No. 193
PROTESTS AND POLITICAL SOCIETY IN
CHINA AND INDIA
Manjusha Nair
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore
11 Arts Link
Singapore 117570
Tel: 65-65163498
E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 0129-8186
ISBN 978-981-3033-87-0
All rights reserved 2013
The Working Papers Series is edited by Maribeth Erb. This series was established
by the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore in 1973, as a
forum for staff members, graduate students and visitors to the department to circulate
their work in progress. Please refer to the back for a list of all past working papers.
PROTESTS AND POLITICAL SOCIETY IN CHINA AND INDIA *
Manjusha Nair
Abstract
Collective protests against corruption and land grabs are widespread in both China and
India. The official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reported that the government
spent $110 billion on containing these and related popular protests in 2011, more than the
defense budget. Many argue that disruptive protests erupt because there are no effective
institutional channels, such as the judiciary, for expressing grievances in China.
However, in neighboring India, the world's biggest democracy where such channels do
exist, people similarly express their discontent through disruptive protests. The Chinese
and Indian states respond to these protests in similar ways. Protests are tolerated. The
states negotiate with the protestors, promise to redress the grievances that sparked the
protests and punish the culprits responsible. Often these promises are not kept. Why does
the “authoritarian” Chinese state tolerate protestors? Why do the protests have to be
disruptive in “democratic” India? Why are the promises of these states to protestors
frequently not kept? I argue that the answer lies in the symbiotic state-society relations
that emerged in rural China and India, due to the post- 1950s program of re-organization
of village life to serve the interests of the states. This re-organization, motivated by a
genuine regard for the people, the need to maintain political legitimacy, the utilitarian
logic of economic growth, and finally the paucity of financial resources, created a
mechanism of governance in which the burden of surveillance, production and
development were transferred to the population. Thus rural societies were “embedded” in
the state governance of them, and their politics now is mediated by this interdependence
with the state.
Maribeth Erb, Kurtuluş Gemici and Qiushi Feng provided valuable comments on this paper. Xiang Biao asked me
to think about using political society, Dhiman Das supplied the numerous news reports and Xiao Yu organized my
first China visit. I am grateful to all of them. I benefitted from comments on an earlier version of this paper,
presented at the East Asia Institute of the National University of Singapore.
*
1
Introduction
“In China, even more than in Russia, the peasants provided the dynamite that
finally exploded the old order. Once again they furnished the main driving force
behind the victory of a party dedicated to achieving through relentless terror a
supposedly inevitable phase of history in which the peasantry would cease to
exist” (Barrington Moore 1966: 237).
“An Indian scholar has recently performed the very useful task of pulling
together an enormous mass of materials on civil disturbances in general during
these hundred years. Among them one may find ten reasonably clear cases where
large numbers of peasants have turned on their masters. At least five of these fall
outside the boundaries of our problem insofar as they concern either Islamic
movements among the peasantry or else aboriginal inhabitants. The whole
record of peasant uprisings is of course unimpressive in comparison with China”
(Barrington Moore 1966:379).
The villages Bhatta and Parsaul in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, near the New Okhla Industrial
Authority in Delhi, were home to a series of protests in May 2011. Farmers in these villages resisted the
Uttar Pradesh state government decision to buy out the land for developing the Yamuna Expressway
connecting Delhi to Agra. Villagers alleged that they did not receive the right compensation for the land.
They abducted three officials of the state transport authority that arrived to survey the land. The police
went in to rescue the officials. The villages were home to several retired police and army personnel and
had more than fifty licensed firearms. The gun battle between the villagers and the police resulted in
injuries and deaths on both sides. Entry to the village was shut off, a curfew was declared preventing
assembly, and 2000 policemen were deployed. The Congress Party General Secretary, Rahul Gandhi
sneaked into the villages and claimed to have found evidence of rape and murder by the policemen 1. In
August 2011, thousands of farmers from Uttar Pradesh marched in Delhi demanding the right price or
return of their lands.
The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to introduce a new land acquisition bill in the
parliament, which would prevent abuse and misuse of farmers’ land. After one year of this struggle,
many farmers are still in jail, accused of rioting, kidnapping, taking hostages, provoking violence,
attempting murder and so forth under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. When I visited the
village in January 2013, four villagers from the same family were still in prison and villagers were
planning for a protest demonstration. A watered down, more business friendly land acquisition bill got the
Indian cabinet ministers’ approval in July 2012, and was formally introduced in the Indian parliament in
August 2013, in light of the general elections in 2014. Meanwhile, in the assembly elections in FebruaryMarch 2012, the BSP candidate once again won in the Bhatta-Parsaul constituency, proving that farmers’
1
Rahul Gandhi was trying to score over the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh, since the state was
ruled by the BSP and the Congress Party was in the opposition.
2
grievances did not translate into electoral votes against the ruling party. Electoral legitimacy and farmers’
protests appeared to be unrelated.
In September 2011, just after the Bhatta-Parsaul protests cooled down, a series of protests in
Wukan, a coastal town in the industrial heartland of Guangdong Province, captured the attention of the
world media. Thousands of villagers took to the streets to protest the seizure of their land by local
township officials. The lands were sold to developers and the villagers did not receive enough
compensation. The angry villagers destroyed police vehicles and government property. Riot police was
deployed to the village to control the protests. While negotiations were going on with the local officials, a
butcher, Xue Jinbo, was allegedly murdered by the police. The unrest spread leading to more destruction
and the angry villagers barricaded their village from entry by local officials and police for ten days. The
protests ended when the Guangdong provincial authorities intervened. The deputy chief of the provincial
Communist Party committee led the negotiations. The villagers agreed to end the protests when the
provincial government offered an inquiry into the land grab, punishment of those responsible for the
abuse and fresh village committee elections.
A new land acquisition bill was already in place in China in 1998, to counter the mounting unrest
against land grabs. The official Xinhua news agency said the former Communist party chief of Wukan
village in Guangdong province and the former head of the village committee was expelled from the ruling
party and ordered to return what it described as illegal gains from the land grab. Half a dozen other former
village officials and a dozen higher-level officials were also punished, but no details were provided to the
public. An eleven member village committee was elected. In 2012, villagers still complained that they had
not received their land back from the local administration. A news report (China Digital Times, February
19, 2013) pointed to the “failed democracy experiment in Wukan” resulting from diminishing outside
investment, a village leadership that lacked governing experience, and in-fighting within the newly
formed village committee.
A Comparative Puzzle
My paper addresses the puzzling similarity in the way the protests unfolded and the way states responded
to the protests in authoritarian China and democratic India. The land seizures in both cases were done by
the local authorities, an indication of the economic decision- making powers of the local state agents in
the period after the introduction of market reforms. The enactment of the protests was similar. The
villagers disrupted order, and policemen were deployed to both villages to control the protests. The
Bhatta-Parsaul villagers kidnapped the state officials. They had weapons in possession, which they
wielded against the unsuspecting policemen, killing people on both sides. The Wukan villagers
overturned police vehicles and ransacked offices, and barricaded their village from entry by outsiders.
3
The only difference was in the way political parties sought to take advantage of the situation in India,
given the multi-party democratic context in India and the assembly election that was ahead. I demonstrate
the similar protest trajectory in the following figure:
Both states reached conciliation with the protestors, instead of suppressing them. In both cases,
the villagers’ disruption, and its coverage by mass media captured the attention of the central state. The
provincial/regional state officials, most probably directed by the central state, intervened and negotiated
with the village representatives and reached an agreement favorable to the protesters. The Indian Prime
Minister, decided to introduce a land acquisition amendment bill in the next parliament, seeking an end to
the land abuses. Such a law had already been enacted in China in 1998, in view of the land grab issues.
The puzzle that this paper addresses is, why this similarity in protest patterns and trajectories in
two states with radically different political regimes? If the Chinese state was authoritarian, why did it not
put down the protests, for instance, using the military? If India was a democratic country, why did the
farmers have to use disruption to get the attention of the state? In contentious politics literature, protests
repertoires vary according to regime types. Charles Tilly characterized India as a low-capacity democratic
regime and China as a high-capacity non democratic regime; state capacity is defined as control over the
resources, population and so forth, while democracy is defined by the existence of political rights and
civil liberties (Tilly, 2006). According to Tilly, in high-capacity, nondemocratic regimes such as China,
instead of social movements, protests take the form of less organized disruption against the exercise of
arbitrary power. In contrast, democratic regimes such as India allow for extensive non violent and less
disruptive repertoire of protests. However, the protests against land grabs and corruption in the rural areas
that I mentioned occur in both China and India, regardless of regime type. Do they point to an underlying
similarity in state-society relations beyond what could be explained by regime types?
I treat these disruptions as forms of collective protests, through which common people make
collective claims or express grievances against the state or state agents (Tilly, 1978; Tarrow, 2011;
Touraine, 1985). The demands could range from a more equitable sharing of resources to recognition of
their identities. These protests have mostly used tactics such as petitions, letter-writing campaigns, or
lawsuits/legal actions, marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience. However,
4
many such protests in China and India, use violence, mass disruption and destruction of public goods.
Unless such drastic measures are used, state attention is most of the time not guaranteed.
Collective protests against corruption and land grabs are widespread in both China and India. The
official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reported that the government spent $110 billion on
containing these and related popular protests in 2011, more than the defense budget (Washington Post,
May 29, 2012). Many argue that disruptive protests erupt because there are no effective institutional
channels, such as the judiciary, for expressing grievances in China. However, in neighboring India, the
world’s largest democracy where such channels do exist, people similarly express their discontent through
disruptive protests. Though not yet systematically counted, disruptions, both violent and non-violent, are
an essential characteristic of Indian democracy.
I concentrate on one type of collective protests in my analysis, which are the protests against land
acquisition in rural China and India. Land acquisition by the state has been the new mechanism for
infrastructural and industrial growth in China and India (as well as in many other states in Asia, Africa
and Latin America). Though urban China and India are equally prone to protests against land acquisition
(see Hess, 2010 in the case of home owners’ protests for better compensation in Chinese cities), many of
the disruptions have emerged in rural areas. This is because much of the Chinese (55 percent) and Indian
(72 percent) population live in rural areas, and their livelihoods are firmly rooted in the land. Poverty and
inequality are greater in rural, compared to urban areas, due to the urban bias in state policies. In 2009,
according to the China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the urban per capita yearly income at US$2525
was approximately three times that of the rural per capita annual income (Fu, 2010). The number of rural
poor in India is 231 million (Kohli, 2012).The National Sample Survey Office, which measures
household consumption expenditure, found that the per capital expenditure of an urban consumer is 91
percent more than that of a rural consumer, and this difference has increased by more than 10 percent
between 2005 and 2010.
I argue that the answer lies in the similar agrarian governance of rural China and India that started
post 1950s to assist the economic development and modernization programs of these nations, which led to
symbiotic state-society relations that we see in contemporary China and India. Rural China and India
underwent comparable modalities of reorganization of everyday village life to suit the material and
ideological needs of the states. Common to both modalities was the emergence of the village community
as the lowest units of governance. The establishment of these communities was motivated by a genuine
regard for the people, the need to maintain political legitimacy, the utilitarian logic of economic growth,
and finally the paucity of financial resources. These together created a mechanism of governance in which
the burden of surveillance, production and development was transferred to the people themselves. Thus
rural societies were “embedded” in the state governance over them. The politics that resulted from these
5
developments assumed a paternalistic, yet uncaring state that paid attention only if demands were made
forcefully, and not in the form of entitlements but as conciliations and concessions.
The first implication of my argument is about the stability of the Chinese and Indian states. These
protests do not pose a long term threat to these states. They emerge locally and are locally solved in a
piecemeal manner; this cellular nature of societal organization and contentions, prevent their eruption as
massive, national level protests, despite other dimensions of mobilization such as the mass media.
Though protesters in India have more political space to spread, the million mutinies (Naipaul, 1991) fail
to join together in a revolution because of the stalemate provided by a plurality of interests and identities,
political parties, social movements and civil society organizations.
The second implication is about the state suppression of dissident movements in China and India.
The analysis of these needs a different paradigm than the collective protests that are discussed in this
paper. The protests in Tibet, Xinjiang, and of other dissidents are suppressed with extreme violations of
human rights by the Chinese state. In a similar way, the protests in the North Eastern states in India, as
well as that of the Maoists, and the other secessionists’ protests such as that of Sikhs and the Kashmiris,
have been suppressed through the use of military force. This indicates that these countries treat the
revolts of “citizens” that accept state legitimacy differently from those of the “secessionists,” who wish
to reject the sovereignty of the nation.
The third implication is about the nature of violence involved in these protests. Rather than being
spontaneous and abrupt expressions of discontent, as was supposed to be the case of peasant insurgencies
of the past, the role of violence and disruptive tactics seem to adopt a utilitarian logic, a calculated means
to an end, as pointed out by Chatterjee (2011), in the case of India. This fury is aimed at the state
authorities, not local money lenders or landlords in India, and has media value, given the presence of
social media. In the case of China, violence and disruption occur at the township level, directed at the
township offices (So, 2007). In the known cases, villagers seemed to be content with receiving adequate
compensation, rather than getting the land back. This instrumental approach to violence and insurgency
requires further scholarly attention.
This paper is organized in the following manner. In the next section, I examine how the existing
approaches to studying protests in China and India are insufficient in explaining the puzzle. Following
that I outline my argument. The section after that examines the evolution of political society in China and
how the state-society relations have unfolded since the introduction of neoliberal reforms. After that, I
examine the same processes for India. In the penultimate section, I compare the state-society relations in
China and India, showing the broad patterns. The concluding section summarizes the findings and
implications.
6
Existing Approaches to Protests in China and India
Though an immensely rich scholarship exists on China and India, very few systematic social comparisons
have been made thus far (see Bardhan, 2012 for an exception). There is a very huge scholarly interest on
collective protests in China (Lee and Zhang, 2013; Chen, 2012; Cai, 2010; O’Brien, 2008; O’Brien and
Li, 2006; Goldman, 2005; and Perry, 2001, to mention a few) while not so much work on India (Ray and
Katzenstein, 2005; Mitra, 1990; Ray, 1999; Shah, 1990). Nevertheless, there has been an immense
interest in rural politics in India (for example Gould, 2003; Chatterjee, 2011; Spencer, 2007; Varshney,
1998; Gupta, 1998; Jeffrelot, 2003), and communal violence (Ghassem-Fachandi, 2012; Saikia, 2011;
Brass, 2005; and Varshney, 2003). There is enduring scholarly interest in rural governance and politics in
both China and India, though not developed comparatively (Mohanty et al, 2007 being an exception).
Drawing on all these separate and comparative studies, I identify three streams of literature that my
research talks to, which directly or indirectly explain the state responses to collective disruptions in China
and I compare them with similar studies on India. I name these as State capacities, Rights awareness, and
Exceptionalism. I will show how they are not sufficient explanations for collective protests and the state
responses to them in China and India.
State Capacities:
China has conventionally been characterized as a strong totalitarian state with a fragmented society and
India as a weak state with a strong society (Kohli, 2004; Walder, 1995; Evans, 1995; Migdal and Kohli,
1994; Ikenberry, 1988; Migdal, 1988; Evans & Skocpol, 1985; Bardhan, 1985). State capacity means the
ability of a country to effectively administer its territories and people (Skocpol, 1985, for the state
capacity literature, see Zysman, 1983; Organski and Kugler, 1980; Katzenstein, 1978; and Almond and
Powell, 1966). Given the enormity of protests in China, scholarly attention has been paid to the extraordinary resilience of the Chinese state in managing protests, rather than the power of protests to
undermine the state (see Chung, 2011; Perry and Goldman, 2007; Perry, 2001). For instance, Chung
describes how the Chinese state treats “chaos as opportunity” (Ibid: 25-26) and deploys measures for
prevention (by “buying off” protesters, monitoring and containment of protests).
The most recent
research in this field is Lee and Zhang (2013), who argue that the state, in its totalizing urge, depoliticizes
social unrest while giving space for maneuvering and bargaining.
However, similar eruptions of protests have been described as a “predicament” of the Indian state,
pointing to its weak capacity to govern. The Indian state is weak in its ability to enforce its governance on
its society due to the strong and conflicting power blocs, interest and identity groups, such as the business
elites, farmers, political parties, and social movements (Bardhan, 1984; Mitra, 1992; Kothari, 1960;
7
Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987; Frankel, 2000; Kohli, 2004; Evans, 1995; Bayley, 1962; Varshney, 1998).
Hence Midgal (1988) called India a weak state with a strong society. The presence of conflicts in India,
along with the political stability of the democratic regime, made Myron Weiner name it the “Indian
Paradox” (Weiner and Varshney, 1989). He accounted for this in a variety of ways: the conflict
management role of the Congress party, the bureaucrats who have a vested interest in democracy’s
maintenance, the development of other political institutions, the balance of power between the states and
the center, and the heterogeneity within states.
Rights Awareness:
In China, the emergence of these protests has been considered as evidence of a new understanding of
rights by the citizens, given the freedom provided by economic reforms and decentralization of power
(Cai, 2010; O’Brien, 2008; O’Brien and Li, 2006; Goldman, 2005; Perry, 2001). China has
conventionally been referred to as an authoritarian and politically repressive regime in contentious
politics literature. “High capacity, non-democratic regimes, in contrast, commonly prescribe a wide range
of public political performances while tolerating few others. They also forbid a much wider variety of
claim making performances" (Tilly, 2006: 76). Given the lack of appropriate democratic spaces for the
expression or resolution of these discontents, they erupt as mass disruptions. The question such scholars
ask is, if economic reforms are in place, can political reforms be far behind? O’Brien and Li do talk about
the ambiguity of the center itself in permitting and constraining collective action (2006: 31-32). Chen has
identified the puzzle of the state tolerating disruptions in a so-called repressive regime (Chen,
2012). They have rather argued for the conception of a multi-layered Chinese state.
However, similar eruptions of conflicts were considered a symptom of a weak democracy and a
governability crisis in India (Kohli, 1990; Bayley, 1962; Desai, 1965). Protests have been treated as the
expression of discontent against chronic problems such as corruption, ineffective legal system,
insufficient resources etc. woven into everyday life in India (see Yasin and Sengupta, 2004; Naipaul
1991; Hardgrave 1984). The latest in this line of thinking is Perry Anderson, (2012), who argues that
Indian democracy is quintessentially flawed, compared to the ideal of western democracy.
Exceptionalism:
Authors like Perry and Goldman (2007,
see also Perry and Selden, 2003) point to the historical
peculiarities of China, such as the ability of people to challenge power centers by questioning the
“mandate of heaven” (Perry, 2001). I term this approach “Chinese exceptionalism.” For Perry, this local
management of protests is a tactic of the state to appease people since imperial times (also see Hung,
8
2011), and hence not an indication of a new rights awareness. Even O’Brien argues that similar dissent
was permissible in Maoist China. “In short, this was hardly a ‘totalitarian’ system in which overweening
state power atomized and paralyzed society, rendering its members incapable of independent collective
action. On the contrary, frequent popular action-sometimes going beyond the confines of state-directed
limits-was a distinctive feature of Mao’s China” (O’Brien, 2008:209).
However, India also has had a long history of rebellious people challenging the state, thus casting
doubt on the argument of Chinese exceptionalism. In fact, its rural populations have been less peaceful
loving as suggested by Barrington Moore (1966), and have been participants in violent rebellions as well
as social movements (see Shah, 1990; Haynes and Prakash 1992). The existence of disruption and
violence as part of everyday life has characterized its democracy from the beginning (Weiner and
Varshney, 1989; Hardgrave 1984; Weiner, 1962). As long as social unrest is contained within regional
state boundaries, it does not pose a substantial threat to the central state, at the very most it may bring
down a regional state ministry. However, if
unrest spreads to the other states, if it is linked
organizationally with unrest in other states, or if a number of states, albeit separately, face serious unrest
at the same time, the state might intervene with a high handedness, as in the case of the introduction of the
Essential Services Maintenance Act in 1981, which deemed strikes that disrupted essential services such
as post and telegraph unlawful (Hardgrave , Ibid: 12).
An Alternative Approach
What accounts for the puzzling similarity in the way rural protests and the state responses to them unfold
in democratic India and authoritarian China? I argue that this similarity stems fundamentally from the
state and agrarian society relations that evolved in China and India since the 1950s till now. China and
India, like many other newly formed states in the 1950s, were faced with the question of attaining fast
economic growth to reach the capabilities of the industrialized nations of the west. For these poor
economies, fast industrialization required the allocation of scarce resources in the industrial sector and
squeezing the surplus out of the agrarian sector. Nevertheless, this squeezing created a dilemma: the
political leadership had come to power through the support of the rural masses. In China, the communist
revolution was a peasant revolution. In India, the Congress party depended on the peasants for its mass
base and electoral support. For ideological and instrumental reasons, these governments were dependent
on the agrarian masses for political legitimacy.
I argue that these states managed this dilemma by 1) making the villagers responsible for their
own development by closely following state directives 2) and thus radically altering the socio-economic
organization of villages by firmly embdedding them in state institutions and structures. The politics that
resulted from these developments assumed a paternalistic, yet uncaring state that paid attention only if
9
demands were made forcefully, and not in the form of entitlements but as conciliations and
concessions. I suggest that the above processes can be better understood using the concept of “political
society” by Partha Chatterjee. Partha Chatterjee has used “political society” to describe the domain where
the state interacts with the majority of its citizen-subjects in postcolonial democracies such as India
(Chatterjee, 2004, 2008, 2011). This vast majority of the “population” does not constitute the civil
society and does not exercise their political will through citizenship. By “political society,” Chatterjee
denotes most of the people in such democracies who do not receive rights as citizens, and are subjects of
state governance through welfare policies. These postcolonial democracies were not direct participants in
the history of the evolution of the institutions of modern capitalist democracy (2004: 31). While civil
society is the defender of citizenship in modern capitalist democracies, in countries such as India, the
participation in civil society is restricted to only a few that are culturally equipped to negotiate it. For
Chatterjee, political society is the way the majority of a “population” negotiates with their governments.
Populations are identifiable, classifiable, and describable by empirical or behavioral criteria and
are amenable to statistical techniques such as censuses and sample surveys. Unlike the concept of
citizen, which carries the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state, the
concept of population makes available to government functionaries a set of rationally
manipulable instruments for reaching large sections of inhabitants of a country as the targets of
their "policies"-economic policy, administrative policy, law, and even political mobilization...The
regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming
to provide for the well-being of population. Its mode of reasoning is not deliberative openness but
rather an instrumental notion of costs and benefits. Its apparatus is not the republican assembly
but an elaborate network of surveillance through which information is collected on every aspect
of the life of the population that is to be looked after (Chatterjee, 2004: 34).
The domain in which this negotiation between state and society takes place he calls the political society.
Why does the postcolonial state create the political society? Why does the state need an elaborate
network of surveillance through which information is collected on every aspect of the life of the
population that is to be looked after? Why does it have to consistently arrive at unstable and contextual
arrangements to meet their demands? Chatterjee does not provide a direct answer, except to say that the
existence of political society ensures the peaceful well being of civil society. “It is in political society that
they have to be fed and clothed and given work, if only to ensure long-term and relatively peaceful well
being of civil society" (Chatterjee, 2011: 234). Thus it is not merely the Foucauldian governmentality
that wants to ensure the wellbeing of the entire society by managing them in toto. It serves a higher
purpose. I contend that this higher purpose that gets only bare attention in Partha Chatterjee is the
blackbox of political economy and development. As I pointed out earlier, it was the need at a particular
historical time, of newly formed states such as India, to achieve rapid economic progress and at the same
10
time maintain political legitimacy. This led to the practices of governing the population where the
economic and administrative burden was shifted to the governed.
Though Chatterjee developed this concept to understand popular politics in postcolonial
democracies, I intend to show in this paper that this concept is useful in understanding state- society
relations in other contexts as well, where the reach of the state has been far, and deep enough to
fundamentally alter the organization of society. Michael Mann’s conception of “infrastructural power” is
useful here in assuming a similar nature of all states, authoritarian or democratic, in their deployment of
power (over civil society). Infrastructural power is the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil
society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.
These powers are now immense. The state can assess and tax our income and wealth at source,
without our consent or that of our neighbors or kin (which states before about 1850 were never
able to do); it stores and can recall immediately a massive amount of information about all of us ;
it can enforce its will within the day almost anywhere in its domains; its influence on the overall
economy is enormous ; it even directly provides the subsistence of most of us (in state
employment, in pensions, in family allowances, etc.). The state penetrates everyday life more
than did any historical state. Its infrastructural power has increased enormously (Mann, 1984:
189).
What distinguishes the exercise of power in the authoritarian context is the highly
institutionalized combination of despotic and infrastructural power that encompasses and penetrates civil
society. Under authoritarian rule, “competing power groupings cannot evade the infrastructural reach of
the state, nor are they structurally separate from the state …. All significant social power must go through
the authoritative command structure of the state” (Ibid.).
In China and India, civil society groups have been absent,
limited, and have played an
insufficient and indifferent role in representing the population. Political society is the domain where the
state’s infrastructural (and despotic in the case of China) power is exercised historically. If one examines
the exercise of power in this domain, one can delineate a Foucauldian development ideology of concern
for welfare, as well as a production oriented ideology aimed at squeezing the surplus out of the agrarian
society. In the policies for development, there was the Foucauldian notion of govermentality, which
dictated the way in which the state treated subject populations. For the new states such as China and
India, modernity and progress were the new world view and the subject populations needed to be cleansed
and transformed to suit the modern world. This meant that they needed to be pulled out of
underdevelopment, the conventions and traditions that bound them to their habitats had to be broken.
Their superstitions needed to be refined through the use of science. Their bodies and habitats had to be
cleansed and sanitized and made free from diseases. They, especially the children, had to be fed
nutritious food. Equally important was how food was cooked, what was cooked, how the food was served
and by whom. The population growth had to be curtailed using measures of fertility control, so that the
11
benefits of welfare can be allocated more efficiently. Each birth had to be nurtured using midwifery and
each midwife had to undergo training provided by the state.
Common to their implementation was the operation of surveillance mechanisms, as my analysis
in the following sections will show, which ensured things were in order, and a tendency to pass the
burden of welfare and production and finally surveillance on to the villagers themselves and one another.
Behind the panopticon was the rationale of making individuals self regulate. The surveillance mechanism
in the villages had a clear utilitarian logic: to transfer the economic burden on to the people. This logic
was evident in state discourses and practices, as I show in the later sections of this paper. The same logic
was present in entrusting the expectation of development to the villagers. One example is the case of
barefoot doctors in China. These locals with little education and expertise were trained under medical
doctors that stayed in the villages for a period of time. After the departure of these doctors, these new
medicine men provided basic medicines to villagers. In the next section, I discuss the emergence of a
state-society relation mediated by the political society in China, which illustrates the workings of these
surveillance mechanisms.
Political Society in China
Evolution of State-Rural Society Relations:
In this section, I show the historical evolution of political society in China. Before the Communist
Revolution of 1949, in the republican period (1911-1949), the Chinese countryside was facing what has
been termed as a “state involution” (Duara, 1987), where the power of the Chinese state expanded
simultaneously with growing informal structures such as tax farmers and mercenaries that wielded
predatory powers over rural society. This anarchy was halted and reversed by the new communist state
through land redistribution, collectivization, and state measures that penetrated deep into and remodeled
rural society such that no space in the rural cosmos was left untouched. A review of the state policies
unmask a familiar contradiction between accumulation and legitimacy: The Chinese state that was eager
and impatient to industrialize had to squeeze the peasantry; it was an economic, and more importantly an
ideological, imperative. However, there was the political and practical imperative of maintaining the
legitimacy of a state that came to power through a peasant revolution. It could not neglect the peasant
population entirely and had to provide for its welfare, while all the state resources were diverted to urban
industrial growth. Finally, there was the need of the time to “develop” and modernize peasant lives to
befit the needs of material progress. I argue that the Chinese state attempted to solve the dilemma by
transferring the burden of production, progress and welfare on to the rural population. Rural society was
re-organized to be an integral part of state power.
12
To analyze the state-society relations in rural China in the Mao era, I examine the rich literature
on village studies by historians, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists. There are recent
studies by scholars who grew up in these villages and have examined their transformation from 1949 up
to the present (Li, 2009; Gao,1999). There are innumerable studies where scholars have visited the village
at frequent intervals from 1950s till now (Chan, Madsen and Unger, 2009 for instance). There is huge
regional variation in China, which has made scholars argue that any generalization is impossible (Perry
1994). However, I focus on the abundant commonalities here based on village studies from North and
South China, from model villages such as Qiaulu in Sichuan province and the poor, nonrecognized
villages such as Gao village in Jianxi province. As my analysis shows, all these villages have undergone
and participated in the same programs and policies, and have responded to them in similar ways, as to be
expected under an authoritarian state structure. Later, my analysis also shows that even in the more
heterogenous and politically active Indian villages, one can see more commonalities than variations.
Before the Communist Revolution, there was the proliferation of local powers such as land
owners, tax collectors and bandits that were engaged in bullying the peasants. In some places, the
peasants suffered from poverty, banditry, Guomindang, as well as the Japanese invaders (Chan, Madsen
and Unger, 2009: 16). Hence, many villages supported the communists, while many were passive
recipients of the new communist state. Even those who supported the communists had very little
knowledge of what was to come. After the Communist Revolution, first through the land reform and later
through the ideology surrounding it, the state made its presence felt as a champion of the peasants.
However, the Communist state economic policy was aimed at squeezing the peasantry for agricultural
surplus, and land redistribution had the instrumental objective of making reorganization of agricultural
production possible. As Barrington Moore observed, “In short, the peasants provided the “dynamite” that
smashed the old order. The tragedy of the peasant revolution is that it ushered in a supposedly inevitable
phase of history—a ruthless terror in which the peasantry would cease to exist (1966: 227). To quote Gao,
an author from a village whose name he bears, peasants in the Mao era had little free education or medical
care, and had to pay taxes and sell grain to the state at a government controlled price (Gao, 1999).
Between 1952 and 1979, by way of agricultural taxes and differential pricing of agricultural and industrial
goods, the state extracted a total of 600 billion Yuan from the peasantry. Subtracting government
investment in agriculture, the state has netted 434 billion Yuan from the peasants, 24 percent of the total
agriculture sector GNP in that period (cited in Gao, 1999). According to two Chinese rural economy
experts, the percentages of government financial income exploited from the peasantry by way of
differential pricing systems in 1957, 1965, 1971 and 1979 were respectively 71, 75.7, 51.6 and 39.4 (cited
in Gao, 1999). In contrast, urban citizens enjoyed the benefits of the revolution such as free education,
free medical care, free housing with nominal rent, assured lifetime employment, and subsidized food
13
supply. The hukou system, which determined the place of residence of a person, ensured that the urbanrural divide was maintained and the peasants were put in their place, which was the village in which they
were born.
Gregory Ruf has argued that it was the collectivization of agriculture that brought about village
communities in China as we know them, rather than the characteristics of these villages being precommunist (Ruf, 1998). I partially agree with him that village collectives did bring forth a village identity
on the basis of which interests, mainly economic interests, were organized. Villages and hamlets and
accompanying loyalties were hitherto divided according to kinship and lineage, and the community
identities that we hear of now in the emergence of protests were predicated on the villages that came into
being as a singular economic entity during the Mao era. Initially villages were organized as smaller
collectives engaged in co-operative farming, which was beneficial to the villagers since they knew one
another well, but this was only a first step towards broader collectivization. Small co-operatives were still
successful because villagers got revenues back according to their inputs in land, tools and labor and also
because these collectives were an extension of kinship and neighborhood ties. During the Great Leap
Forward, in the urge to create huge grain surpluses by following the socialist ideal, large scale
communization of life and production began. The process of communization that started in Henan
province in 1958, was completed in two months all over China and a total of 23,384 communes came into
being, involving 112,174, 651 households (Li, 2009: 82). Villages metamorphosized into production
teams, under bigger production brigades, which were part of
even bigger production communes.
Production brigades appointed production team leaders and accountants, enforced levy to raise funds for
education and health, collected taxes, and implemented state policies. (Gao, 1999). In this “wind of
communization,” to break the boundaries of localities and speed up work, there was the militarization of
work (Li, 2009:85), where villagers and families were separated and sent afar to work in infrastructural
projects. In this economic program where peasant labor and product was squeezed by the all-powerful
state with the brigades acting as an interface between villages and the central state, the reach of the state
was thus far. The famine that resulted was due to the over reporting of food grain surpluses by the
brigades to the central state. It was after the famine that the state reverted to the old form of co-operative
farming, abandoning the communes.
Rural China was also the target of other policies of governance. The foremost of which was the
one child policy, which was imposed from above, and implied constant surveillance and monitoring of
people, which was not always possible (Li, 2009; Gao, 1999 and others). Another policy was burning the
bodies instead of burying to preserve land in an overpopulated country. While these measures unveiled
more of an instrumental objective from the part of the state, there were other measures where the
boundaries were blurred. One example was the measures to take care of health such as prevention of and
14
treatment of Schistomiasis started in 1955 at no cost of work points to patients (Gao, 1999). Dr Philip
Lee, then a professor of social medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, wrote glowingly
in the Western Journal of Medicine about China’s primary health care system after visiting the country in
1973 as part of a United States of America medical delegation. He said prior to the founding of the
People’s Republic of China in 1949, epidemics, infectious disease and poor sanitation were widespread.
He compared that with the then current conditions:
The picture today is dramatically different … there has been a pronounced decline in the death
rate, particularly infant mortality. Major epidemic diseases have been controlled … nutritional
status has been improved [and] massive campaigns of health education and environmental
sanitation have been carried out. Large numbers of health workers have been trained, and a
system has been developed that provides some health service for the great majority of the
people 2.
Villages received electricity. Earthquake shelters were organized in every household and the state
attempted sincerely to sanitize homes.
The huge apparatus of governance that the state created was in many ways brutal, but there was
not much monitoring from the state. Li (2009) argues that the state sustained these efforts by allowing the
peasants discursive superiority while undergoing everyday subordination. The poor and lower-middle
peasants (pingxiazhongnong) were pitted against the landlords, rich and upper-middle peasants. This new
division, Ruf argues, created a new social and political order by re-ordering the cosmos of the peasants
(1998). The destruction of ancestral halls, replacement of Mao worship for religious worship,
undermining of superstition etc. took priority during the cultural revolution. In Chen village,women
publicly broke their jade bangles. (Chan et al, 2009). At the assessment meeting every year of production
teams, every aspect of an individual would be discussed to finalize the assessment (to assess the value of
labor in terms of points). Each activity of the production team leader was monitored by the villagers. The
four clean ups and later the cultural revolution were used by the villagers to settle old scores and punish
the leaders whom they found corrupt. Thus the peasants became the producers and maintainers of state
power in the Foucauldian sense.
In village China under Mao, what emerged out of constant state interference was a political
society that was the object of welfare and target of policies. How did this political society negotiate with
the state? Inspired most prominently by the work of James Scott, recent scholars have tried to point out
how the villagers resisted the communist state (see Li, 2009; Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden, 2005;
Zongze Hu, 2009; Shue, 1988). There were covert forms of resistance such as eloping to have a second
child, sending an old woman, instead of an young one, to undergo surgery to prevent conception, setting
2
Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Volume 86, Number 12, Dec 2008, pages 909-988.
15
up of private vegetable gardens and so forth, as well as overt forms of organized protests. I concentrate
here only on the latter, since that is the focal point of my comparison. It seems that resistance in the
villages had both the character of defending peasant rights to the soil and survival, and rights that were
guaranteed by the paternalistic state. The latter is behind the rightful resistance that we see now(a term
coined by O’Brien and Li, 2008) of turning to ideologies and channels promoted by the state. Villagers
used to dispatch people to far away cities to file complaints and the state always attempted reconciliation.
Most of the time, written complaints against local leaders were initiated by educated villagers such as
teachers. Some villagers became candidate in elections. The state used education and persuasion to
counter the protests and in rare cases, where the uprisings were too massive, protesters were sent to labor
camps, imprisonment etc. (Li, 2009). Thus suppression happened only when resistance got out of hand.
State and Rural China in the Post Reform Era:
With the introduction of market reforms in 1978, farms were de-collectivized, communes were
abandoned, powers were decentralized favoring the local state, the hukou system was nearly withdrawn,
and family household farming was introduced, as well as more incentives for developing rural industries.
However, the most important change that is usually underestimated was that the central state stopped
squeezing the peasantry and appropriating agricultural surplus to finance economic growth. In rich
provinces, the increased incomes through investment in rural industries and in agriculture created
economic transformation in the villages (such as through the brick kilns and orange orchards in Qiaolu
village in Sichaun described by Ruf, 1998). In the poor Gao village, the transformation came from
people’s ability to migrate and escape from the overcrowded countryside. Around 30 percent of the
residents of the Gao village became migrant laborers; villages became the abode of the elderly and the
very young, bringing in other social problems.
An important change was in the powers given to the local government to make economic
decisions. The production brigades and teams were dismantled. The villages were now under the town
administration, which was below the county administration. In a move towards decentralization, village
autonomy was introduced through elections in 1987. Along with this move to decentralization of politics
in favor of villagers, there was fiscal decentralization favoring the township. The township was free to
make economic decisions, attract investment, and develop rural industries. Most capital invested has been
from the Chinese diaspora in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some villages flourished under this system, like
the Chen village in the Pearl River Delta, where the Hong Kong diaspora invested, attracting migrant
labor from the poor inland regions as well as Mongolia, while raising the living standards of the local
population. In the village in Anhui that I visited, the achievements were modest. Most villagers worked in
a garment making industry run by the township, and all land was given on lease to contractors. Taiwanese
16
businessmen had invested in developing a nearby lake for tourism. Business elite from the prosperous
neighboring province of Zhejiang were interested in investing in this village as well.
However, this local autonomy gave rise to what has been termed as the predatory state (So,
2007). The local officials were prone to making corrupt deals and abusing their power against the
villagers in favor of investors (So, 2007; O’Brien and Li, 2006). Since the central state abolished
agricultural taxes, the township had no source of revenue and was forced to resort to various tactics to
attract investment in a competitive environment. The land acquisition drive in China has to be interpreted
in that context. The collective protests in rural China since the reforms have been aimed at the abuses of
the local powers. There are two macro-level phenomena
behind the emergence of protests: 1)
decollectivization, which freed the peasantry economically and politically, to move and make demands,
and 2) decentralization, which opened them to the possibility of abuse.
In the next section, I discuss the evolution of political society in India. Though the contours of the
Indian state were determined by colonial legacies, there are broad parallels between the state-society
relations that were put in place in China and India.
Political Society in India
Evolution of State-Rural Society Relations:
In India, political society was a postcolonial condition, a modality of existence in postcolonial India (see
Gupta, 1998). The Indian state, after gaining independence from colonial rule, embarked on a
modernization program to achieve the stage of advancement of the industrially developed countries. The
fundamental problem of newly formed states such as India in the 1950s was to solve the following puzzle:
How to achieve growth, while having the support of the citizen-population that was needed for
maintaining political power. Unlike already industrialized states, these postcolonial democracies
inherited people already with a notion of rights and universal suffrage. Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Indian
Prime Minister and architect of Indian planning, said, “During the past two centuries [of colonial
domination], we became static and fell away from the current of human progress” (Zaidi and Zaidi, 1981:
155). Progress or modernity in the 20th century, meant giving primacy to the sphere of the economy,
because it was only by a thorough reorganization of economic production and distribution that enough
wealth could be created to ensure social justice for all. The post-colonial modernization program
represented the Nehruvian attempts to make the Indian nation “work back into the trajectory of its
‘normal’ development” (Chatterjee 1986: 138).
The government preferred industrial development over agricultural development, however it still
needed agrarian surplus to feed the growing urban population. For a developing economy such as India, a
17
huge investment in agriculture was beyond its means. What the government did instead was to alter the
Indian villages fundamentally by making the village folk targets of developmental policies. As Akhil
Gupta points out,
The idea that industrial growth would spur the demand for agricultural goods, combined
with a belief that institutional changes in the rural areas would release forces that would
boost productivity, led the planners to emphasize changes such as land reform, the
rebuilding of institutions of village governance on democratic principles (the Panchayat
system), and tenancy reform, instead of direct investment in agricultural infrastructure
and input or output subsidies 3 (Gupta, 1998: 49).
The Indian state implemented the Community Development Programmes (CDP) in 1952 as part of the
first five year plan. CDP involved continuity with the colonial policies. Subir Sinha has shown how the
colonial policies of rural welfare were aimed at the colonial state interests in aligning village communities
with state objectives (Sinha, 2008).
4
For instance, he explains how the colonial state in Punjab granted
community institutions, controlled by large land owners, the power to mobilize unpaid labor to clear the
Shah Nahr canal system, thus reducing the state’s own costs in financially tight times (Sinha, 2008
quoting Gilmartin, 1999). Nevertheless, there were other logics in these community schemes in the
colonial era; they were derived from empathy for the poor and orchestrated in different ways by anticolonial resistance, Christian missionaries, and American philanthropy. However, as Sinha shows, they
covered a minuscule proportion of Indian villages.
With the postcolonial state, these schemes were centralized under the Planning Commission. The
objective was to infiltrate the Indian villages, and at the same time, let them work by themselves, given
the focus on industrialization, as in the case of China. By 1964 the CDP covered the whole of India. As
Sinha argues, it re-territorialized villages.
A “unit”over which a project was implemented was approximately 300 villages, covering 450–500
square miles, with a population of about 200,000. Each unit was divided into three blocks, each
with 100 villages, further divided into “development blocks” of five villages, each attended by one
village-level worker (VLW). Each project unit was assigned a Project Executive Officer, a
Development Officer at the district level, and a Development Committee headed by the Chief
Ministers at the provincial level. At the national level, the Planning Commission itself functioned
as the Central Committee for the Community Development Program (Sinha, Ibid: 75).
3
Gupta discusses how the example of Chinese development inspired the Planning Commission members and
Congress Party officials who visited China on many occasions between 1952 and 1955 (1998: 49-50).
4 Sinha calls this process entrenchment, derived from Gramsci’s writings on state and civil society. By
entrenchment, he refers to the process by which the abstract idea of the state becomes embedded in everyday social
relations, both as common sense and an institutional framework of interaction (2008).
18
Charlotte Wiser, who studied the North Indian village Karimpur for an extended period of time observed
that
The purpose [of the development blocks] is to provide every village with an opportunity to
produce more, to learn more, to earn more, to consume more, and -as a result-to enjoy better
living. The world "block" is now a part of the village vocabulary, heard chiefly among members
of the village council. It is the service arm of the government and the officers within it are to
render whatever advice or help is needed (Wiser etal, 2000: 199).
The state intervened in every aspect of village life such as bringing better agricultural practices to
boost agricultural production and improve the economic well-being of peasants,
to provide social
education, health and sanitation , entertainment, religious activities, midwives, and to demonstrate a
better way of living and so forth. Each Panchayat was assigned a VLW, who would give field
demonstrations. From Dube's elaborate report on a VLW's life based on his diaries, he tried to intervene
in everything the people did (Dube, 1961) 5.
The CDP was a failure. There was no improvement in agricultural production, nor was there any
other evidence of social change. Villagers participated out of fear of the state and the immediate state
agents and many villagers were coerced into voluntary work, which they resented (Dube, 1958; Wiser et
al, 2000); additionally they never really understood the rationale behind the schemes (Dube, 1958;
Mukherjee, 1961; Mellor,1968; Karunaratne, 1976; Wiser et al 2000) 6. Dube pointed out that unlike in
China, mass education was not involved in creating the change. A more pressing reason was that there
was no intention on the part of the state to modify the class relations in the villages (Moore, 1966) 7.
Hence, most of the benefits were hijacked by the propertied classes. Sinha has rightly pointed out that this
hijacking helped the emergence of a strong political movement and a political lobby of the middle income
and rich farmers (Sinha, 2008). An important contribution, as in the case of collectivization in China, was
that the CDP created the “communities” that became the building blocks of social, economic and political
organization in the countryside. As Sinha argues,
CD [Community Development] emphasized the welfare, needs, and capacities of villagers; the
production of an array of intimate knowledge about them so that development interventions could
be fine-tuned; the investment of governmental power not only in the state but also in non-state
5
Dube’s studies, done with the help of Cornell University, are evidence to the fact mentioned by Gupta (1998) and
Sinha (2008) that American soft power in the context of the cold war was instrumental in putting in place
community development schemes. However, rather than focusing on a transnational regime as Sinha does, I would
suggest that that the national state was instrumental in imagining and putting into place these policies.
6 There are hilarious accounts of how villagers were initiated into cups and saucers, new ovens, etc. in Wiser’s
account of Karimpur (Wiser et al, 2000).
7
Barrington Moore hence considers this an example of a passive revolution (1966).
19
institutions including—and especially—the community; and the creation of institutions to orient
and frame the “conduct of conduct” such that individual, village, and state objectives were in
alignment” (Sinha, 2008: 82).
The CDP was abandoned and in its place, new programs for improved agricultural production
were put in place. The most significant change that happened in the 1960s was what came to be referred
to as the Green Revolution (Frankel, 1971; Varshney, 1998; Mitra, 1992 and Gupta, 1998). Given the
famine, decline in food aid and the scarcity of food, the old model of emphasizing changes in the daily
social lives of the villagers all over India by penetrating the social order of everyday life was abandoned.
The new model envisaged by the Planning Commission was to select a few cases, and farmers with
suitable farming conditions, and introduce “intensive” agricultural production, enabled by state
intervention in the form of high yielding varieties of seeds, chemical fertilizers, irrigation, agricultural
credit, knowledge and expertise and procurement of grains at high prices 8. There was support from
Rockefeller and Ford foundations for collaboration with Indian universities to disseminate technical
know-how and enhance production of seeds and fertilizers. 114 districts were chosen for the
implementation of intensive production.
In Wiser’s Karimpur village, the villagers could buy supplies of seed from the seed store, that
were resistant to wind and storm (2000). The state agricultural university at Pantnagar was producing
seeds for its own research, and in fairs in the nearby township, new techniques were displayed. Supplies
of fertilizer increased, as well as the number of tube wells to help with irrigation. Farmers started
engaging in cash crop production such as peanuts, potatoes, soybean etc. and were selling much of their
agricultural produce to the warehouse in the nearby town.
CDP and Green Revolution together shaped the contours of farmers’ politics in India, as we know
it. Firstly, Green Revolution benefitted the wealthy land owners that already had an advantage over the
others. As Wiser commented, "As happens anywhere in the world, those who already had plenty and were
clever, were the gainers. Those who had little and did not know how to maneuver were the losers” (Wiser
et al, 2000: 256). There was also the development of what Rudolph and Rudolph call the bullock cart
capitalists (Rudolph,&Rudolph 1987: 148, also see Jaffrelot, 2003), the middle caste peasants such the
Jats in UP and Haryana, who had at least 10 acres of land (Hasan, 1989; Dhanagare, 1987). This
dimension has to be kept in mind since the Bhatta- Parsaul protests occurred in a Jat villages in Uttar
Pradesh, and many protests against land acquisition happen in Jat villages in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.
Secondly, the populist ideology underpinning the Green Revolution and agrarian development,
perpetrated by Indira Gandhi to strengthen her mass base and consolidate power, was that of garibi hatao,
8
The Agricultural Price Commission was set up to regulate the prices of food grains. But given the lobbying power
of the farmers, the procurement prices of food grains were always fixed by the state higher than that determined by
the Agricultural Price Commission (Varshney, 1998).
20
or “alleviate poverty”. This populist ideology meant that development, or the lack of it and need for it,
became the lens of politics in India. At Gupta shows, this became a catch phrase for populist politics of
the farmer-politicians such as Charan Singh, who differentiated “farmers” from those who oppressed
them such as money lenders, landlords in the village and industries and towns or the “urban” in India.
(Gupta, 1998: 78). Thirdly, the rural countryside was electorally integrated into the nation, which gave
even the poorest of agricultural laborers some agency. As Wiser says, “70 % voted in the last election.
They nonetheless tend to vote by caste.” (Wiser et al, 2000: 258). However, caste itself was not a
sufficient explanation for electoral behavior. Villagers voted according to caste only if the candidate
promised to fulfill material needs such as loans, subsidies and so forth.
State and Rural India in the post-Reform Era:
In the post-reform era, the emphasis on agricultural growth, put in place through the Green Revolution in
the 1960s, became the norm, leaving behind redistributive aspects such as land reforms and state
subsidies through social spending. The market reforms were introduced officially in 1991, though
processes were underway in the 1980s (Mukherji, 2010; Kohli, 2009). Most policies were aimed at
liberalizing the industrial and financial sector, thus once again focusing on the industrial versus the
agricultural sector. Pranab Bardhan characterized this as an urban bias, and a move away from attention to
the rural (Bardhan, 2010). However, rural India was brought under the aegis of neoliberalism soon after
through the following means. The open market for seeds and fertilizers was introduced in 1991, and
agricultural trade was liberalized in 1994, following the GATT agreement. After the establishment of the
WTO, these liberalization measures continued in India. (Vakulabharanam, 2005, Vadiyanathan, 2006;
Mishra 2006), summarized in Table 1.
TABLE 1
Area
Trade
Input Market
Seed
Fertilizer
Power
IMPORTANT LIBERALIZATION MEASURES INTRODUCED IN AGRICULTURE
Measures
Quantitative Restrictions (QRs) have been dismantled for about 470
agricultural products (1998). A further 1,400 agricultural products were put
on OGL (1999). Tariffs reduced to rates of 15–35 per cent. Trade for several
crops liberalized, that is, imports and exports were much freer. These
include important crops such as rice, wheat, cotton, pulses, and oil seeds,
which account for much of the gross cropping area in India.
Partial liberalization of seeds industry allowing for seed imports (1988).
Liberalization of the seed industry has continued to deepen since then.
There was gradual reduction of fertilizer subsidies from 1991until 2003
(budget announcement). This reduction is still in progress.
Power subsidies have been reduced in some areas in the country (1997–99).
The power generation sector was opened for a lot more private participation
21
including international participants. (Enron was the one of the players.)
Irrigation
A setting up of Water User Associations (WUAs) in various states that
would effectively bring about new use rights in irrigation sources such as
tanks and canals.
Institutional credit
A change in the provision of state supported institutional credit for
agriculture.
Food Subsidy
Public distribution system of food grains targeted to cover only the poor
(1997)
Food grains were distributed by the public system at dual prices for Above
Poverty Line (APL) and Below Poverty Line (BPL) populations (2000)
Dismantling of food subsidy and replacing it with food coupons (in process).
Source: Vakulabharanam 2005
The combination of trade liberalization, and reduction in plant food, power, credit and food
subsidies affected the rural sector in many different ways. The input cost of crops such as rice and cotton
rose following the cut in subsidies. Given the reduction in institutional credit, many small and marginal
farmers borrowed from money lenders, and the returns from farming, in a competitive market and in the
weakening of state marketing, were not high enough to offset the initial prices and interest rates. This
created a new rural indebtedness. In 2005, 48.6 percent of farmer households were indebted, and the
average outstanding loan amount was 12, 585 rupees, the amount being as high as 42,532 rupees for
farmers with landholdings between 4 and 10 hectares (National Sample Survey Organization, quoted in
Deshpande and Arora, 2010). This drove many farmers to commit suicide, a very important indicator of
the rural crisis in India. The Suicide Mortality Rate for male farmers had tripled from 17 per 100,000
persons in 1995 to 53 per 100,000 in 2004, in the cotton growing regional state of Maharashtra—nearly
four times the national average. This increase has been linked to the liberalization of cotton trade, which
pushed down the prices of local cotton (Mishra, 2006).
The suicides pointed to the fragmentation and individualization of farmers in the face of the
market, compared to an earlier phase of farmers’ agitations against the Dunkel Draft and GATT,
organized by movements such as the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association, which was known for, among
other things, an attack on the KFC outlet in Bangalore. In 1993, protests against the Dunkel Draft and
GATT agreements were held in New Delhi, led by Mahendra Singh Tikait of Bharatiya Kisan Union and
the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association. There were anywhere between 18,000 and 200,000 farmers
gathered from all over India (Gupta 1998, the highest and the lowest estimates based on news reports).
Nevertheless, these movements were unable to reverse the liberalization measures, or to interact and
organize farmers, who faced the new options . One consequence of the agrarian crisis was the mass
exodus from the countryside, where erstwhile small and marginal farmers and agricultural laborers
became migrant labor, waiting to be employed as an informal workforce in the liberalized economy.
22
Between 1983 and 2004-5, The GDP from agriculture went down from 37 to 21 percent. However the
employment in agriculture is still 57 percent. Non-industrial sectors of the economy have not been able to
absorb the surplus population in agriculture. In sum, small and marginal farmers seem to have suffered
due to the neoliberal reforms, and this suffering has left them individualized and fragmented, even when
they engage in contentious politics. Dipankar Gupta (2005) has argued that though owner-cultivators are
protected politically, their future is uncertain.
Comparing Political Society in China and India
Both in China and India, the ruling state penetrated society through the use of governmentality, only the
mechanisms differed. Common to both cases was the emergence of the village community as the lowest
units of the state. The collectives produced the village communities in China and the blocks produced the
village communities in India. One can also see a comparison in terms of how the village Panchayats and
brigades worked in terms of resource allocation. In China, the communist state embarked on a
modernization project to ensure economic growth at the level which the Soviet Union achieved through
its five year plans. This required a squeezing of the peasantry to feed the urban population. This, however,
conflicted with the proclaimed ideology that the Chinese state came into being through a peasant
revolution. These were the contradicting objectives that faced the state: 1) an increase in industrial
growth by squeezing the peasants; 2) the well-being of the peasants through land redistribution and
development efforts; 3) an increase in agricultural surplus by increasing productivity; 4) the fulfillment of
a socialist ideology. Many of these objectives overlapped: developing the countryside and increasing
productivity for instance could be mutually reinforcing. However, the priorities for the allocation of
scarce financial resources meant that there was not enough to be spent on development. Society was
reorganized to reproduce the collectivist logic. Each and every village, rich or poor, went through the
same processes of collectivization. Above all, this meant that the villagers were participants in
surveillance and disciplining from below. Thus they reproduced, mirrored and represented the central
state from below. Thus in China, we see a state-society relation that is direct and non-mediated. The
appeals made to the central state against the corrupt local state agents today reflects this relation that was
entrenched during the Mao era.
In India, the modality was different and less predictable than in China, due to the existence of a
population that had political rights and freedoms. Given the priority placed on industrial growth, the state
first attempted to reorganize the countryside, or let the villages reorganize themselves, to create an image
of a model countryside, where social organization was intended to suit the needs of the modernized
nation. Due to the failure of these efforts, the new policy selectively intervened in spaces that were
suitable for agricultural production so as to induce productivity, while the earlier developmental efforts
23
still continued under the rubric of the poverty alleviation rhetoric. The Green Revolution, the populist
rhetoric, and electoral processes created the class of rural politicians who amassed a following based on
rural power and the mobilization of the rural against the urban. Despite the plethora of social movement
organizations, civil society groups and NGOs, many protests against land acquisition in India, such as the
Bhatta-Parsaul protests, gather power from associating with these political leaders for the fulfillment of
immediate aims.
Scholars have pointed to the emergence of a post neoliberal state in China and India (Harriss,
2009; Wang, 2008). They particularly point to the introduction of social policies favoring the poor and
disadvantaged. Table 2 summarizes such policies that were introduced since the introduction of neoliberal
reforms. Many try to explain the introduction of these policies as a counter movement against
neoliberalism and globalization. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s ideas, many argue that these new policies are
the result of a double movement where the social fabric is protecting society from the ills of the market
(see Wang, 2009).
TABLE 2: RECENT SOCIAL POLICIES IN CHINA AND INDIA
Year
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
China
Urban
minimum
income
guarantee
program
Rural tax
reforms;
reestablishing
rural
cooperative
medical
systems
Introduction
of agricultural
subsidies
Partially
abolishing
agricultural
taxes
Abolishing all
agricultural
taxes;
introduction of
comprehensive
rural subsidies;
free compulsory
education in
western and
central rural
areas; public
housing for the
urban poor
Free
compulsory
education in
all rural
areas; basic
health
insurance for
all urban
residents;
Co-operative
Medical
System
coverage for
over 80
percent of
rural
population
Year
1995
2004
2006
2009
2012
India
The
National
Social
Assistance
Program
National
Social
Security
Scheme for
Unorganized
Sector
Workers; The
National
National
Rural
Employment
Guarantee
Act
The Right to
Education Act
National
Food
Security Bill
24
Social
Assistance
Program
Source: Compiled from Wang 2008; Harriss 2009
I argue that what we are witnessing is once again the symbiotic interaction of the state and
political society that preserves each other. Accumulation at the cost of redistribution, the introduction of
piecemeal welfare measures when penury and pressures from populations become unmanageable, the
watering down and not following up on the implementation of policies, all these have been crucial
strategies of the state to settle affairs in political society. The policies implemented do not reverse the
program of growth under neoliberalism; and indeed no structural changes are intended.
Conclusion
In this paper, I asked the question why collective protests in China and India followed the same pattern
despite the wide variation in political regimes. I focused on protests against land acquisition, and showed
that the cause of the protests, enactment of the protests and most importantly state responses to the
protests were strikingly similar. Both states reached conciliation with the protestors, instead of
suppressing them. This is not to say that violence was not involved, but the modality of state action was
strikingly different from say how the Chinese state dealt with civil society dissidents or the Indian state
dealt with unrest in Kashmir. What was similar to the rural protesters in China and India in their relation
to the state?
Existing approaches proved inadequate to explain this similarity. If the protests showed the
emergence of a rights awareness in China and conducive to democracy, why did such protests happen in
India which has been democratic for a long period of time? And if these disruptive protests pointed to a
lack of institutionalized channels such as the legal system or social movements to express dissent in
authoritarian China, why did they emerge in India where these channels are in abundance? If these
protests in China are a historical legacy, why do they exist in India as well? One way in which existing
approaches have been helpful was in identifying that protests were related to market reforms and the
predatory nature of the local state. Another way was in identifying that the governments took a more
conciliatory approach to protests rathe than suppressing them.
I argued that protests and the state responses showed a continuous relationship between state and
society in China and India. Here I drew on Partha Chatterjee’s idea of “political society.” Chatterjee
argues that most of the people in postcolonial democracies do not receive rights as citizens, but are
subjects of state governance through welfare policies. For Chatterjee, political society is the way the
25
majority of the “population” negotiates with the state. His conceptualization helps us to look at a
symbiotic state-society relation.
I showed two means of the evolution of political society in China and India. Common to both
modalities was the emergence of the village community as the lowest units of the state. The collectives
produced the village communities in China and the blocks produced the village communities in India. In
China, the village communities reproduced, mirrored and represented the central state from below against
the local officials. Thus in China, we see a state-society relation that is direct and non-mediated. The
appeals made to the central state against the corrupt local state agents today reflects this relation that was
entrenched during the Mao era. In India, the modality was different and less predictable than in China,
due to the existence of a population that was fully political. Despite the plethora of social movement
organizations, civil society groups and NGOs, many protests against land acquisition in India, such as the
Bhatta protests, gather power from associating with these political leaders for the fulfillment of immediate
aims.
What implications can we draw from this comparison? Can a conclusion be drawn about the
future of the Chinese state? It seems that as many have assessed, these protests do not place a long term
threat to the Chinese state. They emerge locally and are locally solved in a piecemeal manner and this
cellular nature of societal organization and contentions, prevent their eruption as massive, national level
protests, despite other dimensions of mobilization such as the mass media. Furthermore, most of the
demands are immediate, and not for the common good. A similar conclusion can be drawn about India.
V.S. Naipaul already pointed to the plethora of unrest in India. “The liberation of spirit that has come to
India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to
come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little
mutinies” (Naipaul, 1991: 517). However, these million mutinies failed to join together in a revolution
because of the not so romantic stalemate provided by a plurality of interests and identities, political
parties, social movements and civil society organizations. The second implication is about the state
suppression of dissident movements in China and India. The analysis of these needs a different paradigm
than collective protests that are discussed in this paper. The third implication is about the nature of
violence involved in these protests. Rather than being spontaneous and abrupt expressions of discontent,
the use of violence and disruptive tactics seem to follow a utilitarian logic, a calculated means to an end.
To conclude, these parallels suggest fundamental similarities in the ways that these states relate to
ordinary citizens, beyond what is explained by political regime types. Both societies have undergone
similar transformations in local governments, village autonomy and so on after the introduction of
reforms favoring a bigger role for the market in the economy. Comparing these two situations brings into
26
focus the similarities of governance in China and India, and goes beyond the frames of authoritarianism
and democracy.
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Department of Sociology
Working Papers Series
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Riaz Hassan and Geoffrey Benjamin,"Ethnic Outmarriage Rates in Singapore: The Influence of
Traditional Socio-Cultural Organisation", 1972, 26pp.
Hans-Dieter Evers, "Urban Involution: The Social Structure of Southeast Asian Towns",
1972, 19pp.
Erik Cohen, "Social Ecology -- A Multidimensional Approach", 1972, 97pp.
Noeleen Heyzer and Wee Gek Sim, "Trade Union Leaders in Singapore", 1972, 92pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "The Political Course of Singapore", (in English and Chinese), 1972, 23pp.
Chan Heng Chee and Hans-Dieter Evers, "National Identity and Nation Building in S.E. Asia", 1972,
29pp.
Peter Weldon, "Indonesian and Chinese Status Differences in Urban Java", 1972, 41pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "Austroasiatic Subgroupings and Prehistory in the Malay Peninsula", 1972, 63pp.
Aline Wong, "Job Satisfaction among Higher Non-Expatriate Civil Servants in Hong Kong", 1972, 64pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "Modernisation in Singapore: Changing Values and the Individual", 1972, 16pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "An Outline of Temiar Grammar", 1972, 41pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "Social Stratification in Singapore", 1973, 99pp.
Peter D. Weldon, John S. Western and Tan Tsu Haung,"Housing and Satisfaction with Environment in
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Mochtar Naim, "Penghulu di Minangkabau (Penghulu as Traditional Elite in Minangkabau)", 1973,
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Riaz Hassan, "Towards a Dialectic Anthropology -- A Comment on Professor M. Freedman's Paper,
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Compensation in an Atomistic Society", 1975, 31pp.
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Vivienne Wee, "A Preliminary Account of 'Buddhism' in Singapore", 1975, 56pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "The Cultural Logic of Singapore's 'Multiracialism'", 1975, 34pp.
Eckehard Kulke, "Social Class and Primordial Loyalty in Rural India -- An Approach to the Study of
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Peter S.J. Chen, "Elites and National Development in Singapore", 1975, 15pp.
Riaz Hassan, "Social and Psychological Implications of High Population Density", 1975, 30pp.
Rory Fonseca, "Planning and Land-use in Singapore", 1975, 26pp.
Lawrence A. Babb, "Thaipusam in Singapore: Religious Individualism in a Hierarchical Culture", 1976,
19pp.
Rory Fonseca, "Growth, Transition and the Urban Environment; A Reference Frame
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Peter S.J. Chen, "Asian Values in Modernising Society: A Sociological Perspective", 1976, 17pp.
Eddie C.Y. Kuo, "A Sociolinguistic Profile of Singapore", 1976, 20pp.
Michael A.H.B. Walter, "On Transitional Society", 1976, 20pp.
Frederic C. Deyo, "Marital Status, Job Orientation and Work Commitment among Semi-Skilled Female
Workers in Singapore ", 1976, 20pp.
Frederic C. Deyo, "Decision-Making and Supervisory Authority in Cross-Cultural erspective: An
Exploratory Study of Chinese and Western Management Practices in Singapore", 1976, 24pp.
John R. Clammer, "Sociological Approaches to the Study of Language and Literacy in Southeast
Asia", 1976, 28pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "Ecological Distribution of Social Pathology in Singapore", 1977, 28pp.
Aline K. Wong, "The Value of Children and the Household Economy -- A Review of urrent VOC
Studies in the Developing World", 1977, 24pp.
Chiew Seen Kong, "Educational and Occupational Attainment of Singapore's Chinese Women and
Men", 1977, 24pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "Population Policy and Social Science Research on Population in Singapore", 1977,
28pp.
Michael A.H.B. Walter and Riaz Hassan, "An Island Community in Singapore: A Characterisation of
a Marginal Society", 1977, 44pp.
Stella R. Quah, "The Unplanned Dimensions of Health Care in Singapore: Traditional Healers and
Self-Medication", 1977, 22pp.
John R. Clammer, "Islam and Capitalism in Southeast Asia", 1978, 22pp.
Robert G. Cooper, "Second World First: The Study of Films and the Use of Film in Social Studies",
1978, 20pp.
Peter S.J. Chen, "Ethnicity and Fertility: The Case of Singapore", 1978, 25pp.
Rolf
E. Vente, "Urban Planning and
High-Density
Living. Some Reflections on their
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William S.W. Lim, "A Case for Low-Rise High-Density Living in Singapore", 1979, 13pp.
Mak Lau Fong, "Subcommunal Participation and Leadership Cohesiveness of the Chinese in 19th
Century Singapore", 1984, 23pp.
Eddie C.Y. Kuo and Huey Tsyh Chen, "Towards an Information Society: Changing Occupational
Structure in Singapore", 1985, 29pp.
Ko Yiu Chung, "Industrial Workers and Class Formation: A Study of Chinese Industrial Workers in
North China, 1900-1937", 1986, 31pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "Between Isthmus and Islands: Reflection on Malayan Palaeo-Sociology", 1986,
43pp.
Habibul H. Khondker, "Is There a Dependency Paradigm?", 1986, 55pp.
Mak Lau Fong, "The Locality and Non-Locality Organising Principles: A Technical Report on the
Taxonomy of Chinese Voluntary Associations in the 19th Century Straits Settlements", 1986, 33pp.
Chua Beng Huat, "Reading Foucault as a Conservative", 1986, 40pp.
Vivienne Wee, "Material Dependence and Symbolic Independence: Constructions of Melayu Ethnicity
in Island Riau,Indonesia", 1986, 46pp.
Habibul Haque Khondker, "Famine Response: The l984-85 Ethopian Famine", 1986, 38pp.
Allen J. Chun, "Conceptions of Kinship and Kingship in Classical Chou China", 1986, 50pp.
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Mak Lau Fong, "The Social Alignment Patterns of the Chinese in 19th-century Penang", 1987, 32pp.
Allen J. Chun, "Durkheim Reconsidered: A Critique of Primitive Structuralism", 1987, 30pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "Process and Structure in Temiar Social Organization", 1987, 46pp.
Eddie C.Y. Kuo, "Confucianism and the Chinese Family in Singapore: Continuities and Changes",
1987, 32pp.
Tatsuko Takizawa, "Facets of Musical Activities in Singapore", 1987, 35pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "Notes on the Deep Sociology of Religion", 1987, 37pp.
Habibul Haque Khondker, "The World According to Wallerstein",1987, 48pp.
Mak Lau Fong, "Solidarity Models: A Sociological Framework For Comparative Criminal
Organization", 1988, 29pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, "Grammar and Polity: The Cultural and Political Background to Standard
Malay", 1988, 51pp.
Viswanathan Selvaratnam, "Limits to Vocationally-Oriented Education in the Third World", 1988, 36pp.
Vivienne Wee, What does ‘Chinese’ mean?: an exploratory essay, 1988, 41pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, The unseen presence: a theory of the nation-state and its mystifications, 1988,
55pp.
Tong Chee Kiong, Perceptions and boundaries: problematics in the assimilation of the Chinese in
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Alan J Chun, Toward a political economy of the sojourning experience: the Chinese in 19th century
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Chua Beng Huat, Public housing policies compared: US, Socialist countries and Singapore, 1988,
41pp.
Eddie C. Y. Kuo and Bjorn H. Jernudd, Language management in a multilingual state: the case of
planning in Singapore, 1988, 45pp.
Ho Kong Chong, The community study: a discussion of the method with modifications for research in
Singapore, 1988, 44pp.
Tan Ern Ser, Employing organizations and the dynamics of social mobility in Singapore: an analytical
framework and empirical analysis, 1988, 43pp.
Mak Lau Fong, Singapore Chinese traditional voluntary associations: convergence vs divergence,
1989, 36pp.
Tong Chee Kiong, Centripetal authority, differentiated networks: the social organization of Chinese
firms in Singapore, 1989, 36pp.
Chan Kwok Bun and Ho Kong Chong (eds), Explorations in Asian sociology. 100th special issue,
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Eddie C. Y. Kuo, Ethnicity, polity and economy: a case study of Mandarin trade and the Chinese
connection, 1990, 36pp.
Chua Beng Huat, Fashion shopping: programs, stages and audience, 1990, 29pp.
Georg Stauth, Revolution in spiritless times: an essay on the inquiries of Michel Foucault on the
Iranian Revolution, 1991, 54pp.
Chua Beng Huat & Eddie C. Y. Kuo, The making of a new nation: cultural construction and national
identity in Singapore, 1991, 43pp.
Alfred Choi, Policing domestic disturbances: a research review of police response, 1991, 40pp.
Vineeta Sinha, Some notes on ‘temple’-building and image-worship in Indian religion, in historical
perspective, 1991, 50pp.
Ho Kong Chong, Studying the city in the new international division of labour, 1991, 43pp.
Georg Stauth, Critical theory and pre-Fascist social thought, 1991, 35pp.
Zhang Xin-Xiang, A methodological critique of Marx’s theory of surplus value, 1991, 37pp.
Lee Siew Peng, Class and noise tolerance: some ruminations, 1991, 39pp.
Paulin Tay Straughan, Screening for early detection of cervical cancer: the relationship between social
integration and preventive health, 1992, 34pp.
Lian Kwen Fee, Stratification in Maori society in the 19th century, 1992, 40pp.
Eddie C. Y. Kuo, Confucianism as political discourse in Singapore: the case of an incomplete revitalization movement, 1992, 29pp.
Syed Farid Alatas, Some problems of indigenization, 1992, 46pp.
Zhang Xin-Xiang, Crime and control: a neo-rational choice approach, 1993, 43pp.
Tan Ern Ser, Theorising the dynamics of industrial relations and trade unionism: lessons from the
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Zhang Xin Xiang, Education as a vehicle for social stratificational change: the case of Singapore,
1993, 38pp.
James V. Jesudason, Statist democracy and the limits of civil society in Malaysia, 1993, 40pp.
Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr, Nouns that sail through history: reified categories and their transcendence in
Marx’s social theory, 1994, 50pp.
Syed Farid Alatas, Post-colonial state: dual functions in the public sphere, 1994, 45pp.
Chua Beng Huat, That imagined space: nostalgia for the kampung in Singapore, 1994, 39pp.
Habibul H Khondker, Globalization theory: a critical appraisal, 1994, 42pp.
Kwok Kian Woon, Social transformation and the problem of social coherence: Chinese Singaporeans
at century’s end, 1994, 39pp.
Chua Beng Huat, Culture, multiracialism and national identity in Singapore, 1995, 36pp.
Nirmala Purushotam, Disciplining differences: ‘race’ in Singapore, 1995, 33pp.
Chua Beng Huat and Tan Joo Ean, Singapore: new configuration of a socially stratified culture, 1995,
40pp.
Paulin Tay Straughan and Tan Ern Ser, Shiftwork, job satisfaction, and turnover propensity: nurses in
a Singapore hospital, 1996, 26pp.
Habibul Haque Khondker, Competing paradigms and conflicting theories in the studies of the development of Asian NICS, 1996, 37pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, Rationalisation and re-enchantment in Malaysia: Temiar religion 1964–1995,
1996, 52pp.
Selina Ching Chan, Negotiating Coloniality and Tradition: The Identity of Indigenous Inhabitants in
Hong Kong, 1996, 43pp.
Geoffrey Benjamin, Affixes, Austronesian and iconicity in Malay, 1997,31 pp.
Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rahah, Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore, 1997,24 pp.
Kay Mohlman, Home-base Workplaces and Workplace Domesticities: A Socio-Spatial Analysis, 1998,
28pp.
Paulin Tay Straughan, The Social Contradictions of the Normal Family: Challenges to the Ideology,
1999,18pp.
Vineeta Sinha, Colonial Encounters: Transplanting "Western Medicine"; Ousting "Traditional"
Healing? 1999,42pp.
Tong Chee Kiong and Lian Kwen Fee, The Nationstate and the Limits to Globalization in Southeast
Asia,1999,30pp.
Chia Hwee Kim Karen, Experiencing Sacred Spaces: The Negotiation of Authenticity by Tourists and
Worshippers, 1999, 45pp.
Leong Wai Teng, Consuming the Nation: National Day Parades in Singapore, 1999, 16pp
Maribeth Erb, What is a Tourist?: Tourists and Other Spirits in the Manggaraian World, 1999, 28pp
Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha, Teaching Classical Sociological Theory in Singapore: The
Context of Eurocentrism, 1999, 34pp
Thomas Menkhoff and Jochen Wirtz, Local Responses to Globalisation-The Case of Singapore, 1999,
34pp
Johannes Han-Yin Chang, China: An Unintended Transformation of Class Stratification, 1999, 32pp
Srilata Ravi, “Antivoyages-Reflections on women travellers’ writings”, 1999,18pp
Goh Pei Siong Daniel, Space, Meaning and A “Neighborhood” Charismatic Fundamentalist Church,
1999, 30pp
Ng Tang Nah, The Effects of Science Education on National Economic Growth in The World and
Singapore, 1999, 21pp
Md.Mizanur Rahman, The Asian Economic Crisis and Migrant Workers: The Case of Bangladeshi
Workers in Singapore, 1999, 33pp
Vineeta Sinha, Socio-Cultural Theory and Colonial Encounters: The Discourse on Indigenizing
Anthropology in India, 2000, 38pp
Chua Beng Huat, Taiwan’s Present/Singapore’s Past Mediated by Hokkien Language, 2000, 19pp
Michael Hill, ‘Asian Values’ as Reverse Orientalism: The case of Singapore, 2000, 34pp.
Hans-Dieter Evers, Epistemic Cultures: Towards a New Sociology on Knowledge, 2000, 16pp.
Roxana Waterson, A Toraja Pilfrimage: The Life of Fritz Basiang, 2000, 46pp.
Tan Ern Ser, Globalization and National Industrial Relations Systems: Theoretical Implications from
the Singapore Case, 2000, 12pp.
Thomas Menkhoff and Lena Kay. Worlds Apart? Reflections On The Relationship Between Small
Entrepreneurs And External Change Advocates In Singapore, 2000, 22pp.
Michael Bourdillon. Children’s Right and Children’s Labour, 2000, 22pp.
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Alwyn Lim. ‘Intelligent Island Discipline: Notes on Culture, Governance, And Subjectivity’, 2000,
50pp.
Woon-Ping Chin. ‘The Mystery Of The Postcolonial Woman’, 2001, 20pp.
Ryan Bishop. Representations of Asians in the American Public Imagination: The Problems of
Representation as a Problematic. 2001,20pp.
Maribeth Erb. Conceptualising Culture in a Global Age: Playing Caci in Manggarai. 2001, 32pp.
Alexius A. Pereira. ‘Revitalizing National Competitiveness: The Transnational Aspects of Singapore’s
Regionalization Strategy (1990-2000),’ 2001, 28pp.
Vineeta Sinha. A critical study in concept formation: conceptualizations of ‘primitive thought’ and
‘primitive mentality’ in selected works of Franz Boas and Lucien Levy-Bruhl, 2001, 32pp.
Johannes Han-Yin Chang. Differential Educational Attainment and its impact on Social Stratification :
A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective , 2002, 41pp.
Mason C. Hoadley, Why “You can’t go home”: The Legacy of Law and Indonesian Public
Admisitration”, 2002, 26 pp.
Volker H. Schmidt. Models of Health Care Rationing, 2003, 24pp.
Volker H. Schmidt and Lim Chee Han. Organ transplantation in Singapore: History, problems, and
policies, 2003, 27pp.
Eric C. Thompson. Tribal Signifiers and Intersubjectivity in a General Theory of Group Identity, 2004,
36pp.
Noorman Abdullah. (Re)thinking the Categories of Halal and Haram: Notes on Islamic Food Rules in
Singapore, 2004, 37pp.
Shi Fayong. Social Capital and Collective Resistance in Urban China Neighborhoods: A Community
Movement in Shanghai, 2004, 47pp.
Volker H. Schmidt. Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity? 2004, 25pp.
Habibul Haque Khondker. Globalization to Glocalization: Evolution of a Sociological Concept, 2004,
18pp.
Syed Farid Alatas. Ideology and Utopia in the Thought of Syed Shaykh Al-Hady, 2005, 31pp.
Kelvin E.Y. Low. Olfaction and the Presentation of Self, 2005, 29pp.
Douglas Farrer. Deathscapes of the Malay Martial Artist, 2005, 35pp.
Noorman Abdullah. Exploring Constructions of the ‘Drug Problem’ in Historical and Contemporary
Singapore’ 2005, 38pp.
Lim Bee Fong Lisa. Hegemony, Dominance and Resistance in Singapore: Pulau Ubin As a Case Study,
2005, 19pp.
Volker H. Schmidt. Varieties of Social Policy: East Asian Welfare Capitalism in Comparative
Perspective, 2005, 23pp.
Liang Yongjia. Fertility, Kingship and Ethnicity: the Gwer Sa La Festival of the Bai in Southwest
China, 2006, 26pp.
Kelvin E.Y. Low. Olfactive Frames of Remembering: Notes on the Smells of Memories, 2007, 27pp.
Pereira Shane Nicolas. A New Religious Movement in Singapore: Syncretism and Variation in the Sai
Baba Movement, 2007, 27pp.
Alexius A. Pereira. Explaining the Enduring Comprehensive Developmental State in Singapore: A
Class Relations Perspective, 2007, 21pp.
Vineeta Sinha. Harriet Martineau-social thinker and methodologist: In danger of being forgotten once
again? 2007, 30pp.
Vincent Chua. Social Networks and Labour Market Outcomes in the Meritocracy, 2007, 32pp.
Sarbeswar Sahoo. Globalization and “the Politics of the Governed”: Redefining Governance in
Liberalized India, 2007, 30pp.
Noorman Abdullah. Rave encounters and the Meaningfulness of ATS Use: Realms of ‘Alternative’
Possibilities in Singapore, 2007, 31pp.
Justin Lee. Conditions for Progressive Research Programs in ‘Qualitative’ Sociology, 2007, 37pp.
Gloria Arlini. (Mis)remembering Soe Hok Gie: Transmitting and (re)constructing social memory in
turbulent Indonesia, 2008, 24pp.
Ho Kong Chong. Meandering beyond the Single Case in Urban Studies, 2008, 21pp.
Yuko Okubo. The Localization of Multicultural Education in Osaka, Japan: With a Focus on the
Concept of “Native Speaker”, 2008, 39pp.
Wei-Jun Jean Yeung. Days of the Week: Intra-family Childcare Time Distribution, 2009, 39pp.
Volker H. Schmidt. Conceptualizing Global Modernity. A Tentative Sketch, 2012, 55pp.
Volker H. Schmidt and Tiffany Jordan Chuang May. Educating Global Citizens, 2013, 26pp.
Manjusha Nair. Protests and Political Society in China and India, 2013, 38pp.
38