A PROTEST SOCIETY EVALUATED: POPULAR PROTESTS IN CHINA, 2000–2019*
This article reveals the trends and characteristics of popular protests in China, drawing evidence from a database the author built by collecting more than 12,000 news stories on China’s mass protests from 2000 to 2019. The data present the ups and downs of China’s social protests over the past two decades, showing that social protest in China has been diffused widely throughout different social groups and has covered a vast variety of issues across a wide geographical area. However, despite the trend of subsiding protests after the mid-2010s, the Chinese state has a lower capacity to channel popular protests into institutionalized forms as in the norm in democratic polities. Under Xi Jinping’s rule in 2013–19, the regime has been relying on increasing surveillance and repression to squash protest activities. Police have also been more inclined to arrest protesters. This study concludes that the dynamics of social protests in China are contingent on its state-society relations and the state’s capacity of channeling contentious politics into more institutionalized forms.
Contributor Notes
* I thank Yongshun Cai, Kevin O’Brien, Yang Su, and Dingxin Zhao for their suggestions and advice in conducting this project and writing related papers. I am grateful for Hank Johnston’s and the anonymous reviewers’ comments and suggestions. The data collection process for this study continued for more than ten years, and I am particularly grateful to the dozens of assistants who participated during that time—many of whom were graduate students in the Master’s Program of Contemporary China Studies at National Tsing Hua University. This research was supported by a series of grants from Academia Sinica and the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan. I also thank the Harvard-Yenching Institute for providing a visiting scholarship which aided the writing of this article.
† Chih-Jou Jay Chen is Professor and Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. He also teaches at National Tsing Hua University and National Taiwan University. Please direct all correspondence to the author at jaychen@sinica.edu.tw.