Popular Protest in China

Popular Protest in China - Harvard Contemporary China

Paperback (17 Oct 2008)

Save $7.63

  • RRP $39.16
  • $31.53
Add to basket

Includes delivery to the United States

10+ copies available online - Usually dispatched within two working days

Publisher's Synopsis

Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.

Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts-such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures-while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to "silences" in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.

Book information

ISBN: 9780674030619
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 303.4840951
DEWEY edition: 22
Language: English
Number of pages: 236
Weight: 436g
Height: 227mm
Width: 155mm
Spine width: 19mm