Grassroots Participation and Repression under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping

Abstract

This study examines changes in grassroots participation and repression under the Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. Under Xi, the Partystate has launched political campaigns against a range of grassroots activists and organizations. This entails a shift in state repression from fragmentation to consolidation, and it has resulted in less room for contentious participation. However, institutionalized political participation-activities by ordinary people aimed at changing government behavior through official channels-has persisted. The Hu administration presided over the development of new institutions of public participation, and there is little evidence for their decay. Despite important breaks from the past under Xi, there are noteworthy continuities in the institutions that enable grassroots participation.

Different Demands, Varying Responses: Local Government Responses to Workers’ Collective Actions in South China

“…The finding from this chart resonates with those of other studies that have found that the Xi administration has adopted different approaches from the Hu–Wen administration in responding to workers’ collective actions. See, e.g., Fu and Distelhorst 2017; Elfstrom 2019.…”

Editorial

“…As Franceschini and Lin's article illustrates, there is a strong demand for rights and fairness among workers (Lee 2007;Ngai 2016). If the existing law and legal design are perceived to be narrow, ineffective, or otherwise not credible to meet the demand of ever-increasing rights awareness, workers, with the assistance of labour NGOs, will bypass existing legal institutions and bring their grievances for extra-legal resolution (Fu and Distelhorst 2018). In accepting the existing political system, as the authors hint, the only viable resolution for labour disputes in China is to re-design the existing labour legal system to legalise workers' right to fair and effective bargaining in formulating their labour contracts.…”

Editorial Essay: From Cautious Optimism to Renewed Pessimism: Labor Voice and Labor Scholarship in China

“…Other recent research has focused specifically on the LNGO methodology-that is, how NGOs work, what they do to mobilize workers, and the various ways they perform union-like functions (Chen and Yang 2017;Fu 2018). The third article in this issue, ''Overcoming Collective Action Problems Facing Chinese Workers: Lessons from Four Protests against Walmart'' by Chunyun Li and Mingwei Liu, extends this stream of research through its detailed study of the activities and strategies of LNGOs in strikes against the closures of Walmart stores in China.…”