Download or read book Force and Contention in Contemporary China written by Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is contemporary China such a politically contentious place? Relying on the memories of the survivors of the worst catastrophe of Maoist rule and documenting the rise of resistance and protest at the grassroots level, this book explains how the terror, hunger, and loss of the socialist past influences the way in which people in the deep countryside see and resist state power in the reform era up to the present-day repression of the People's Republic of China central government. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr provides us with a worm's-eye view of an 'unknown China' - a China that cannot easily or fully be understood through made-in-the-academy theories and frameworks of why and how rural people have engaged in contentious politics. This book is a truly unique and disturbing look at how rural people relate to an authoritarian political system in a country that aspires to become a stable world power.

Download or read book Social Ties Resources and Migrant Labor Contention in Contemporary China written by Jeffrey Becker and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growth of China’s internal migrant labor population is one of the most important issues emerging from the Hu Jintao regime. As China continues to undergo an urbanization process as profound as any in modern history, there is little doubt migrant workers are affecting economic and political decision making at the central and local levels. Relying on interviews with over 250 Chinese migrant workers—peasant farmers who have moved to the cities in search of work—as well as interviews with Chinese labor activists, this book explores the evolution of migrant labor protest in China over the past three decades. It examines how migrant workers engage in protest today, and how they choose from available protest strategies. While past studies of Chinese rural to urban migration have long acknowledged the importance of traditional rural ties between family members, this book demonstrates how new urban ties: help migrant workers learn of new protest options, navigate the legal system, connect with others sharing similar disputes, and identify additional resources. The book also examines the growth and importance of Chinese migrant labor rights organizations and the role of information communication technology in migrant labor protest activity. The findings presented here shed new light on Chinese state-society relations and economic development. Moreover, the findings from this book, which demonstrate how economic reforms create opportunities for protest, and how migrant workers take advantages of these opportunities, have implications for our understanding of contentious politics in other authoritarian states undergoing similar economic and demographic transition.

Download or read book Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China written by Ralph Thaxton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-05 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thaxton argues that the memory of the great famine under Mao shaped villagers' resistance to the socialist state.

Download or read book The China Order written by Fei-Ling Wang and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the rising power of China and Chinese foreign policy through a revisionist analysis of Chinese civilization. What does the rise of China represent, and how should the international community respond? With a holistic rereading of Chinese longue durée history, Fei-Ling Wang provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the nature of persistent and rising Chinese power and its implications for the current global order. He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order—the China Order—is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People’s Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy. “An original, important, well-researched, and powerfully argued exploration of the virtues and vices of the Chinese state from its ancient past to its likely future.” — Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison “A masterpiece. Wang provides a grand, sweeping, even epic review of two thousand years of Chinese history. His argument is compelling and well documented; the richness and variety of sources—Chinese and English—he cites is breathtaking. The book is likely to end up on the reading list of every serious student of China’s position in the world for many years to come.” — Daniel C. Lynch, author of China’s Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy “This imaginative and provocative grand tour of Chinese cosmological order and geopolitical strategy, past and present, is destined to become a classic.” — Ming Xia, author of The People’s Congresses and Governance in China: Toward a Network Mode of Governance

Download or read book Colonial Institutions and Civil War written by Shivaji Mukherjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What explains the peculiar spatial variation of Maoist insurgency in India? Mukherjee develops a novel typology of colonial indirect rule and land tenure in India, showing how they can lead to land inequality, weak state and Maoist insurgency. Using a multi-method research design that combines qualitative analysis of archival data on Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh states, Mukherjee demonstrates path dependence of land/ethnic inequality leading to Maoist insurgency. This is nested within a quantitative analysis of a district level dataset which uses an instrumental variable analysis to address potential selection bias in colonial choice of princely states. The author also analyses various Maoist documents, and interviews with key human rights activists, police officers, and bureaucrats, providing rich contextual understanding of the motivations of agents. Furthermore, he demonstrates the generalizability of his theory to cases of colonial frontier indirect rule causing ​ethnic secessionist insurgency in Burma, and the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan.

Download or read book Righteous Revolutionaries written by Jeffrey A. Javed and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-09-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority. Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

Download or read book The Poor s Struggle for Political Incorporation written by Federico M. Rossi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the poor's movements in response to the ever-widening gap between the poor and the state in Latin American politics.

Download or read book Political Translation written by Nicole Doerr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the legitimacy of democracies is in question, calls to improve the quality of public debate and deliberative democracy are sweeping the social sciences. Yet, real deliberation lies far from the deliberative ideal. Theorists have argued that linguistic and cultural differences foster inequality and impede democratic deliberation. In this empirical study, the author presents the collective practices of political translation, which help multilingual and culturally diverse groups work together more democratically than homogeneous groups. Political translation, distinct from linguistic translation, is a set of disruptive and communicative practices developed by activists and grassroots community organizers in order to address inequities hindering democratic deliberation and to entreat powerful groups to work together more inclusively with disempowered groups. Based on ten years of fieldwork, Political Translation provides the first systematic comparative study of deliberation under conditions of linguistic difference and cultural misunderstandings.

Download or read book Labor and Politics in Indonesia written by Teri L. Caraway and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first analysis of how Indonesia's labor movement overcame organizational weakness to become the most vibrant in Southeast Asia.

Download or read book Solidarity in Practice written by Chandra Russo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-border solidarity has captured the interest and imagination of scholars, activists and a range of political actors in such contested areas as the US-Mexico border and Guantanamo Bay. Chandra Russo examines how justice-seeking solidarity drives activist communities contesting US torture, militarism and immigration policies. Through compelling and fresh ethnographic accounts, Russo follows these activists as they engage in unusual and high risk forms of activism (fasting, pilgrimage, civil disobedience). She explores their ideas of solidarity and witnessing, which are central to how the activists explain their activities. This book adds to our understanding of solidarity activism under new global arrangements, and illuminates the features of movement activity that deepen activists' commitment by helping their lives feel more humane, just and meaningful. Based on participant observation, interviews, surveys and hundreds of courtroom statements, Russo develops a new theorization of solidarity that will take a central place in social movement studies.

Download or read book The Advantage of Disadvantage written by LaGina Gause and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Advantage of Disadvantage provides insights for scholars and activists into how marginalized groups gain representation through protest. Drawing on formal theory, surveys, and quantitative data, the book presents an interdisciplinary analysis of representation, inequality, and digital activism.

Download or read book Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada written by Barry Eidlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are unions weaker in the US than in Canada, two otherwise similar countries? This difference has shaped politics, policy, and levels of inequality. Conventional wisdom points to differences in political cultures, party systems, and labor laws. But Barry Eidlin's systematic analysis of archival and statistical data shows the limits of conventional wisdom, and presents a novel explanation for the cross-border difference. He shows that it resulted from different ruling party responses to worker upsurge during the Great Depression and World War II. Paradoxically, US labor's long-term decline resulted from what was initially a more pro-labor ruling party response, while Canadian labor's relative long-term strength resulted from a more hostile ruling party response. These struggles embedded 'the class idea' more deeply in policies, institutions, and practices than in the US. In an age of growing economic inequality and broken systems of political representation, Eidlin's analysis offers insight for those seeking to understand these trends, as well as those seeking to change them.

Download or read book Proletarian Lives written by Marcos E. Pérez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnographic study of how people in one of Latin America's most notorious social movements became long-term activists.

Download or read book Between Mao and Gandhi written by Ches Thurber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asks why some dissident movements adopt nonviolent strategies of resistance, while others choose to take up arms.

Download or read book Useful Bullshit written by Neil J. Diamant and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Useful Bullshit Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy? Over the course of four decades, the PRC government encouraged millions of citizens to pose questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft of a new constitution. Seizing this opportunity, people asked both straightforward questions like "what is a state?", but also others that, through implication, harshly criticized the document and the government that sponsored it. They pressed officials to clarify the meaning of words, phrases, and ideas in the constitution, proposing numerous revisions. Despite many considering the document "bullshit," successive PRC governments have promulgated it, amending the constitution, debating it at length, and even inaugurating a "Constitution Day." Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens—police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups—have responded.

Download or read book The Arab Spring Abroad written by Dana M. Moss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moss presents a new theoretical framework for explaining when anti-authoritarian diaspora movements emerge and become transnational agents of change.

Download or read book Contentious Episodes in the Age of Austerity written by Abel Bojar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides researchers with a novel methodological tool to study interactions between governments, challengers, and third-party actors.