Reflections on Popular Protest in Modern China

Elizabeth J. Perry
Harvard University

	
	No country boasts a more enduring or more colorful history of rebellion and revolution than China.  The Chinese tradition of popular upheaval stretches back well beyond this century; indeed, records allow us to trace it as far back as 209 B.C. when the Chen She Rebellion helped to topple the mighty Qin empire and give rise to the famous Han dynasty.  Over the ensuing millennia, popular protest has formed a constant and consequential theme in Chinese political history.  
	How do we explain this impressive record of protest?  And what consequences does our explanation hold for an understanding of contemporary Chinese politics?  These questions have been at the heart of my own scholarly research agenda, from my first book (Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945, published by Stanford University Press in 1980) to my latest book, entitled Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and State-Building in Modern China (forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield Press).  In trying to answer these questions, I moved from the study of peasant rebellions in the late imperial and Republican periods to studies of the labor movement, from the 1920s to the present.  Along the way, I have examined a wide variety of protests in modern and contemporary China: tax revolts, banditry, secret societies, religious rebellion, industrial strikes, student demonstrations, and armed revolution in both urban and rural settings.  While the general focus on popular protest has remained more or less the same, my approach to the subject has changed rather markedly over the years.  Today I would like to reflect upon both the continuities and the discontinuities in my – still evolving – understanding of popular protest in China.
	My first book, Rebels and Revolutionaries, was a revised version of my doctoral dissertation – completed in the University of Michigan’s Department of Political Science in 1978.  It was a rather unusual political science dissertation at the time, inasmuch as it explored events which occurred prior to 1949 (when the People’s Republic of China was established).  In those days, the year 1949 marked a fairly rigid separation between historians (who confined their studies to the pre-49 period) and political scientists (who worked on the post-49 period).  It was considered acceptable for political scientists to study the history of the Chinese Communist Party, from its founding in 1921 on, but all other pre-49 topics were considered the purview of historians.  In fact, my dissertation proposal was at first rejected by the department for this very reason.  Only after considerable petitioning on my part (and the energetic support of my dissertation chair, Professor Michel Oksenberg) was the department’s decision eventually reversed. 
	In one respect my dissertation project did resemble that of a historian; it was based upon the use of archival materials (the Ming-Qing Archives, the Bureau of Investigation Archives, the Party History Archives) that were not the normal raw materials of political science research.  Many of these materials were written in classical Chinese, often in cursive handwriting, and required a level of patience to decipher that is not a common trait among political scientists.  However, in other respects the project departed significantly from typical historical research.  For one thing, it covered a century in time (from 1845 to 1945) and compared various movements (the Nian Rebellion, the Red Spears Society, and the Communist New Fourth Army) that many historians would consider too dissimilar to fit between two covers of a standard historical monograph.  For another thing, my interest in undertaking this comparison was less to describe these particular events than to draw general lessons about (1) the conditions under which peasant rebellion is likely to occur and persist, and (2) the relationship between “traditional” rebellion and “modern” revolution.  The search for patterns, rather than particulars, is of course the driving force behind social science analysis, distinguishing it from a humanistic approach (preferred by many historians) that emphasizes individual interpretation over general explanation.
	My dissertation research was centered on a region of China (known as Huaibei, or the area north of the Huai River).  This was the heart of China’s flood and famine region, where natural disasters were frequent and peasant life was extremely hard.  Huaibei had been home to the first recorded peasant rebellion in Chinese history, back in the third century B.C., and to countless other rural uprisings in the centuries that followed.  This region was also the site of a Communist base area in the 1930s and 1940s during the revolutionary war against first the Japanese and then the Nationalists.  It thus seemed to me an ideal location for a study designed to examine the relationship between traditional rebellion and modern revolution.  Many social scientists – from sociologists Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol to anthropologist Eric Wolf – had argued for a positive relationship between rebellion and revolution.  The existence of a strong tradition of rural rebellion, they suggested, prepared the ground for a Communist-led rural revolution.  However, these scholars were quite vague about the specific mechanisms that linked rebellion and revolution.  My study was intended to establish these connections, through a detailed case study of one remarkably rebellious region.  I chose to focus upon the Nian Rebellion of the mid 19th century and the Red Spears Society of the early 20th century as my examples of “traditional” rebellion because the secondary literature on these events suggested that they were both outgrowths of the religious White Lotus Society active in this part of the North China Plain.  Surely, I reasoned, this millenarian religious institution was the glue that linked rebellions and revolutions.  Historian Eric Hobsbawm in his book, Primitive Rebels, had suggested that millenarian rebellions were conducive to modern revolution.  When I conducted my research, however, I was quickly forced to retreat from my guiding hypotheses.  First of all, it became clear from my work in the Ming-Qing and Party History Archives that neither the Nian nor the Red Spears had much of any link with the White Lotus Society, despite a substantial secondary literature in both Chinese and English that had argued for just such a connection.  Secondly, when I began to read the diaries and reports of Communist cadres working in the Huaibei area, I soon realized that these revolutionaries found the existence of a strong tradition of peasant rebellion much more of a hindrance than a help in their own efforts to mobilize the peasantry.  Faced with these unsettling discoveries, my initial reaction was despair – and a temptation to retreat from my social science ambitions into an embrace of the idiosyncrasies of historical events.  However, after puzzling over my findings for a while, I began to see a certain pattern to the data after all – although not the one with which I had originally begun my research.
	Peasants, it seemed, were influenced less by the inspiration of religious beliefs than by the imperatives of the hostile material environment in which they were trying to eke out a living. In adapting to their difficult environment, peasants adopted various strategies of survival which ranged from “predatory” strategies of begging and banditry (among the less fortunate) to “protective” strategies of militias and fortresses (among the relatively well-off).  Predatory strategies were typically organized along lines of kinship (family and lineage) whereas protective strategies were more commonly organized along lines of community (village and market town). Peasant rebellions such as the Nian and Red Spears, I came to realize, were extensions of these ordinary survival strategies.  The strategies were basically means of gaining or retaining scarce resources in an extremely unstable and risky environment; they were not inherently political, but – at times when ambitious leaders took charge – these ongoing modes of action could escalate into rebellions that threatened the political authorities.  The Communist revolution, by contrast, was aimed from the outset at political targets, and Communist cadres moved decisively against both predatory bandits and protective militias in an effort to mobilize the rural populace along new, class-based lines.
	In this study I developed what I called an ecological analysis of peasant rebellion, which highlighted the influential role of the material environment, and which stressed the discontinuity between the rebel tradition and the Communist revolution.  I went on to apply this perspective to a number of other cases of rural unrest in late Qing and Republican China, the results of which were reported in various journal publications.  When it came to thinking about my next book-length project, however, I found myself increasingly drawn to the study of workers rather than peasants.  This was partly because I was aware of a rich collection of primary materials, housed in the archives of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, which included detailed transcripts of lengthy interviews conducted in the early 1950s with hundreds of workers who had been active in the Shanghai labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s.  The materials permitted a rare first-hand glimpse into the mentality of ordinary workers themselves.  Another reason behind my decision to abandon the peasantry in favor of the proletariat was that I was becoming somewhat bored with social science debates about peasant rebellion and agrarian revolution, and thought I might “recharge my intellectual batteries” by engaging instead with the extensive secondary literature on the European and American labor movements.  The field of labor studies had recently been transformed by E.P. Thompson’s enormously influential book, The Making of the English Working Class.  Although a Marxist, Thompson stressed the cultural dimensions of working-class action, arguing that class consciousness does not follow automatically from economic circumstances but – in the unusual cases where it develops -- reflects the mentality of particular groups of workers living within specific cultural milieus.  Thompson’s work spawned a whole generation of “new labor historians” who explored the lives and thoughts of ordinary workers.  Their studies highlighted the deep divisions (along lines of gender, skill, ethnicity, religion, education, etc.) that beset the European and American working classes, and militated against their acting in a coherent, class-conscious manner.  In contrast to Karl Marx’s image of a united and militant proletariat, rising up in revolutionary struggle to usher in a new communist order, scholars pictured the proletariat as fragmented and politically powerless.
	A few scholars had already ventured into studies of Chinese labor history from a Thompsonian perspective, but without the benefit of the rich primary sources that the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences was able to offer.  I hoped to use these materials to combine a Thompsonian emphasis on working-class culture with a political scientist’s interest in industrial unions and strike actions. The result was my book, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford University Press: 1993).   Following the lead of “new labor historians,” I highlighted the complex nature of the Shanghai proletariat, which was indeed deeply divided along lines of native-place origin, gender, and skill level.  Unlike much previous scholarship, however, I emphasized the ways in which these very divisions served as the basis for working-class action.  Rather than be incapacited by their internal differences, workers were empowered by them.  Workers, organized on the basis of native-place, gender and skill, were involved in numerous politically influential strikes, from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 through the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, the Three Workers’ Armed Uprisings of 1926-27, and the strikes of the Nationalist period, and played an important role in the Communist takeover of the cities in the spring of 1949.  Workers were not striking as a unified, class-conscious force to be sure, but their actions -- fragmented as they were -- nevertheless carried considerable political weight.  Moreover, different groups within the labor force supported different kinds of politics.  The major social base of the Communists, it turned out, came not from the most impoverished and exploited workers but rather from the best educated, best paid and best organized segment of the work force: skilled and literate male workers from the richer areas of South China.  By contrast, the Nationalists drew support from a less skilled, less educated segment of the workforce: semi-skilled workers, also primarily male, but from the poorer areas of North China.  While the pro-Communist skilled workers were often organized by guild associations, the less skilled pro-Nationalist workers often joined secret-society organizations.  The unskilled women workers, who were arguably the most oppressed group of all, were generally reluctant to support either political party and tended instead to engage in independent strike actions for purely economic goals.  
	There were certainly some points of continuity between my first and second books.  In both studies I found that peasants and workers acted not as unified classes, but on the basis of more parochial orientations.  For the peasantry, kinship and community were the salient mobilizing networks.  For the proletariat, native-place, gender and skill were the key bases of collective action.  Yet there were also some major differences in approach.  Whereas the first book stressed material environmental conditions in giving rise to strategies of survival, the second book emphasized culture and identity in generating distinctive patterns of working-class action.  This difference was surely due in part to the more prominent role that the natural environment plays in rural agrarian – as opposed to urban industrial – life.  But it was also due to changes in scholarly approach, with issues of culture and identity becoming more central to studies of social history.  
	After completing this study of the Shanghai labor movement between 1919 and 1949, I began to turn my attention to the impact of the labor movement on post-‘49 politics.  That interest result in a co-authored book with a former researcher at the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution.  My co-author had spent many years poring over the Cultural Revolution materials in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, materials which remain to this day closed to ordinary researchers (Chinese and foreigners alike) because of the continued political sensitivity of the Cultural Revolution.  During the course of her years of archival research, my co-author had handcopied what amounted to more than 50 volumes (each containing hundreds of pages) of extremely valuable primary materials.  These ranged from highly classified reports and summary statistics to personal confessions made to the public security authorities upon the arrests of many of the Cultural Revolution activists.  
	Once again, the book that resulted from this research stressed the fragmented character of the working class.  We found that there were three different labor movements among Shanghai workers during the Cultural Revolution: “rebel,” “conservative,” and “economistic.”  Whereas rebel workers tried to topple Communist Party authorities, conservatives protected them.  Economistic workers, by contrast, showed little interest in the political debates of the day and agitated instead for higher wages and improved working conditions.  To some degree, this tripartite division within the Cultural Revolution labor movement was similar to the divisions that had marked the labor movement before 1949.  Whereas during the Republican period the labor movement was divided into Communist, Nationalist and independent, now it split along rebel, conservative, and economistic lines. Yet despite certain parallels between the two periods, our book emphasizes the extent to which the Chinese working class had in fact changed as a result of policies imposed by the Communist regime.  Migration restrictions, for example, meant that native-place origins no longer played the same role as they had in the pre-Communist period, when workers were usually first-generation immigrants to the city.  
	In this book, we propose that different kinds of labor movements are best explained by different analytical approaches.  While the “economistic” strain can be understood in terms of material grievances, and the “conservative” faction in terms of political networks, to explain the “rebels” requires an excursion into the realm of social psychology.  Some rebel leaders were materially deprived; others were enmeshed in influential political networks; and yet others had become alienated from the authorities by some unhappy disciplinary experience.  But, despite these disparate backgrounds, all of the rebel leaders -- in contrast to the leaders of the conservative and economistic movements -- displayed unusually feisty and independent personalities.  Thanks to the rich biographical details contained in the police confessions, we were able to describe these individual personalities at some length.  The result, we believe, is a more complex and human portrait of Cultural Revolution activism than was previously available.
	Most recently, I have been working on a book that examines workers’ militias, from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the present.  Again, the book is grounded in detailed work in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, supplemented by the Beijing Municipal Archives, the Number Two History Archives in Nanjing, and the Party History and Bureau of Investigation Archives in Taiwan.  These militias were the first vehicle that the Chinese Communists (following upon the example of Russian Red Guards) employed to carry out armed insurrection, and they have remained an important means of gaining and retaining political power – for state authorities as well as for would-be revolutionaries – ever since.  The book shows how a series of Chinese political regimes (Nationalist, early Communist, Cultural Revolution, and post-Mao) deployed these militias – in the name of the proletariat – in order to increase their control over society.  At the same time, however, the militias provided opportunities for ordinary workers to become politically active and sometimes even quite influential.  The book traces changes in the institution of the militias as a way of examining the dynamics of state-society relations under different political regimes.  Although I stress the continuities from one regime to the next, I also emphasize the open-ended possibilities for events to have taken a very different turn at key historical junctures.  In sharp contrast to my first book, which emphasized the determinative influence of the material environment, in the forthcoming book my stress is on human agency and historical contingency.  By focusing upon the agendas and activities of various political leaders, I highlight the impact of ideas and individuals (rather than ecology and economy) on political change.  Also in contrast to my previous work, this new book concludes with an excursion into comparative history in which the Chinese militia experience is compared to the that of several other revolutionary societies: France, America, Russia, and Iran.  In all of these cases, militias were established as an expression of  “revolutionary citizenship” – recruiting favored elements of society to defend the revolution against potential counter-revolutionaries.  The principles of citizenship varied, from “class” in the case of China and the Soviet Union to “community” in the case of France and the U.S. to “creed” in the case of Iran.  These distinctive principles of citizenship generated different kinds of struggles: conflicts between “proletariat” and “capitalist” in the case of Communist systems; conflicts between neighborhood and nation in the case of liberal democratic systems; conflicts between believers and infidels in the case of religious systems.  But although each of these revolutionary trajectories was marked by certain common contradictions, they are all capable of developing in very different directions – depending upon the particular ways in which various political leaders choose to draw upon these revolutionary legacies.  Although the Chinese militia tradition has generally been used by state officials to strengthen their control over society, it has also on occasion been used by disgruntled workers seeking to challenge state policies.  I conclude my book with the observation that existing institutions can serve many different political purposes, depending upon the ingenuity of the people who take advantage of them.
	Let me now try to summarize.  In one sense my research agenda over the past thirty years has remained remarkably consistent:  I have continued to plumb historical archives to explore the origins and political impact of popular protest in modern China.  To be sure, I have focused upon different social elements (peasants, workers, students), different time periods (late imperial, Republican, and Communist), and different locations (North and South, rural and urban).  But the driving questions have not changed all that much, I’m afraid.  Whether this is simply because I have a rather limited imagination when it comes to formulating research questions, or because I have done an unsatisfying job of answering the questions I’ve posed, I’m not sure – probably a little of both!  But another reason why I have continued to pose similar questions is because my sense of how to go about answering them has in fact changed a great deal over the years.  Although my basic research methodology – of exploiting historical archives – has remained constant, my analytical approach has shifted from an emphasis on material conditions to an emphasis upon cultural, political, and even psychological issues.  Part of the reason for this evolution has to do with the new sources that have become available.  Whereas for my first book I relied heavily upon local gazetteers (which stress geographical and economic context) in more recent work I have had access to transcripts of confidential police confessions and classified party meetings that permit the exploration of other factors.  Indeed, a close reading of these richly detailed sources has convinced me of the highly fluid and contingent nature of political action.  
	Part of the reason for the evolution in my interpretive interests also has to do with changes in the wider intellectual milieu of which I am a part.  The past couple of decades have witnessed a major shift in studies of popular protest, away from a Marxian concern with material conditions toward a greater appreciation of culture, identity, and discourse.  If one wants to engage an audience beyond those interested in the narrow empirical subject matter of the research, one simply cannot avoid addressing these concerns.  
	But a final, and perhaps the most important, reason for the change in my approach is quite simply that my own outlook has changed.  As a young PhD in political science, trained at the University of Michigan where social science is taken very seriously, I was optimistic about being able to devise deterministic explanations of human behavior.  Now, having grown a bit wiser I think, I have lost much of my youthful enthusiasm about the possibility of developing a true science of human behavior.  Having witnessed the headspinning – and I believe unpredictable – changes around the globe in recent years, I no longer have great faith in social science explanation and prediction.  Who could have foreseen either the initiation or the outcome of China’s Cultural Revolution?  Who could have known in 1989 that most of the formerly Communist world would be transformed in a matter of months?  Or that the Chinese Communist regime would remain firmly in place after the turmoil of Tiananmen?  Living through such events has given me an appreciation for a more interpretive approach to human behavior – one that stresses the open-ended possibilities inherent in any historical event and emphasizes personality, ideology, and human agency -- as well as sheer accident -- over natural environment and other determining structures.  
	As my perspective has shifted, I hope that my work has become of greater relevance and interest to the people about whom I have been writing all these years – ordinary Chinese citizens.  Whereas my earlier work took as its primary audience the other social scientists who would decide on my tenure and promotion, now I am more interested in reaching a Chinese readership.  Rather than offer them a simplistic and fatalistic interpretation of their own past and future, I hope that my work will suggest new complications and possibilities, thereby helping to open up a wider sense of future options. 
	But, just I no longer feel confident pronouncing about China’s past or predicting its future, so I cannot be certain what the twists and turns in my own work will hold.  Thanks to America’s peculiar system of not requiring university professors to retire at any set age, who knows how many more years I may be devoting to the pursuit of these same old questions!  And surely the approach will continue to evolve – in step with new sources, new scholarly debates, and new experiences.