Middle-Class Mobilization
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Journal of Democracy, Volume 20, Number 3, July 2009, pp. 29-32 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jod.0.0090
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jod/summary/v020/20.3.wasserstrom.html
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China Since Tiananmen
middle-class mobilization
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is professor of history at the University of
California, Irvine. His books include Student Protests in TwentiethCentury China (1991) and the forthcoming China in the 21st Century:
What Everyone Needs to Know (2010). He is a cofounder of “The China Beat” (http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com), which strives to bridge
the gap between academic and journalistic discussions of the PRC.
Many Chinese events made international headlines in 2008, thanks
both to the long-anticipated Beijing Olympic Games and to surprise occurrences such as the massive May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province.
The news from China told as well of a diffuse range of dramatic protests,
involving people, such as striking cab drivers, who felt frustrated by living in a locale or belonging to a social group left behind by the economic
boom. Others relayed the grievances of people angered by official misbehavior, like the grieving parents from Sichuan who charged that secret
deals between shady contractors and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
cadres had condemned their province to flimsier school buildings—and
hence more dead children—than should have been the case.
Still others were protesting because they felt that China was being
pushed around by other countries. Demonstrators rallied outside branches of the French supermarket chain Carrefour after a Chinese woman was
roughed up by free-Tibet supporters during the Paris leg of the Olympictorch relay. A fourth subset of those registering discontent were upset
over the general direction in which their region or the country as a whole
was heading. In Tibet, for example, young Tibetans rioted in March
against members of other ethnic groups.
But in a year that saw China receive an unusual amount of global
attention both welcome and unwelcome, the very first protest to make
headlines was quite different from all those just described. It was a gathering by relatively well-off residents of central Shanghai, who called for
a halt to plans to extend into their district the city’s iconic first-in-theJournal of Democracy Volume 20, Number 3 July 2009
© 2009 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Journal of Democracy
world, fastest-on-earth magnetic-levitation (or “MagLev”) train line,
which previously ran only through an isolated section of East Shanghai.
Here are some key things to keep in mind about this protest, which
was not the most dramatic occurrence of 2008 by any means, but which
nevertheless draws our attention to something significant about today’s
China:
1) The participants were not people being left behind by the economic
boom, but rather members of what can be called, using the term loosely,
the new “middle class.” That is, they were neither part of the urban elite,
which is made up of the nouveau riche and those with official posts or
high-level connections within the CCP (often the same people fit into
both of these privileged categories), nor did they belong to the ranks of
the disadvantaged (recent migrants from the countryside, laid-off workers, or others struggling to get by).
2) When these protesters gathered outside a government building,
they were not voicing outrage at specific officials or complaining about
general developments. They simply claimed that they should have been
consulted more fully about a project that would have a profound impact
on their lives. They worried that the noisy new train line might harm
their families’ health (there was talk of radiation associated with the
MagLev); would disturb their peace and quiet; and would depress local
property values in a neighborhood with no small number of fledgling
condominium owners.
3) The protests were generally nonconfrontational. This was underscored by participants referring to their acts not as “marches,” but rather
as “strolls” or even “going shopping on Nanjing Road” (the street on
which the official building sits is also famous for its department stores).
4) Even though there were distinctive-to-Shanghai dimensions to the
anti-MagLev protests, they were also part of a wider pattern. They followed on the heels of mid-2007 protests in the city of Xiamen, Fujian
Province, which aimed at forcing the relocation of a chemical plant.
The demonstrations in Xiamen, which is several hundred miles down
the coast from Shanghai, also were part of a neighborhood-specific
struggle waged by members of the urban middle class, a social sector
that is not only relatively privileged but also unusually adept at using
new communications technologies such as text messaging. Following
the Shanghai “strolls” (a term that would catch on) came similar mid2008 agitations, in the western city of Chengdu and in Beijing soon
after the Olympics ended. The driving force in both cases was concern
over pollution.
Protests such as these—they are sometimes called NIMBY (“not in
my backyard”) struggles—add a noteworthy new dimension to the already-complex world of contentious politics in today’s China. But what
is their overall significance? The phenomenon is too recent to let us
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
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draw any far-reaching conclusions, but it may not be too early to identify one possible interpretive avenue that seems best avoided as a likely
dead end, and another that seems much more promising.
Roads to Take—and Avoid
I worry that some foreign observers will jump to the wrong conclusion when thinking about Chinese middle-class protests, especially if
we see more and larger ones in the years to come: namely, that they
signal the imminent arrival of the sort of democratic transition that has
so often been predicted for China since the 1980s. When protesters took
to the streets of Beijing twenty years ago, with the fall of Philippine
dictator Ferdinand Marcos fresh in many minds, some thought that the
CCP would be toppled by something akin to the “people power” rising
in Manila. Then, after Solidarity won elections in Poland and the Soviet
system unraveled, some outsiders predicted that China would follow in
the footsteps of one or another East European country. All it would take
would be some “X factor” or other, perhaps the appearance of a reformminded official with bold ideas or the rise of a charismatic organizer
able to bring workers and intellectuals together.
More recently, while the search for a Chinese counterpart to Mikhail
Gorbachev or Lech Wa³êsa has not been abandoned completely, one
“X factor” on which some have begun to bet has been a restive middle
class. Once an authoritarian country has undergone a dramatic period of
economic development, members of the middle class will demand more
of a say not only in how they make and spend money, but in how they
are governed. The CCP, according to this logic, could end up facing
the same pressure to share power that its erstwhile rival, the Nationalist
Party (KMT), faced and eventually gave in to on Taiwan.
It is easy to see the appeal of the thought that China, a country which
has so often surprised us of late, is still destined to have a future that will
resemble some other formerly authoritarian country’s recent past. Yet
there are important flaws in this mode of thinking. How justified, for
instance, is the assumption that because a number of Leninist regimes
fell between 1989 and 1991, communist rule everywhere must be teetering? In Central and Eastern Europe and many parts of the old USSR,
communist rule was essentially a foreign imposition. In China, as in
Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea, the communist regime has at least
some basis for grounding its claim to legitimacy in its role in a struggle
not to impose but to throw off foreign domination. Then too, one must
account for the cautionary lessons that many Chinese (ordinary citizens
as well as rulers) have drawn from watching the postcommunist travails
of places such as the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR. Have the
economic hardships, internal wars, social upheavals, and loss of respect
in the world that such countries have had to bear made them seem like
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models for emulation in Chinese eyes, or worrisome examples of sad
blunders best avoided?
The CCP is intensely aware of all the precedents just cited, and its
leaders have been trying to make sure that they avoid the fates of their
counterparts in both East Asian and East European settings. Among the
reasons why a Chinese Wa³êsa has not emerged is Beijing’s concerted effort to make sure that the “Polish disease” (as a Solidarity-style mobilization has sometimes been called) never infiltrates the PRC’s body politic.
The authorities will sometimes compromise with protesting workers, but
have shown determination in trying to nip in the bud any protest struggle
that seems capable of crossing class lines.
Just as it has proved risky in the past to play the waiting game with
China where other “X factors” have been concerned, this is likely to be
the case again with the middle class. There are forces working to keep
this group’s restiveness in check, such as the sense of pride that some
members of it feel in the resurgence of their nation or even their respective cities. And the CCP’s leaders are surely trying hard to figure out
how to keep their organization from suffering the fate that the anticommunist (but organizationally Leninist) KMT underwent on Taiwan in
the 1980s.
While recent middle-class protests are not signs that a political transformation is imminent, they do suggest that China has reached a turning
point of sorts. The shift that I have in mind relates to a turn, among relatively well-off urbanites, from worrying about urban modernization’s
slowness in coming to worrying about urban modernization’s effects on
the middle class’s quality of life now that such modernization is here.
Three decades ago, when Mao had only been dead a few years, Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng wrote his famous 1978 manifesto
insisting that China needed a “Fifth Modernization” (democracy) to supplement the “Four Modernizations” already undertaken by Deng Xiaoping (of agriculture, industry, technology, and defense). Wei argued that
without political reform, China would not be able to develop economically. Democracy was presented not simply or even primarily as an abstract good in itself, but also as another rung on the ladder to modernity
and its promises of wealth, power, and prestige.
Now, by contrast, middle-class protesters are no longer fighting for
swifter modernization. Instead, they are worrying about what the steamroller (or the MagLev train, or the chemical plant) of runaway modernization might flatten as it continues on its path. Participants in NIMBY
protests are not fretting that progress is coming to China too slowly,
nor do they want to stop the steamroller in its tracks. Instead, they are
insisting that they deserve a greater say in how far, how fast, and exactly
where it goes, and to what ends. They want a voice in determining how
their neighborhoods are transformed.