security to control protests, crime, and social disorder.65 Bianco also states that the ability of authorities to exercise control over local society is gradually fading away under Maos successors, which has contributed to the resurgence of rural disturbances during the reform era.66 Second, suppression does not always deter resistance because even anticipated suppression may fail to deter protests when the participants are ignorant of the true risks or define risks differently from those who impose the risk.67 There have been cases in which some participants continued in their leadership of resistance after they were released from jail. OBrien and Li also find that defeat does not cause all rightful resisters to lapse into despair and passivity.68 Suppression may thus lead to the persistence or escalation of resistance the opposite of the intended outcome.69 This has been seen in peasant resistance to tax collection and the occupation of their farmland.70 Collective resistance may also occur because activists or participants overestimate their opportunities for successful resistance.71 At other times, citizens resist because lack of action amounts to accepting the loss. McAdam suggests that perceived threats to group interests can serve, along
63 Chen, Industrial restructuring and workers resistance; Cai, Civil resistance and rule of law. 64 Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 114; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 65 Bernstein and Lu, Taxation without Representation, p. 139. 66 Lucien Bianco, Peasants without the Party: Grassroots Movements in 20th-Century China (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), p. 245. 67 Karl-Dieter Opp and Wolfgang Ruehl, Suppression, micromobilization and political protest, Social Forces, Vol. 69 (1990), pp. 52147. 68 OBrien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, p. 105. 69 See Li and OBrien, Protest leadership in the countryside; Ying Xing, Dahe yimin shangfang de gushi (The Experience of Hahe Migrants Petitions) (Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe). 70 Ren Yanfang, Minyuan (Peoples Complaints) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 1999). 71 OBrien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, ch. 2.

Local Governments and the Suppression of Popular Resistance

with expanding opportunities, as distinct precipitants of collective action.72 As the cases presented earlier have shown, Chinese citizens stage resistance often to defend their legitimate rights. In other words, resistance may occur because of the threats that citizens face. A third reason for the occurrence of citizen resistance is concerned with mobilization. Popular resistance may not be organized by any identifiable person, and the arrest or detention of one or a few participants is not sufficient to stop such resistance.73 In defensive or reactive resistance, a strong consensus among potential participants may be sufficient to mobilize them as long as information dissemination is possible. As Piven and Cloward point out, riots do not require much organization when the number of potential participants is large and communication is possible.74 Some incidents occur because of a poster, a piece of news on the internet, or mobile phone calls; they are initiated without much mobilization or are mobilized anonymously.75 New technologies, in particular the internet and mobile phones, also facilitate mobilization. The Minister of Public Security acknowledged in 2005 that the development of information technology, while facilitating social and economic development, has also posed serious pressures for maintaining social stability.76 Mobile phones have become convenient tools of information dissemination (such as in the Wanzhou case). The internet is also a powerful tool for mobilization. For example, in 2005, when citizens in Daye (), a county-level city in Huangshi (), Hubei province, learned that their city would be turned into a district of Huangshi city, they protested. On 5 August 2005, one person posted an announcement of a demonstration on the internet. The next day, about 20,000 people participated in the demonstration, and the plan to transform Daye was abandoned.77 Moreover, local governments face constraints in the use of suppression. Local governments reliance on suppression implies that citizens have a slim chance of success. Repeated failures undermine citizens confidence in the political system, thereby damaging regime legitimacy or the political systems worthiness to be recognized. This is important because a regime lacking legitimacy has a smaller chance of survival in crises when citizens and some state agents choose to
72 Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 19301970 (2nd ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xi. 73 Dai Gang, Hongjiang quntixing shijian chuzhi yinfa de xikao (Some thoughts about the settlement of the instance of collective action in Hongjiang), Gongan yanjiu (Research on Public Security), No. 7 (2001), pp. 6568. 74 Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, Collective protest: a critique of resource-mobilization theory, in Stanford Lyman (ed.), Social Movements: Critique, Concepts, Case-Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 13767. 75 For example, taxi drivers in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui province, organized an effective strike protesting against the fines imposed by the local police in 2000. The strike notice was issued from the Association of Taxis of Hefei, an organization that did not exist. Fazhi ribao, 3 July 2000. 76 The Editorial Group, Goujian shehuizhuyi hexie shehui dacankao (Reference on the Building of a Socialist Harmonious Society) (Beijing: Hongqi chubanshe, 2005), p. 102. 77 The participants blocked traffic and approached the Huangshi city government. They were accused of attacking the government, destroying public property and wounding police officers. Ten participants were sentenced to up to five years in jail. Chutian dushi bao, 25 February 2006.

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support alternative systems. Signs of the danger of legitimacy loss emerged in China in the 1989 Tiananmen incident when both citizens and state employees took to the streets.78 In recent years, some large-scale collective actions have also signalled to the party-state the potential consequences of its loss of legitimacy. For example, in the Chizhou and Wanzhou cases, the riots were caused by seemingly trivial issues. One was a dispute between a student and a businessman, and the other was between a peasant worker and a self-proclaimed government official. Such cases reflect the broad social environment in which citizens are discontented for different reasons. In the Huangshi case, the local government was puzzled about how a reform plan could so easily mobilize such a large number of protesters who would actually not have been affected by the plan had it been carried out. To some extent, citizens might see such opportunities for action as chances for airing their grievances over other issues. Hence, what Gurr has suggested may also be true in China: Low levels of legitimacy, or by inference feelings of illegitimacy, apparently motivate men to collective violence.79 Compared with local governments, the central government more strongly represents the political system and therefore has a greater interest in protecting the regimes legitimacy, which is why it tries to prevent local governments from using violent suppression in dealing with popular resistance. This interest creates a divide between the two levels of government in the sense that the central government is more tolerant of rightful resistance than are local governments.80 Although this divide should not be overstated, it serves as a constraint on local governments when they deal with popular resistance.

Conclusion
In China, local governments are responsible for dealing with much of the nonregime-threatening popular resistance. While local governments do not have to rely on suppression, it is certainly an option if neither concessions nor tolerance is desirable. The use of suppression reveals both the difficulties in and the possibilities of popular resistance in China. On one hand, local governments assume considerable autonomy in dealing with popular resistance in China. This allows them to use suppression when the pressure on maintaining local stability or protecting their image mounts. In addition, they incur limited risks when they use appropriate modes of suppression that do not trigger intervention from the central or provincial government. More specifically, local governments face little
78 Between 15 and 19 May 1989, about 700 work units had employees who held demonstrations in Beijing, including about 70 Party and government agencies. Fifty of the 70 agencies, including the State Council, belonged to the central Party committee and the central government. State Education Commission, Jingxin dongpo de 56 tian (The Soul-Stirring 56 Days) (Beijing: Dadi chubanshe, 1989), p. 138. 79 Ted Gurr, A causal model of civil strife: a comparative analysis using new indices, American Political Science Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (1968), pp. 110424. 80 OBrien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, ch. 2.

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risk when they impose legal punishment on certain participants. The central government has generally tolerated the punishment of those who have staged large-scale disruptive action or have presented petitions in Beijing. Local governments autonomy implies that citizens face serious constraints in staging successful resistance. There is little doubt that suppression will remain an important method used by the central and local governments in China because it has contributed to both social and political stability. From the perspective of local governments, suppression can deter resistance and protect their authority and image. Moreover, civil resistance in China has not threatened political stability because suppression prevents the emergence of organizations that can co-ordinate forceful resistance across social groups or among people in different places.81 In the 66 cases we collected, only in a few riots did different groups of people act together. Suppression also helps enhance the party-states reputation for not tolerating regime-threatening actions On the other hand, however, suppression has not prevented popular resistance in China. A number of factors, including social changes that relax social control, the availability of new technologies and the limited mobilization required, undermine the effectiveness of suppression. Another significant factor that makes resistance possible is the central governments concern over legitimacy. Goldstone and Tilly suggest that the regimes that rely on suppression run the risk of becoming habituated to this method as a preferred response to protest. However, if their repressive capacity should ever fall, then they are vulnerable to a massive eruption of protests, in which case citizens can certainly choose alternative systems.82 For this reason, the Chinese central government sometimes tries to protect the regimes legitimacy by intervening in disputes between local governments and citizens and punishing resistance-provoking local officials. More significantly, the central government has also made policy adjustments to accommodate citizens interests and reduce the sources of conflicts.83 Although Chinese citizens often face serious difficulties in staging successful resistance, the divide between the central and local governments implies that popular resistance will remain an important channel through which citizens can pursue their interests.

Appendix: Data Collection

The data used in this study were collected from several sources. Forty-four of the 66 cases were collected from formal publications (permitted by the government) in China, and 16 were collected from government websites or governmentpermitted websites. The remaining six were collected from overseas media. Formal publications in China do not necessarily defend the government. Some
81 Bernstein and Lu, Taxation without Representation, ch. 5. 82 Goldstone and Tilly, Threat (and opportunity), p. 193. 83 Chen and Chun, Survey of Chinese Peasants.

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cases were reported by sympathetic media that even criticized the local governments for the way they handled citizens resistance. However, it must be pointed out that the collection of such data is constrained by the limited sources that systematically report the causes and outcomes of instances of resistance.

Sources
Newspapers (31): Beijing wanbao; Beijng yule xinbao; Chende ribao; Chengdu shangbao; Chizhou ribao; Fazhi ribao; Huashangbao; International Herald Tribune; Jiancha ribao; Jinhua ribao; Jinghua shibao; Lanzhou chenbao; Mingpo; Nanfang duoshi bao; Nanfang ribao; Nanyang ribao; New York Times; Sanqin dushi bao; Shanxi fazhibao; Shaanxi ribao; Shenzhen shangbao; Shengyang wanbao; South China Morning Post; Takungpao; Xibu shangbao; Yangzhi wanbao; Zhongguo jingji shibao; Zhongguo qingnian bao; Washington Post; Wuhan wanbao. Books and periodicals (6): The Research Group, Zhongguo zhuanxingqi quntixing tufashijian duice yanjiu (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 2003); Shenzhen Yearbook 1998; Far Eastern Economic Review; Gongan yanjiu; Xinwen zhoukan; Ying zhoukan. Websites (16): http://news3.xinhuanet.com; http://www.sd.xinhuanet.com; http://www.pingyin. cn; http://www.yinzi.cn; http://dailynews.sina.com.cn; http://jcy.bjtzh.gov.cn; http://www.cq.chinanews.com.cn; http://www.lawyer-china.com; http://news. sdinfo.net; http://www.qtfy.gov.cn; http://www.bbzy.org; http://www.Longhui. net; http://www.sjw.gov.cn; http://www.investchina.com.cn; http://hnfy.chinacourt. org; http://www.lz160.net