Ideological Control through Protest Management: The Case of Post-socialist China

• In Event: Loyalty, Protests, and Popular Resistance in Asia

Abstract

China’s economic transition from a socialist planned economy to a free market system under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) brings a conundrum to the regime: How to deal with the tension between the regime’s inherited socialist promises and growing social inequalities introduced by marketized reform? The precarious relationship between the state’s socialist ideological orthodox and its embrace of neoliberalism creates an ideological gap. Against this backdrop, how does the state respond to collective action that targets its unsquared ideological circle? More broadly speaking, how do post-socialist authoritarian regimes balance preserving ideological legitimacy and maintaining social stability?
While there has been a burgeoning body of literature on the determinants of protest response under authoritarianism, most take the ideas attached to protest events as given, and few investigate the role ideology plays in how demands are communicated between citizens and the state. In dialogue with the rich insights yielded by ethnographic work on contention and control under authoritarianism (Friedman, 2014; Fu, 2018; Mattingly, 2020; O’Brien & Li, 2006), this study intends to examine patterns of state response to protests framed in different ideological terms through a quantitative lens, drawing on empirical evidence of social protests in China between 2010 to 2017. This study theorizes that autocrats implement ideological control through protest management in the face of ideological challenges from the grassroots. More specifically, this study proposes a theory of post-socialist ideological control through protest management in which the degree of threats different ideologies employed in protests pose to the regime is determined by its relation to the regime’s ideological orthodox and the thickness of the ideology.

Author

• Jiayi Zhang, Yale University