Why Truckers Win and Jasmines Lose in China
Shanghai’s ports are returning to normal after the government capitulated to the demands of truckers who had gone on strike to protest rising costs over the past couple of weeks. Government officials agreed to roll back fees and sent out a representative to take a survey of the truckers’ grievances.
Meanwhile, the crackdown on dissidents following anonymous, online calls for a “jasmine revolution” goes on unabated and Tibet is once again gaining unwanted attention from Beijing.
What explains the divergent responses to domestic protest movements in China? Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom provide a compelling answer in a Dissent magazine article from last fall.
“There are tens of thousands of protests in China each year, but the vast majority of them stay out of the headlines, both in China and overseas. They are typically small, localized demonstrations taking aim at specific problems or voicing concern over specific issues, and as such do not represent a threat to Chinese stability. Even protests that have a wider geographic appeal, such as this year’s labor demonstrations, can be treated lightly if the government does not feel its legitimacy is under fire and activists do not band together across class lines and regional divides. Activities, though, that draw or seem to have the potential to draw support across generations, across classes, and across the country—such as Charter 08—are much more threatening to the government. For when these unfold, it is not just foreign observers who recall the events of 1989, but also China’s leaders.”
This is in line with the argument of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs in a Foreign Affairs article from 2005. China’s government is not afraid of protests per se, as long as they do not threaten the Communist Party’s legitimacy. As such, the government allows public goods to be used for coordination if it helps to improve the functioning of the economy without threatening the CCP (like small-scale protests that lead to the removal of excessive fees at ports), but “those public goods that critically affect the ability of political opponents to coordinate but that have relatively little impact on economic growth” are eliminated without hesitation.
The question is whether or not China’s leaders will be able to distinguish between the two as the organization of China’s political economy grows more complex and interdependent. China is entering the “middle income” trap that has stalled development in several emerging markets, partly because political systems failed to keep up with the economy. The reaction to the publication of an editorial calling for hukou reform last year suggests that the CCP may err on the side of political survival rather than economic growth in the future, though as we’ve argued before it will be some time before the CCP is on the ropes.
One Response to “Why Truckers Win and Jasmines Lose in China”
824951 • May 30th, 2011 at 2:43 pm
824951 beers on the wall.
