Making Activists In Global China

Presents an empirically and theoretically rich sociological study of two Chinese diaspora protest movements: Falun Gong and the Chinese democracy movement.

What does China’s rise mean for transnational civil society? What happens when global activist networks engage a powerful and norm-resistant new hegemon? This book combines detailed ethnographic research with cross-case comparisons to identify key factors underpinning variation in the results and processes of advocacy on a range of issues affecting both China and the world, including global warming, intellectual property rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, the use of capital punishment, suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement, and Tibetan independence. Built on a unique blend of comparative and international theory, it advances the notion of “advocacy drift”—a process whereby the objectives and principled beliefs of activists are transformed through interaction with the Chinese state. The book offers a timely reassessment of transnational civil society, including its power to persuade and to leverage the policies of national governments.

Unnatural capital: Chinese state investment and its travails in Africa -- Varieties of accumulation: profit maximization and beyond -- Labor bargains: regimes of exploitation and exclusion -- Managerial ethos: collective asceticism versus individual careerism -- Contesting capital: aspiration and capacity from below -- Eventful global China -- Appendix: an ethnographer's odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of researching China in Zambia

Chinese leaders are pursuing a long-term grand strategy based on maintaining a peaceful international environment that allows China to build the economic and technological foundations necessary to become a rich and powerful country. This strategy supports the Chinese leadership's domestic objective of maintaining Communist Party rule by building an advanced economy and raising living standards. Chinese leaders are focused on domestic challenges and view continued rapid economic growth as essential to maintaining social stability. Despite fears of U.S. and Japanese hostile actions, they have repeatedly compromised on strategic issues as necessary to maintain economic growth. In practice, Chinese foreign policy reflects efforts to balance strategic and economic considerations and to coordinate the activities of diverse Chinese economic and political actors to advance national goals. Efforts to formulate coherent policy are impeded by bureaucratic and political conflicts of interest, while policy implementation is often hindered by incentives of Chinese actors to evade government directives that conflict with their interests. China's increased global activism is intended to secure inputs for the economy; protect against a possible U.S. containment strategy; expand Chinese political influence; and pursue Chinese commercial interests. The timing and pattern of China's increased activism in different regions has evolved along largely independent strategic and economic tracks.

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China's incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang's book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.

Introduction -- Grand strategy, economic development, and foreign policy priorities -- Drivers of China's increasing global activism -- Tools for Chinese global influence -- Data on Chinese regional priorities -- Is China's increase global activism the product of a global strategy? -- Outlook and implications -- Conclusion.

This book engages with Foucault's theoretical works to understand the (re-) making of the working-class in China. In so doing, the author applies Foucault's genealogical (historicalization) method to explore the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) develop Chinese governmentality (or government of mentalities) among everyday workers in its thought management system. Through the investigation of the key events in Chinese history, she presents how China's stable political party is sustained through the CCP's ability to retain, update and incorporate many Confucian discourses into its contemporary form of thought management system using social networks, such as families and schools, to continuously (re-) shape workers' consciousness into one that maintains their docility. This book will bring a new voice to the debate of Chinese working-class politics and labour movements. It will serve as a gateway to comprehensive knowledge about China for students and academics with interests in Chinese employment relations, Chinese politics, labourist activist culture, and social movements. Elly Leung is a research officer at the University of Western Australia. Since completing the doctoral thesis that explored how workers' consciousness and mentalities were (re-) shaped by the State in China, her writings have appeared in various books and journals.

The contributors to China's Embedded Activism focus on the environmental realm - one of the most active areas of civil society in modern China.