Is Rights Consciousness Rising in China? Evidence from Ten Years of Complaints

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: State and Society in Contemporary China

Abstract

Is rights-consciousness rising in China even at a time of increased state repression? In this paper, we examine over four million citizen complaints submitted over a twelve-year period (2011-2023) to a nationwide online petition platform, the Local Leaders Message Board (人民网地方领导留言板), assessing the presence of "rights-conscious" language used in the solicitation of government assistance. Using human annotation and deep learning classification of submitted texts, we find that citizens increasingly cited their legal rights in communication with government. This rise occurred across regions representing different levels of economic development, across appeals addressed to different levels of government, and appeared more pronounced in contentious issue areas such as labor disputes and housing complaints. In addition, a regression discontinuity analysis of Shanghai's 2022 Covid-19 lockdown shows that such overt repression may motivate people to increasingly advocate for their legal rights. Other forms of citizen advocacy---including a "subjecthood"-based glorification of powerholders and a "socialist" advocacy of moral obligation for welfare provision---declined over the 12-year period. These findings indicate that legal rights-consciousness is rising in China, despite (and perhaps because of) increased state repression.

Authors

• Matt DeButts, Stanford University

• Tongtong Zhang, American University