Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Chinese Labor Unrest: Transforming the State from Below?

政治学博士论文研究：中国劳工骚乱：自下而上改造国家？

• 批准号: 1421941
• 负责人: Valerie Bunce
• 金额: $ 1.76万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1421941&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

In China, tens of thousands of strikes, protests, and riots over workplace issues are estimated to occur annually. What is the political impact of this turmoil? Dominant analyses assume that rising unrest is not fundamentally altering the Chinese political system. This project assesses another interpretation, namely that worker activism is gradually transforming the Party-state from below, but in a potentially contradictory manner, spurring a strengthening of the coercive capacity of local governments, on the one hand, while forcing officials to side with labor against capital in formally adjudicated disputes and to publicly reframe the role of workers in a more positive light, on the other. To test this hypothesis, the project will first employ an original, crowd-sourced and georeferenced dataset of strikes, protests, and riots by workers across China, as well as GIS maps of county-level demographic and economic data, to identify those causes of labor unrest that might also correlate with government policy. Next, it will use a time series dataset drawn from official sources to analyze the relationship between provincial-level labor dispute rates and both spending on the anti-riot People's Armed Police (PAP) and outcomes of labor dispute mediation, arbitration, and litigation (i.e., the balance between pro-worker, pro-employer, and mixed rulings), controlling for those variables that were significant in the first round of analysis. Finally, to examine subtle changes in government rhetoric and to understand the precise mechanisms potentially linking unrest and policy outcomes, interviews will be conducted and media reports and state press releases collected in provinces that lie along the regression line of disputes and PAP spending but that vary in their levels of unrest. This research will have important ramifications for our understanding of the long-term viability of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the role of social movements under authoritarianism more generally. To date, the emphasis of researchers has largely been on how state structures shape dissent, not the reverse, and on movement "successes" versus "failures." The project will examine alternatives to prevailing top-down narratives of state-society relations and explore how concessions and repression can combine in unexpected ways, encouraging further unrest even as unrest is clamped down upon more forcefully. The project will prove valuable outside of academic circles. Its findings should provide guidance to activists in the international labor movement regarding how best to support their counterparts in China. Following the dramatic events of the Arab Spring, democracy promotion experts in government and civil society ought to find the results of the project useful in gauging the openings?and barriers?to reform in single-party states. Finally, at a time when spending on domestic "stability maintenance" has outstripped the entire Chinese defense budget, this research will inform debates among security analysts regarding Beijing's internal and external priorities and the interaction between the two.

在中国，估计每年都会发生数万起因工作场所问题而引起的罢工、抗议和骚乱。这场动荡的政治影响是什么？主流分析认为，日益加剧的动荡并没有从根本上改变中国的政治体制。本项目评估了另一种解释，即工人行动主义正在从下而上逐渐改变党-国家，但可能是以一种相互矛盾的方式，一方面促使地方政府的强制能力得到加强，另一方面迫使官员在正式裁决的纠纷中站在劳工一边反对资本，并以更积极的方式公开重新定义工人的角色。为了验证这一假设，该项目将首先使用中国各地工人罢工、抗议和骚乱的原始、众包和地理参考数据集，以及县级人口和经济数据的GIS地图，以确定可能与政府政策相关的劳资纠纷原因。接下来，它将使用从官方来源提取的时间序列数据集来分析省级劳动争议发生率与防暴人民武装警察（PAP）支出和劳动争议调解，仲裁和诉讼结果（即，亲工人，亲雇主和混合规则之间的平衡），控制那些在第一轮分析中显着的变量。最后，为了研究政府言论的微妙变化，并了解可能将骚乱与政策结果联系起来的确切机制，将在争端和人民行动党支出的回归线沿着但骚乱程度不同的省份进行采访，收集媒体报道和国家新闻稿。这项研究将对我们理解中国共产党的长期生存能力以及威权主义下社会运动的作用产生重要影响。到目前为止，研究者的重点主要是国家结构如何塑造异议，而不是相反，以及运动的“成功”与“失败”。“该项目将研究国家与社会关系的自上而下叙述的替代方案，并探讨让步和镇压如何以意想不到的方式联合收割机结合，鼓励进一步的动乱，即使动乱被更有力地镇压。这个项目在学术界之外将被证明是有价值的。调查结果应该为国际劳工运动的积极分子提供指导，指导他们如何最好地支持中国的同行。在阿拉伯之春的戏剧性事件之后，政府和民间社会的民主促进专家应该发现该项目的结果有助于衡量开放？障碍？一党制国家的改革。最后，在国内“维稳”支出超过中国全部国防预算的情况下，这项研究将为安全分析人士就北京的内外优先事项以及两者之间的互动进行辩论提供信息。