Leadership, Organization and Moral Authority

Leadership, Organization and Moral Authority: Explaining Peasant Militancy in Contemporary China Wu Zhang*

A b s t r ac t

Despite a growing literature on peasant protest in contemporary China, we know little about why some protests are more sustained, disruptive and violent—in a word, militant—than others and thus pose a more serious challenge to the political order. The influential concept of “rightful resistance” cannot explain protest militancy, because it only applies to civil protest. This article studies a case of unusually militant peasant protest in Qizong, Hunan. The protest became militant because the peasants rallied around well-educated and fearless leaders and established a layered and encompassing protest organization. Empowered by central policies on lowering taxes and fees on the peasants (the so-called “peasant burden”) and the Confucian norm of subsistence, the peasants successfully mobilized for drastic reduction of the burden. Local government could not contain the protest, having lost its moral authority and lacking the resources either to suppress it or to make sufficient concessions.

“W

e are a famous rebellious township” (zaofan xiang 造反乡). Thus peasants introduced themselves to me when I arrived at Qizong Township, central Hunan, in summer 2004 to conduct research on peasant protest.1 During the 1990s, these peasants had staged a militant protest against heavy taxation that had lasted for several years. Peasants and local cadres kidnapped one another ( guan zhuo min, min zhuo guan 官捉民,民捉官), law and order broke down completely, and crowds of angry protesters besieged the local government compounds several times. In the words of a township cadre, “peasants went mad in those years”.

* Fieldwork for this article was supported by the Mellon Fellowship, the Lam Family Award for South China Research, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lee Teng-hui Fellowship in World Affairs from Cornell University. Qinghua University and the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences provided institutional support for the research. I am grateful to Vivienne Shue, Jing Jun, Tao Ran and Zhu Tianbiao for securing this support. I would like to thank Andrew Kipnis, Luigi Tomba and the two anonymous reviewers for The China Journal for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article, and Jean Humez and Aleksander Lust for editing the manuscript before submission. 1. Pseudonyms are used throughout this article. The China Journal, no. 73. 1324-9347/2015/7301-0003. Copyright 2015 by The Australian National University. All rights reserved.

• 59 •

60 • T H E C H I N A J O U R N A L , No. 73

The Qizong protest was not an isolated incident. During the 1990s, large agrarian provinces such as Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui and Sichuan experienced widespread peasant protest against heavy taxes and fees. Known as peasant burdens (nongmin fudan 农民负担), heavy rural taxes and fees pitted cash-strapped local governments (counties, townships and villages) against peasants, whose incomes were stagnating. The tax-sharing system adopted in 1994 centralized fiscal revenues and created a 25-per-cent gap between the fiscal capacities and responsibilities of local governments so, lacking an adequate alternative tax base, they financed the gap by taxing peasants excessively.2 The 1990s saw the collapse of small and medium-sized state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the pillar of these local economies. On the expenditure side, the size of the local bureaucracy exploded as a torrent of unfunded central mandates arrived. Local governments had to finance costly rural public goods, such as basic education, irrigation and rural roads. They were also under intense pressure to develop the local economy after the collapse of the SOEs.3 Many peasants simply could not afford these taxes and fees, as the prices of grain and pigs, two major sources of their income, were falling while the price of agricultural inputs, such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers, was increasing. Peasants responded to this situation in a variety of ways. Some simply abandoned the farmland and migrated to cities, or engaged in everyday forms of resistance, such as refusing to pay taxes, haggling with the local cadres and, in the most extreme cases, committing suicide. Others protested against the heavy burdens. Many protests were peaceful and short-lived, and did not threaten the rural political order. Thus, peasants often petitioned provincial and central authorities, posted slogans and banners, and held peaceful burden-reduction meetings. Some protests, however, were militant. A protest can be classified as militant de pending on three factors: whether it is sustained, whether it uses disruptive tactics (including violence), and whether it poses a serious challenge to the local state. The Qizong protest lasted for five years. Peasants used disruptive tactics, from destroying official signboards; through besieging and ransacking government buildings to assaulting and kidnapping cadres. As a result, the township government lost its ability to govern.

2. Mingxing Liu, Juan Wang, Ran Tao and Rachel Murphy, “The Political Economy of Earmarked Trans fers in a State-Designated Poor County in Western China: Central Policies and Local Responses”, The China Quarterly, No. 200 (December 2009), pp. 973–94. On the difficulties that the tax-sharing system brought on township public finances, see An Chen, “The 1994 Tax Reform and Its Impact on China’s Rural Fiscal Structure”, Modern China, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2008), pp. 303–43. 3. For the causes of heavy taxation, see Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Represen tation in Contemporary Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On heavy rural taxes and fees, see Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua (I Tell the Prime Minister the Truth) (Beijing: Guangming Ribao Chubanshe, 2002), and Chen Guidi and Chun Tao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (An Investigation of Chinese Peasants) (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 2003).

Leadership, Organization and Moral Authority • 61

Why did the Qizong protest become militant, while those in other townships did not? In answering this question, this article builds on a fine body of literature on peasant protest during the market reform era.4 Scholars agree that policy documents on lowering peasant burdens issued by higher authorities, particularly the central government, provided important weapons during peasant protests. Peasants usually demanded economic rights, such as lower burdens and an end to corruption, and refrained from making political demands.5 Most protests were short-lived, but some persisted, “made possible by sustained networks of contact among activists and leaders”.6 However, the existing literature does not explain why some peasant protests became so militant that they threatened the authority of the local state. O’Brien and Li’s influential concept of rightful resistance is not easily applicable to militant forms of protest, such as kidnapping cadres and ransacking government of fices, as rightful resistance is ultimately a measured and moderate form of resis tance.7 Xi Chen’s idea of protest opportunism recognizes the power of disruption; however, he argues that petitioners “prefer those disruptive tactics that can be easily portrayed as a natural growth of moderate petitioning”.8 Empirical studies, too, have failed to analyze militant protests. For example, Yu Jianrong provides a detailed portrait of peasant protest leaders in Hunan, but none of them led militant protests.9 While Chinese scholars have compiled data on violent riots, none has studied a violent protest.10 This article argues that, in the Qizong case, peasant protest became militant when peasants, bonded by a common protest frame, rallied around fearless 4. See, for example, Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, Chapter 5, and Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 5. Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, pp. 138–39, and Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, p. 122. Yu Jianrong argues that peasants in Hengyang County, Hunan Province, pushed for political rights, including the right to establish a Peasant Association. See Yu Jianrong, “Nongmin youzuzhi kangzheng jiqi zhengzhi fengxian” (Organized Peasant Resistance and Its Political Risks), Zhanlüe yu guanli (Strategy and Management), Vol. 3 (2003), pp. 1–16, and Yu Jianrong, Dangdai Zhongguo nongmin de weiquan kangzheng: Hunan Hengyang kaocha (Organized Peasant Resistance in Contemporary China: An Investigation of Hengyang County, Hunan Province) (Hong Kong: Zhongguo Wenhua Chubanshe, 2007). 6. Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, p. 156. 7. Kevin J. O’Brien, “Rightful Resistance”, World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 1 (1996), pp. 31–55, and Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China. 8. Xi Chen, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 179. 9. See Yu Jianrong, Yuecun zhengzhi (Politics of Yue Village) (Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 2001), pp. 557–62; Yu Jianrong, “Nongmin youzuzhi kangzheng jiqi zhengzhi fengxian” and Dangdai Zhongguo nongmin de weiquan kangzheng. 10. See, for example, Liu Zifu, Xin qunti shijian guan: Guizhou Wengan 6.28 shijian de qishi (New Perspectives on Mass Incidents: Lessons from the 6.28 Incident in Wengan, Guizhou) (Beijing: Xinhua Chubanshe, 2009).


leaders and established a protest organization, while the local state faced too many constraints either to pacify the protesters or to suppress the protest. The article is based on more than two years of fieldwork in Hunan in 2001–03, summer 2004 and winter 2005, with follow-up interviews in summer 2011. Hunan is a typical grain-producing province in central China where peasant protest was widespread in the 1990s. By studying Hunan, we can achieve a good general understanding of the causes of peasant protest in contemporary China. I chose to focus on the Qizong protest because it was unusually militant. A careful analysis of the Qizong case in the broader Hunanese context allows us to understand why some protests are more disruptive, last longer and pose a more serious challenge to the local state than others. During my fieldwork, I interviewed peasants and local cadres and collected government documents and statistical data on local public finances in five different prefectures in Hunan. In Qizong, I conducted two group interviews with peasants and their leaders, both of which lasted several hours. The first group interview gave me a general idea of the protest and helped me to locate the protest center. The second, which was recorded, was conducted at the center of the Qizong protest, in the house of Xie Weimin, the most prominent leader of the protest. Since Xie had been arrested and sentenced to a long prison term, Zhou Pucheng, an articulate leader with a high school diploma, was the main speaker. He spoke in Mandarin and translated the local dialect into Mandarin for me when others spoke. Zhou spoke not only for himself, but also for the entire group. Others added their comments and corrected Zhou when he could not remember an event or when he remembered an event incorrectly. To reconstruct the protest events, the peasants relied on both their memories and printed materials that they had kept. Those present at the second group interview included Zhou, Xie’s wife and children, his brother and his brother’s wife, two other leaders and several other peasants. For a different perspective, I also interviewed Qizong Township cadres. In all, the Qizong protests escalated through three rounds of interactions between peasants and the local government. Table 1 summarizes these events. T h e Qi z on g P rot e st, Rou n d On e : 1 9 9 3

Hilly and mountainous, Qizong is a middling township in Xiangyang Prefecture. It is neither rich nor poor. Each peasant has only 0.3 to 0.4 mu (san si fen 三四分) of land, and the peasant burden was a little more than 40 yuan per person on average in the 1990s. The township was formed in 1994 when Qianjiang Township and the original Qizong Township were consolidated into the current Qizong Township. Though Qizong Township gained a reputation for being rebellious, it was actually in Qianjiang Township that peasants rebelled twice in the 1990s. The first round of protest happened as early as in 1993, the same year in which peas-


Table 1. Cycles of Protest in Qizong, 1993–98 A1

B1

C1

D1

Concessions

Rising Expectations

State Repression

Peasant Violence

Returned overcharged tuition to peasants (1993)

Peasants revitalized the organization and resisted new fees and heavy taxes (1996)

Arrested the wives (1996)

Kidnapped the vice mayor (1996)

A2

B2

C2

D2

More Concessions

More Expectations

More Repression

Peasant Violence

Met with peasant representatives and sent in work teams

Peasants raised three radical demands (1996)

Arrested 11 leaders (1996)

Smashed the county government (November 1996)

A3

B3

C3

D3

More Concessions

More Expectations

More Repression

Peasant Violence

Released the 11 leaders (January 1997)

Peasants set up their own school

Arrested a village representative (1997)

Kidnapped a police officer and a vice township mayor (1997)

Burdens reduced by 60 per cent Fees returned to peasants (1990)

Peasants continued to push for burden reduction Peasants from neighboring towns started borrowing documents (1997)

ants rioted in Renshou County in Sichuan. The second lasted from 1996 to 1998. While the first round was civil, the second was militant, as crowds of peasants repeatedly kidnapped local officials, besieged the township government compounds and ransacked the county government. The authority of the township government collapsed, to the point that it could no longer govern the villages.


The protest in 1993 was triggered by a sharp tuition increase. When the fall semester started in 1993, the tuition for schools in Qianjiang Township increased by several dozen yuan, reaching more than 300 yuan per student. The peasants were enraged, as their burdens increased year after year. One peasant, a retired village Party Secretary, read in the local newspaper the No. 33 document issued by the county, which set a ceiling for tuition at an amount much lower than the amount being demanded from the peasants. He contacted several other peasants, including Xie Weimin, a middle-aged peasant from Baishiqiao Village, telling them that the local government was corrupt and that they should use both policies (zhengce 政策) and laws ( falü 法律) to protect their interests. After reading the No. 33 document, several peasants decided to protest against the high tuition. These peasants became leaders for the protest. Altogether, a dozen or so peasants emerged as leaders in the Qizong protest. Every leader was male. Most were middle-aged peasants with children attending school. Most had a high school diploma, the highest level of education among peasants in China in the 1990s. Other peasants considered the leaders cultured (wen hua ren 文化人). Most were not Communist Party members, but all had been politically active before they started the protest. Some were demobilized soldiers. Most were team heads, the low-level cadres in charge of dozens of rural households.11 Team heads perform administrative functions and implement government policies, but in the 1990s were paid only dozens of yuan a year for their labor, so a team head was a cadre who shared the peasants’ economic interests. Since they were educated and articulate, peasant leaders could write petition letters and pamphlets, speak in public to incite peasants, and use the language of the state to reason with the local cadres. Through their experience of working for the local state, they had also become familiar with government policies. Zhou Pucheng, a leader imprisoned for 51 days in 1996 and for 3 years in 1998, explained: Leaders are progressive figures who are socially conscious [shehui jinbu renshi 社会进步人士]. They understand the Party’s policies more [than others do] because they need to popularize the Party’s policies. They are also more acquainted with [da jiao dao 打交道] the Party’s policies [than others are]. For example, after I was demobilized from the military, I became a team head. As a result, I know quite a lot about the Party’s policies.

Among the dozen or so core activists, Xie Weimin emerged as the most promi nent leader, and his village, Baishiqiao, became the protest center. Xie was neither a Communist Party member nor a demobilized soldier. He had once worked for 11. Bernstein and Lü also argue that, of all local cadres, team heads were most likely to side with peasants, see Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, p. 154.


the village propaganda team (xuan chuan dui 宣传队). He was a powerful political orator, a charismatic leader and a public-spirited person. A township cadre described him thus: He is a peasant and he does not have a normal job. However, he is a good public speaker and has certain ability to rally the peasants. He is rather active [huo yue 活跃] and has good support from the masses.

Zhou Pucheng said: Xie respects the old and loves the young [zun lao ai you 尊老爱幼] in his village. He always helps out those in need. He is angry at those who oppress the weak. He thinks that the local government has oppressed the peasants too much. He is willing to sacrifice all he has and to do good deeds for peasants.

Perhaps the most striking feature about Xie’s leadership style was that he was a fearless peasant intellectual. He led the protest even though he anticipated state repression. Xie’s brother described how Xie told the local government that it could in no way suppress peasants: “Even if you arrest me, Xie Weimin, there would be thousands and tens of thousands (qianqian wanwan 千千万万) of Xie Weimins”. A fellow peasant activist commented: Xie Weimin is an educated and cultured person. He has a high school diploma . . . He has a courageous spirit and is willing to try new things. He is not afraid [of state repression]. Even imprisonment does not scare him. He has never regretted [leading the protest], for it was his own decision. He told his wife that it was fine for her to suffer some hardship at home while he was imprisoned, because he believes that one day the Communist Party will become just. It will not remain as corrupt as it is now.

Other leaders in Qizong were equally fearless. Xie’s brother said: We peasant representatives are just, we have not committed any crime, and we have never been scared [of the government]. We believe that the people’s government will be reasonable . . . I am not afraid, because I am just. If I were unjust and broke any law, you could punish me accordingly. If I deserve to be shot dead [qiang bi 枪毙] because of what I did wrongly, you could put me to death. I would face it with no grudge.

Zhou Pucheng said: Chairman Mao said that wherever there is exploitation and oppression, there is resistance . . . At that time [township governments] everywhere demanded all kinds


of random fees. I have three children attending school. [A second leader] has three school-attending children. [A third leader] also has several children who go to school. We are all people whose burdens are heavy. So we decided to become leaders [chu zhege dou 出这个头]. It was related to our self-interest. There was no other way out. To live is to be oppressed. To be imprisoned is also merely to be oppressed.

Peasants in Qianjiang also established a township-wide organization. In each of the 18 villages of the township, peasants elected several representatives, who formed a “Qianjiang Township Parents’ Association”. Altogether, the association had more than 80 representatives, including about a dozen core activists. However, the Parents’ Association was temporary, as it disbanded immediately after peasants succeeded in lowering tuition fees in 1993. It was also informal and had no professional staff, fixed office or budget. More than 80 peasants representing all the villages of the township marched to the township in September 1993, each wearing a piece of red cloth on their breast pocket, with the words “Representatives of the Parents’ Association” written on it, to protest at high tuition fees. The representatives marched in a soldierlike fashion from three villages. The three groups merged into one near the gate of the township compound. It was the educated peasant leaders, not the demobilized peasant-soldiers, who came up with the idea to protest in this way.12 The representatives protested in such a particular form because they did not want to be taken for a mob. This march was the first sign that the Qizong protest would be unusually organized and persistent. Anticipating violence from a peasant mob, township cadres had left the compound so, when the peasant representatives arrived, the township compound was empty. Later, the township head arrived. The representatives refused to negotiate with him when they were informed that he could not be in charge. Around dinner time, the township Party Secretary finally appeared. He asked the peasants to select three representatives. These three representatives, along with two or three others, came to form the leadership core of the protest in Qizong. These five or six leaders regularly negotiated with the local government and petitioned higher authorities. The township Party Secretary first tried to deny the existence of any documents putting a ceiling on tuition. When the peasant representatives asked him if he had read the No. 33 document, he replied that there was no such document. When they showed it to him, he said, “Oh, this. This I have. I put it in the drawer and have not paid attention to it.” The representatives then criticized him for not even looking at a document from the county government and for charging so

12. Asked whether the demobilized soldiers among the leaders came up with the idea to protest in such a way, peasants said not, and explained that the leaders were all educated (du guo shu).


much tuition. The Party Secretary then explained that the township government faced severe fiscal difficulties. “This is a way out when there is no way out”, he said. The peasant representatives retorted, “You simply transfer burdens to peasants when you have no way out. What can we peasants do when we have no way out?” Because the two sides could not resolve their differences, the negotiation moved to the next bureaucratic level. Later that night, both the director and the Party Secretary of the rural district arrived. The district director brought along a thick book entitled A Complete Compilation of Chinese Laws (Zhongguo falü daquan 中国法律大全). He said, “Be quiet, be quiet [bu yao nao 不要闹]. [We] the masses do not understand laws. Let us study laws together. If we do not study laws, we tend to make mistakes and break the law.” The peasant representatives retorted: “It is you who have not studied the law and thus whatever you do breaks the law. The No. 33 document is a piece of written law (ming fa 明法), yet you do not implement it. So we will not study laws with you now. We will only talk about the tuition question.” No agreement was reached then or the next day. The Parents’ Association negotiated hard with the township for three days and nights. During the negotiations, peasants in nearby villages cooked for the representatives and brought them rice, food and tea. The county’s Bureau of Education and two other bureaus finally agreed to return the overcharged tuition to the peasants, about 70 yuan for each primary school student and more than 80 yuan for a junior high school student. After the agreement, peasants disbanded the Parents’ Association. Ultimately, about a quarter of the overcharged tuition was deducted from the next semester’s tuition, but no cash was actually returned to the peasants. Altogether, the township credited more than 180,000 yuan of overcharged tuition to peasants. The county also removed some township cadres, including the township Party Secretary and the principal of the rural school district. Rou n d T wo : 1 9 9 6 – 9 8

From 1996 to 1998, peasants in Qianjiang Township carried out the second round of protest. New fees and high agricultural taxes and charges triggered the protest. Again, policy documents played an important role. Fueled by the success of the first round, the protest became militant and contagious. In 1996 three types of fee increase were imposed. First, tuition jumped again. Second, a highway was to be built that would link the county seat with the city of Xiangyang; to finance this, an annual fee of 40 yuan was to be levied on each male peasant under 65 and each female peasant under 60 in the county, including babies, for three years in a row. Third, each peasant had to pay a new school construction fee to help the township build a new middle school. On top of these


three fees, agricultural taxes also increased. Finally, rumors spread that peasants would have to pay for a new national security fee because Hong Kong was to be returned to China, and that there would be a war. Leadership and Organization The same man who provided the peasants with the document in 1993 again provided them with three documents, including the No. 1 central document, the No. 9 provincial document and the No. 28 document issued by the prefecture, all published in the local newspaper in 1996. All forbade the local government to act arbitrarily in assessing fees on peasants, collecting fees from them or fining them. Peasants again asked Xie Weimin to lead the protest. He initially declined. Peasants then knelt before him, begging him with tears in their eyes to lead the protest. Xie finally agreed. According to Xie’s wife, “he did not want to be a leader [again]. It was the masses who wanted him to do this, no matter what.” On 29 August, Xie and the other leaders convened a meeting of the same village representatives elected by peasants in 1993, and read the three documents aloud. The representatives decided not only to popularize the documents among peasants but also to help the township cadres to study them. On 30 August, they wrote a letter addressed to the parents of students in Qizong, instructing them to use the weapons of the law to protect their interests and to pay only as much tuition as was stipulated in the three documents. On 30 August 1996, the peasants established a “Temporary Council on Peasant Burden Reduction in Qizong Township”. The council had the same structure and leadership as the Parents’ Association established in 1993. It had more than 80 members (lishi 理事) and each of the 18 villages of the original Qianjiang Township had several members on it. Xie was elected president. The dozen or so activists who first emerged in 1993 again played a crucial role in the council. The council was an informal organization; its main purpose was to look after the more than 10,000 yuan that the peasants donated to the leaders, who needed the money to petition higher authorities, hire lawyers and make copies of the doc uments. The local government accused the peasants of establishing an illegal Peasant Association (nongmin xiehui 农民协会) to seek political rights and to undermine the Party-state. According to local cadres, peasants called Xie “the Chairman” and his wife “the Chairman’s wife”. The association had a secretary and three echelons, each with its own leaders. The second and the third echelons were ready to replace the first if ever its leaders were arrested. In reality, peasants did not have the resources to establish an elaborate formal organization independent of the Party-state. Neither did they seek political rights. Instead, they said that they simply wanted the local government to follow Party policies. Zhou Pucheng explained:


Peasants survive by their own labor [zi shi qi li 自食其力]. They have to work in order to eat. If they stopped working for a day, they would starve for a day. We peasants cannot organize ourselves, precisely because we do not have fixed salaries [guding gongzi 固定工资] . . . We have never thought about establishing a longlasting and independent peasant organization. We added the word “temporary” in front of “council”. Because it was temporary, ours was not any kind of organization . . . They [the township government] say that we want to overthrow the people’s government and establish our own organization. We have never admitted to this. We have not done anything like this. We only want the [local] government to implement the Party’s policies, and treat us peasants properly in line with policy.13

This round of protest was more dramatic than the first. It featured mutual kidnappings between cadres and peasants, mass meetings, demonstrations, sit-ins, negotiations and strikes. Mobilization Once leaders emerged, the mobilization of peasants was swift. Although most peasants were too poor to shoulder the new taxes and fees and thus had a strong interest in protesting, as individuals they also generally lacked the courage to protest, as they were afraid of state repression. The emergence of peasant leaders armed with policy documents enabled others to join in, as the general expectation is that the state will punish only leaders, not followers.14 Thus peasants responded enthusiastically. They donated money, participated in demonstrations and sit-ins, withheld taxes and fees, and sheltered their leaders for months after their protests were suppressed. Mobilization was further eased by the fact that Qizong villages were tightly knit communities, in which peasant households interacted through weddings, funerals, exchange of labor, the celebration of important festivals, rural periodical markets, and simply by playing cards and mahjong together. These thick networks, together with the informal organizations that the peasants built, made mobilization easy. The leaders circulated the content of the policy documents among the peasants in different ways: by word of mouth, by relaying the documents from one household to another, by copying out documents on sheets of red paper and posting them in a public space in each village, and by broadcasting them through

13. The Qizong peasants, therefore, differed from the Hengyang peasants, who demanded the right to establish a Peasant Association. See Yu Jianrong, “Nongmin youzuzhi kangzheng” and Dangdai Zhongguo nongmin de weiquan kangzheng. 14. See also Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, p. 87.


loudspeakers. It was this dissemination that soon became a focal point of the contention between the peasants and the local government. At around 8.00 a.m. on 1 September 1996, the three documents, some containing editorial comments (bianzhe an 编者按) written by local peasant Communist Party members, were copied on sheets of red paper and posted in each village’s public space. They had hardly been posted for an hour when the township Party Secretary (a woman) and several police officers drove to Baishiqiao Village and tore them up. The peasants were outraged. Some shouted: “These are documents from the State Council! You do not study them yourself and you dare to forbid us peasants to study them!” Peasants quickly congregated. They cursed the cadres, surrounded them, and trapped the township Party Secretary in her car. She and peasant women exchanged rude curses for hours in the stifling heat of that summer day. When a police officer pulled his pistol from his holster, the peasants promptly encircled him and tried to take his weapon. Luckily for the officer, the director of the township’s rural credit union, who interacted with the peasants frequently because his office was located in the village, was able to persuade the peasants to allow the officer to leave with him. Hours later, eight anti-riot policemen escorted the female township Party Secretary out of the village. Peasants also decided to “study” the three documents with the township cadres. At the end of August, hundreds of peasants in a dozen mini-buses headed for the township government to publicize Party policies. The documents were recorded, and broadcast through a loud speaker. Banners such as “Wholeheartedly Support the No. 1 Document of the Central Committee of the Party and the State Council”, “Lower Peasant Burdens” and “Demand that the Government Lower Peasant Burdens and Implement the Party’s Policies” were stuck to the front and the two sides of the buses. A deputy city head received the peasants. He promised them that the county government would implement central and provincial policies without any compromise.15 Satisfied, the peasants disbanded. Despite these promises, this time the county government was determined to nip peasant protest in the bud. It concluded that the “Peasant Association” was a criminal organization (hei shehui zuzhi 黑社会组织). At the end of August, the county government organized a large public meeting attended by all Party members and team heads in the township. It charged peasants with numerous criminal behaviors, including disturbing pub lic order, and decided to arrest the peasant leaders. On the night of 1 September, 21 police vehicles and more than 100 officers surrounded Baishiqiao Village. Having been tipped off, the leaders had left home. The policemen broke into the peasants’ homes, dragging the wives of three lead

15. Qinggang City, which governs Qizong Township, is a county-level city.


ers from bed and jailing them. Pointing a pistol at her head, a policeman tried to force Xie’s wife to reveal her husband’s whereabouts, but in vain. The next day, more than 1,000 angry peasants marched to the township to force the government to release the women. All coal mines and cement factories in the township were shut down and peasants working in the factories joined the protest. A crowd of more than 10,000 peasants besieged the township compound. Most township cadres had left the building, and the county sent only a few cadres to face the peasants. While peasant representatives were holding discussions with the cadres, a female cadre hid under a table and telephoned the county government. Soon a fleet of about 20 police cars arrived. Seeing that their representatives were trapped, the peasants became enraged at the female cadre, whom they mistook for the township Party Secretary. Some shouted, “Grab her!” They snatched her away from the township compound, drove her away on a motorcycle, and hid her with a peasant’s family. It turned out that the kidnapped cadre was in fact a deputy city head ( fu shizhang 副市长).16 This first kidnapping was not premeditated. However, once used, kidnapping became what Sidney Tarrow calls a “modular” practice of protest.17 Peasants and their leaders quickly learned the tactic and deliberately used it twice more. The moment that the county government realized that the peasants had kidnapped the deputy city head, it released the three wives and dispatched every civil servant in the county to search for her. It also asked cadres who used to work in the township to persuade peasants to release their hostage, and the peasants did so the following night. Altogether, she was held for more than a day. After the kidnapping, the county and prefectural governments took steps to stabilize the region. All county cadres who had previously worked in the township were recalled and posted there to do “thought work”. To appease the peasants, the prefectural government also dispatched a “Reconstruction and Poverty Relief Work Team”, bringing funding and manpower to accomplish local projects in each village. County and prefectural leaders also met and negotiated with peasant representatives. During these negotiations, peasant representatives raised numerous questions concerning heavy tax burdens, school tuition fees, rural irrigation projects, the price of rural electricity, family planning and village finances. The county government made important concessions. It admitted that peasant burdens exceeded the 5 per cent limit of net peasant annual income set by the central government. It returned the 40-yuan highway fee, waived the new school construction fee, and lowered tuition charges and the agricultural taxes 16. This was the deputy head of the city, which is a county-level city (xianji shi). She was referred to as a deputy mayor ( fu shizhang), but her ranking was a deputy county head ( fu xianzhang). 17. A modular protest is a form of protest that can be transferred from one setting to another. See Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (3rd ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 41.


and fees. Altogether, peasant burdens in Qizong were lowered by as much as 60 per cent in 1996. The county government also audited the accounts of the township’s rural credit union. Despite these concessions, peasants still needed to pay more than ten different taxes and fees which, according to national and provincial policies, should have been either lowered or abolished. “The first tax was light, the second tax was heavy, and the third and fourth taxes were bottomless” was a popular saying among peasants in the 1990s. As a result, peasants pushed for further burden reduction. In the words of Xie’s brother, “We demanded that the local government clearly explain itself to us and that it lower all those taxes and fees that should be lowered”. Furthermore, peasants made three radical demands about village public finances. First, they demanded that each village set up a “Denunciation Letterbox” so that peasants could disclose the corrupt deeds of village cadres. Second, they de manded that the prefectural government establish a “Leading Group in Auditing Village Accounts” (qingli cunji caiwu lingdao xiaozu 清理村级财务领导小组) and that village representatives be allowed to join the group. Third, they demanded that the county and township governments return all overcharged taxes and fees collected between 1994 and 1996. Accepting this last request, however, would have bankrupted the local government. Initially, the government agreed to the first two demands, but then reneged on its promises. Peasant representatives continued to push for further burden reduction and for the three demands. They repeatedly petitioned the township, county and prefectural governments. After a few months, having achieved nothing, the representatives decided to escalate the conflict and force the township, county and prefectural governments to negotiate. They planned to organize a mass demonstration (qing yuan 请愿) in front of the county government compound. This sent a clear signal to the county and prefectural governments that it was time to suppress the protest, as the peasants had raised their sights from the township to the county level.18 On 11 November, a few days after the representatives submitted an application for a mass demonstration, the local government arrested 11 peasant leaders. Two days later, on 13 November, peasants responded with a massive demonstration in front of the county government compound. Village representatives led the demonstration. They mobilized peasants in each village and made ban ners such as “Support Party Policies” and “Resolutely Demand [that the govern18. Since the township government collected rural taxes and fees, most anti-tax protest in the 1990s targeted the township government, not the county government. The decision of the leaders in Qizong to hold a mass demonstration in front of the county government indicates a type of tactical innovation designed to sustain the protest. For the concept of tactical innovation, see Doug McAdam, “Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 6 (1983), pp. 735–54.


ment] Unconditionally Release Xie Weimin and Other Peasant Representatives”. To maintain order during the demonstration, Xie Yongkang, a peasant leader who had not been arrested, organized a meeting of village representatives, telling them to make sure that peasants did not scuffle (da jia 打架), smash objects (da dongxi 打东西), rob people (qiang dongxi 抢东西), make trouble (nao shi 闹事) or break the law. Despite these efforts, the demonstration turned chaotic and violent. On 13 November, several thousand peasants marched to the county government compound to petition, sit in, and demand the immediate release of their leaders. By the time the demonstration reached the gate of the county government, it had swelled into a crowd of tens of thousands of people. The county government locked its gate. Firefighters sprayed water at peasants, who then started throwing bricks into the compound. Peasants smashed the government’s signboard,19 forced the gate open, broke the signboard of the Office of Letters and Visits, destroyed all the fire ambulances and other vehicles in the compound, and severely beat up a firefighter. A few demonstrators broke into the county Party Secretary’s home, trashed the apartment and stole money and wine. After the peasants ransacked the county government, the provincial government sent down a detachment of several hundred police, who stayed for more than 40 days, patrolling the streets of the county and guarding the Qizong Town ship compound. However, they never ventured into the protest center. Up to the day of my group interviews (2004), Xie’s village had remained an area where almost no cadres could be seen, except for the village cadres, who had no power and often obeyed the village representatives. Protest Escalation in 1997 All 11 peasant leaders were acquitted of the charges against them, and released on 1 January 1997. According to the township cadres, the local government had to release the leaders, because the provincial government ordered it to do so, con vinced that this would help to rein in the peasants. According to peasant leaders, however, they were released because China’s new penal code, which forbade arbitrary imprisonment with insufficient evidence, became effective on that day. The release did not stymie the protest. In 1997, it became even more militant. Peasants kidnapped two more cadres, and local authority broke down completely in Qianshui Village, a remote mountainous village ten kilometers away from the protest center. The protest became contagious, as peasants in Zouma, a town that bordered Qizong, started a protest that became even more disruptive than the one in Qizong. 19. Smashing a signboard (za pai) means destroying somebody’s authority or credit. Thus smashing the government’s signboard is a symbolic act, recurrent in most violent peasant protests against heavy taxation.


In the first half of 1997, Chu Hansheng, a peasant representative and team head, participated in the auditing of the accounts of his village, which revealed that three cadres had embezzled several hundred thousand yuan. After the summer harvest in August, Chu, beating a gong and walking around in the village, told peasants that they should not turn in any taxes or fees for three years. Instead, corrupt village cadres should pay taxes and fees for the peasants for three years. Township cadres threatened to confiscate Chu’s property and bankrupt him if he continued to incite the peasants or refused to pay taxes and fees. Chu insisted that the money embezzled by village cadres be deducted from peasant taxes and fees liabilities toward the township and county governments. The county government eventually arrested him on 1 October 1997, on the grounds that he had quarreled and scuffled with neighbors over a burial ground. Chu’s wife and brother visited Xie, wept in front of him, and pleaded that village representatives rescue Chu. The peasant leaders then decided to storm the township government to get him back (yao ren 要人). The next day, dozens of peasants, mostly Chu’s relatives, fellow villagers and peasant representatives, including Xie and others, went to the police station to free Chu. Tipped off, all the police officers quickly left, except for one who had only recently been hired. Not finding Chu, peasants brought this unfortunate officer to Chu’s village and held him in a peasant’s house for about 12 hours. The local government then sent cadres to the village to persuade peasants to release the officer, assuring them that the government would handle Chu’s case justly and fairly. Thinking that Chu would be released promptly, peasants released the officer; Chu, however, was sentenced in late 1997 to four-and-a-half years in prison. Despite this temporary government victory, village authority in Qizong broke down completely in 1997. Nowhere was the breakdown clearer than in Baishiqiao Village, the epicenter of the protest (where power had been in the hands of peasant leaders ever since the protest started), and in the mountain outpost of Qianshui Village, the remotest and poorest village in Qizong. One day in August 1997, village residents clashed with grain procurement cadres. After the cadres dragged to their vehicles a peasant who owed the township and county governments taxes and fees and beat up an old woman who tried to prevent the vehicles leaving, peasants punctured the vehicles’ tires and started chasing the cadres. All except one fled. This cadre was a deputy director of Qizong Township, whom peasants hated the most, since he had fined them severely for violating the family planning policy. Peasants held him for 12 days, releasing him only after the local government released the detained peasant. In September 1997, peasants in Qianshui also established their own village school, which operated for a year. Though China does allow private (minban 民办) schools, this is the only case in Hunan that I know of where peasants built a school of their own in the spirit of rebellion. Completely financed and run by


peasants, the school charged students a tuition fee lower than that for public schools, and paid a lower salary to its teachers. The school provided each student with a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary (xinhua zidian 新华字典), handed out free copied materials, and lowered or even waived tuition fees for poor students. Peasants required teachers to work six days a week, living in the school, preparing classes and grading student homework. Peasants even evaluated teacher performances and checked their course plans to ensure that the teachers prepared their classes properly. In 1996 and 1997, at the high tide of the protest, this village became completely ungovernable. According to peasants, “in 1996 and 1997 the [township] government didn’t dare to govern Qianshui Village at all. Whenever cadres tried to govern them, peasants did not allow them.” Seeing that the local state was so weak, some peasants started engaging in self-seeking behavior, such as felling trees in forests without permission or building houses without paying the house construction fee. To try to deal with such problems, the township government, frustrated, sought unlikely allies: the peasant leaders. The township’s forest director asked them to stop peasants from felling trees. The leaders, in turn, explained state policies to the representatives in Qianshui Village and asked them to persuade the peasants, and the logging stopped. The township government also asked the peasant leaders for help on other occasions, even at times of open protest. The relationship between the local government and peasant leaders during the height of the protest was thus a combination of repression, accommodation and cooperation. The End of the Protest in 1998 When in 1998 the county government finally received permission from the provincial government to suppress the protest, its cadres could not have been more relieved, for they had come to the conclusion that the only way to stabilize the region was to arrest the leaders. From their perspective, Xie had established a Peas ant Association, an independent political organization that sought to undermine the local government. As Xie had established Peasant Associations in other townships, a large area was destabilized. The deputy director of Qizong Township said: [Xie and other leaders] established an organization, attacked cadres and assembled illegally. [They] also went to other towns and townships to develop Peasant Associations. They incited peasants in Zouma Town, who then tied up the town’s Party Secretary, stripped him of all his clothes except his underwear, and paraded him through the streets.

The local government arrested more than ten peasant leaders in November 1998. Xie was arrested in the county seat, after cadres had pursued him for more


than 100 kilometers. Peasant leaders were charged with kidnapping the police officer in a premeditated and organized way (you zuzhi, you yumou 有组织, 有预谋) and sentenced to long jail terms. Xie Weimin was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Tian Zhiyong, the peasant in Qianshui Village who kidnapped a vice township mayor for 12 days, was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Two leaders were sentenced to ten years and two were sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. Three were sentenced to three years in a labor camp. One escaped, and was still in hiding as of the summer of 2004. Surprisingly, despite this severe state repression, peasant leaders in Qizong maintained their militancy and optimism. They never regretted their role in the protest. Several representatives petitioned the central government in 2002. Though severely criticized for kidnapping cadres, they were determined to petition the central government again once they had saved enough money to do so. Some leaders continued to petition higher authorities on local issues after their release from prison. The leaders’ family members also remained optimistic. Xie’s wife, his brother and sister-in-law all believed that Xie did the right thing. There was no lamentation over the long jail term or the deterioration of Xie’s health in prison. There was no regret over his leading the protest and the destruction that it brought to the family. The leaders have maintained close ties with one another. They are also highly respected by villagers. Whenever a peasant leader is released from prison, villagers of all ages pay their respects to him, bringing gifts of eggs, fish, meat and other food. Many peasants respectfully call Xie “the Chairman”, comparing him to Chairman Mao. When asked why, one answered: “Like Mao Zedong, he led us peasants, lowered our burdens, and brought real benefits to us. Otherwise, the local government demands various kinds of taxes and fees from us peasants, even though we are still quite poor.” The Qizong protest achieved many of its goals, albeit at high cost to the leaders. The education surcharge was lowered by almost 50 per cent. Tuition was significantly lowered and did not increase between 1996 and 2004. Taxes and fees were reduced by as much as 60 per cent in 1996, to about 40 yuan per person, the lowest in the entire county. They remained at that level until 2004, when the burden level was reduced to around 20 yuan per person, as a result of the rural tax-for-fee reform (nongcun shuifei gaige 农村税费改革), carried out partly in response to militant peasant protest in places like Qizong.20 In 2005, agricultural taxes and fees were abolished completely in Hunan Province. 20. “Peasant protest and violence were a major reason why the Party-state sought to solve the burden problems” (Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, p. 166). On the tax-for-fee reform, see ibid., pp. 199–204, and John James Kennedy, “From the Tax-for-Fee Reform to the Abolition of Agricultural Taxes: The Impact on Township Governments in North-west China”, The China Quarterly, No. 189 (March 2007), pp. 43–59.


Di s c u s sion

The Qizong protest was a rare case of peasant militancy in contemporary China. It was persistent and disruptive, and seriously challenged local authorities. The protest lasted five years, consisted of three cycles, and persisted despite both concessions and state repression. The protest was also violent, as tens of thousands of peasants attacked the county government, repeatedly encircled the township government and on several occasions kidnapped local cadres. Sometimes the violence was spontaneous, for example when the peasant crowd smashed vehicles, beat up a firefighter and ransacked the county government. At other times, however, the violence was deliberately used by protest leaders as a tactic, such as when protest leaders stormed the police office and kidnapped an officer. Finally, the usual power relationships between peasants and the local government and its agents were inverted. It was the only case in Hunan where peasants built their own school in a spirit of rebellion and where the teachers were subject to the authority of peasants. It was one of the few cases in Hunan where village authority broke down completely and where township cadres relied on peasant representatives to govern villages, even when peasants were protesting. Why was the Qizong protest so militant? Frances Piven and Richard Cloward argued that popular insurgency erupts when institutional dislocation frees the poor from the usual social control at exceptional moments in history. “Protest wells up in response to momentous changes in the institutional order. It is not created by organizers and leaders.”21 These poor people’s movements are most disruptive when they are unorganized and leaderless. Organizers and leaders channel mass defiance into normal politics, thus blunting the militancy of a protest and the power of the poor to disrupt the existing political order.22 Similarly, in the Chinese context, Yongshun Cai and Yu Jianrong argue that violence in rural protest occurs when these protests are leaderless or when protest leaders lose control of their followers.23 In other words, they interpret rural violence as a peasant mob’s outburst of anger. I argue, however, that the Qizong protest was militant, not because it was leaderless and spontaneous, but precisely because it was well organized and enjoyed extraordinary leadership. The Qizong protest achieved a degree of organization and coordination displayed by few other protesting peasants in China. From the very beginning, Qizong peasants founded a township-wide organization that included peasant representatives from every village. Out of the more than 80 rep resentatives, about a dozen became actual leaders, and five or six of them formed 21. Frances F. Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 36. 22. Frances F. Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, Introduction. 23. Yongshun Cai, Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 135–54; Yu Jiarong, Yuecun zhengzhi, p. 572.


a core leadership group. Though informal, this layered and encompassing organization worked as a “mobilizing structure” allowing a few leaders to rally a large number of participants and get them to work with a common purpose. Mobilizing structures are “collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action”.24 They provide connective structures that “[link] leaders and followers, centers and peripheries, and different parts of a movement sector with one another, permitting coordination and aggregation, and allowing movements to persist even when formal organization is lacking”.25 The mobilizing structure in the Qizong protest was comprehensive, as it included every village. Thus, the protest became a township-wide phenomenon from the moment that it was born. The mobilizing structure was also layered, as the representatives in each village provided a fixed channel of communication between the leaders and the peasants. This connective structure enabled the leaders repeatedly to mobilize tens of thousands of peasants in the township to encircle government compounds, mount massive demonstrations and sit-ins and sustain the protest even when some of the leaders were imprisoned. Leaders and village representatives organized all the demonstrations and encirclements. In any particular incident, the leaders would decide what tactic to use. The repre sentatives informed fellow villagers of the leaders’ decisions, collected donations, made banners, distributed leaflets, and mobilized peasants directly when the leaders were arrested. The organization also enabled the peasants to reignite their protest even after three years, rather than starting over from scratch. Protest leadership also played a crucial role in the Qizong protest. Li and O’Brien argue that rural protest leaders perform important tasks; for example, they “lead the charge, shape collective claims, recruit activists and mobilize the public, devise and orchestrate acts of contention, and organize cross-community struggles”.26 Most of the leaders analyzed by Li and O’Brien, however, refrained from using militant tactics when confronting the local government. Only a few became radical “movement entrepreneurs” after suffering state repression.27 The leaders in Qizong, however, were unusually fearless even before suffering state repression. I argue that their level of education and their relationship with the Party-state contributed to their audacity. Among the 12 or so leaders, most had a high school diploma and most were not Communist Party members, making them both more educated and less tied in with the local Party-state than 24. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3. 25. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, p. 124. 26. See Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, “Protest Leadership in Rural China”, The China Quarterly, No. 193 (March 2008), p. 22. 27. Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, “Protest Leadership in Rural China”, p. 21.


protest leaders elsewhere.28 As educated non–Communist Party members, the protest leaders in Qizong did not have to abide by Party discipline, were not subject to organizational control, could articulate peasants’ interests better, and were willing to employ a variety of protest repertoires, including collective violence, to challenge the local state. When we study the behavior of Communist Party members in the Qizong protest and elsewhere, it does seem that Communist Party membership reduces protest militancy.29 Many Communist Party members in Qizong were active during the emergence and the moderate phase of the protest: it was a retired village Party Secretary who provided peasants with the relevant policy documents in both 1993 and 1996 and spurred peasants on to protest. It is not clear whether, without him, Xie and others would have rebelled. Communist Party members also wrote commentaries for peasants when policy documents were posted up in public spaces on 1 September 1996. Most Party members stopped participating in the protest when it became militant: the retired village Party Secretary decided to quit when the peasants started kidnapping cadres and ransacking government buildings during the second round of protest, as did Old Liang, a peasant activist who had joined the Communist Party in the 1940s, wore a Mao Zedong badge and had contributed to popularizing policy documents among peasants. Of course, leaders and organizers could not have sustained the protest for years without widespread support from the tens of thousands of peasants in the township. Common economic interests and a shared protest frame turned the peasants in Qizong into a formidable political force. In the literature on social movements, a protest frame is defined as “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization”.30 It usually performs three core tasks: attributing blame for a bad situation, envisioning an alternative, and urging people to join the protest. Such processes have been called “diagnostic framing”, “prognostic framing” and “motivational framing” respectively, depending on which of these tasks they perform.31 In this case, peasants in Qizong justified their protest on the basis of policies from higher levels of government on lowering peasant burdens, and demanded that the township and county governments implement these policies fully, a legitimate demand in a centralized political system in the eyes of both the local 28. Most peasant leaders in Hunan did not have a high school diploma. For example, among the 87 burden-reduction leaders in Hengyang, only 10 had a high school diploma, barely one for each township in the county. See Yu Jianrong, Dangdai Zhongguo nongmin de weiquan kangzheng, pp. 25–27. 29. See, for example, Wu Zhang, “Protest Leadership and Repertoire: A Comparative Analysis of Peasant Protest in Hunan in the 1990s”, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2013), pp. 167–94. 30. Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment”, Annual Review of Sociology, No. 26 (2000), p. 614. 31. Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements”, p. 615.


governments and the peasant protesters. Thus, despite disruptive and even violent tactics, peasants in Qizong insisted that they were not “making trouble”. Rather, they were merely helping local government to implement central policies on lowering peasant burdens. Both rounds of protest started after peasants obtained policy documents. Legitimizing peasant protests in the name of the central government, these policies provided the most important mobilizing tool for peasant protest in the 1990s. As they were relayed from one peasant to another, posted in public spaces and broadcast in rural periodic markets, and borrowed by leaders from one township to another, these documents greatly contributed to the agitation of peasants in the 1990s.32 The use of policy documents to frame protest also justifies the persistence with which peasants in Qizong pursued their economic interests, as they kept protesting until everything that was promised them in the central policies was implemented locally. The protest frame also had a moral undertone. Peasants in Qizong protested because it was unjust for the local government to tax them so heavily that they could not make ends meet, violating the norm of subsistence. Research on precapitalist societies suggests that the norm of subsistence modifies market transactions, as in food riots in pre-industrial Britain, where hungry crowds seized grain and sold it at a just price, and in the moral obligation of landlords in Southeast Asia to lower rent in bad times.33 In China, by contrast, the Confucian idea of a benevolent ruler who takes care of people’s economic wellbeing and ensures their survival forms a fundamental principle of political philosophy. The government would thus demonstrate its benevolence by lowering taxes, controlling flood and fighting drought, building state granaries and carrying out famine relief.34 Socialism continued the idea of a paternalistic and benevolent ruler and deepened the norm of subsistence, as it strove to ensure economic security for the masses through a planned economy. In the peasants’ eyes, by violating the norm of subsistence local governments lost their moral authority. Peasants considered the township and county 32. The Renshou protest in Sichuan, for example, also started when a peasant leader posted central poli cies on peasant burdens in villages. See Pan Wei, Nongmin yu shichang (Peasants and the Market) (Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 2003), Chapter 4. 33. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, No. 50 (1971), pp. 76–136, and James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 34. On the benevolent Chinese ruler working for the common welfare of the people, see Vivienne Shue, “Legitimacy Crisis in China?”, in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen (eds), Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 47, 52, 59, and Yanqi Tong, “Morality, Benevolence, and Responsibility: Regime Legitimacy in China from Past to the Present”, Journal of the Chinese Political Science Association, No. 16 (2011), pp. 41–59. On the obligation of the Chinese government to ensure the subsistence of its people, see Elizabeth J. Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao—and Now”, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2008), pp. 37–50.


governments to be corrupt, unjust and unworthy of the name of government, and believed that it was reasonable (li 理) and just (yi 义) to protest against a local government that did not perform the basic duty of ensuring subsistence for the people. This common moral framework among the peasants in Qizong explains the rage that the peasants felt, the ease with which the protest leaders mobilized them, and the persistence of the protest. One Qizong peasant told me: For peasants, food is the most important thing [min yi shi wei tian 民以食为天]. We peasants were enraged because most could not afford the heavy taxes [ fudan buqi 负担不起]. When peasants had nothing to eat and when they could no longer make a living, they got organized and started to protest against heavy burdens.

Zhou Pucheng said: When the local government stops serving the people and starts oppressing them, we no longer treat it as the government, so we must arrest them [the local cadres] . . . When the government stops being fair and just, we no longer regard it as the government. They arrested us, and why could we not arrest them? . . . When the cadres no longer work for the interests of the people, we break no law and commit no crime when arresting them.

Local government in China is under heavy pressure to maintain social and political stability. Local political leaders face demotion if they fail to prevent large-scale protests or large numbers of petitions in their jurisdiction. Thus, in the event of a large-scale protest, local government will seek by all possible means either to pacify the protesters or to crush the protest. In this case, however, the means available to the township and county governments were limited. They had not the budget, policies or police to deal with this scale of protest. Heavily indebted and facing a large revenue shortfall, they did not have the fiscal means to implement burden-reduction policies issued by the central and provincial governments.35 Thus, local government could not afford to make concessions to peasants. However, sitting at the bottom of a multi-layered centralized political system, it had to implement these policies; it therefore had to make concessions to peasants. Heavily influenced by the mass line, the local government tended to use persuasion, thought work and negotiation, rather than repression, when dealing with protesting peasants who demanded only economic rights.36 Even 35. Implementing these policies required a large transfer of funds from higher levels of the government, which, however, was not forthcoming until 2004. 36. See, for example, Shaoguang Wang, “Democracy, Chinese Style”, Adelaide Confucius Institute Public Lecture, Adelaide, Australia, 18 September 2012, and Yanhua Deng and Kevin J. O’Brien, “Relational Repres sion in China: Using Social Ties to Demobilize Protesters”, The China Quarterly, No. 215 (September 2013), pp. 533–52.


when the township and county governments concluded that the surest way to maintain rural stability was to imprison the peasant leaders and destroy their organization, the decision to use force to subdue peasants had to be approved by the provincial government, which was often more sympathetic to the peasants, as it rarely had to deal with the political and fiscal consequences of peasant protests. Compared to local governments elsewhere, the Qizong Township government suffered an additional constraint: the widespread support that the peasants received from village cadres and retired cadres in the township. In most parts of Hunan, village cadres supported the township government and tried to rein in the protest leaders. In Qizong, however, village cadres supported the protest. They often cooperated with village representatives, backed them and avoided voicing disagreements with them. Village representatives in Qizong wielded power and influence, solving problems that neither the village cadres nor the township cadres could solve. In a few villages, power was in the hands of village representatives, not village cadres. Peasants also received strong support from retired county and prefecture cadres living in Qizong. Such support made it easy for village representatives to mobilize peasants and very hard for local governments to use repression. Given these constraints, the township and county governments in Qizong could neither make enough concessions nor use repression decisively, so the protest persisted. The governments made a series of concessions to the peasants. In 1993, they negotiated with village representatives and returned overcharged tuition. From 1996 to 1998, they sent in work teams, provided funding for new village projects and returned fees to peasants. They relied on connections to persuade peasants to give up their protest activities. The governments also undertook months of meetings and negotiations with village representatives, and lowered the peasants’ burdens significantly. Rather than appeasing the peasants, however, these concessions fueled more demands, due to rising expectations and the inability of local government to reduce peasant burdens to the degree required by central policies. The township and county governments started to use repression when they felt that peasant protest threatened local political order. However, they could not deploy force decisively in villages, where their capacity to govern was limited and where the peasants physically protected their leaders. These levels of local government also lacked autonomy in deciding whether, when and how to use repression. When it was first decided to arrest the protest leaders in September 1996, they were tipped off and were able to flee. When 11 leaders were arrested in November 1996, the retired cadres in the township strongly insisted that they be released, the provincial government intervened, and a new legal code issued by the central government became effective, so they were released. Even when local government finally received permission to imprison the leaders in 1998, it took months to lure them outside their villages and arrest them. Furthermore, every


time the peasants kidnapped a local cadre, the local government responded with more concessions and persuasion, rather than overwhelming force. This may have convinced peasants that kidnapping was an effective tactic. No major protest occurred in Qizong after 1998. However, at the time of my interviews, the villages that had been at the center of the protest remained in the peasants’ hands. With well-educated and fearless protest leaders, and united by common interests, central policies and a belief in the government’s moral responsibility to ensure subsistence, peasants organized themselves and persistently challenged the authority of the local state. Through repeated mobilizing activities, including demonstrations, sit-ins, encirclement, kidnapping and negotiation, all aimed at township and county governments, the peasants in Qizong grew into a political force that fought for its own economic interests. The case also shows that China in the 1990s was facing a profound crisis in rural governance. Lacking power, resources and moral legitimacy, the local state was unable to collect enough taxes or maintain rural political stability. Its authority was eroded by widespread peasant protest. Its ability to collect taxes and provide public goods was in serious doubt. This compelled the central government to take action.37 After experimenting with numerous pilot projects, the Chinese government significantly lowered peasant burdens and provided local-level governments with subsidies in 2004. In 2006, the central government abolished the agricultural tax. It also adopted a new national policy of “Building a New Socialist Countryside”, which tilted public expenditures toward rural areas and brought the peasants public goods, such as free basic education, new rural cooperative health care and rural pensions. These policy changes reflect significant efforts by the central government to stabilize rural China, rebuild state authority and strengthen the local state.

37. For the role played by peasant protests in national policy change, see Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation, Chapter 6, and Yongshun Cai, Collective Resistance in China, Chapter 8.

Copyright of China Journal is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.