In March 2014, while the National People's Congress was meeting in Beijing, a group of activists in Chongqing challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They waved a portrait of Sun Yat-sen 孙中山, the founding father of the rival Nationalist Party, accusing the CCP of corruption and dictatorship. Despite police action to disperse the protestors and confiscate their banners, no violence occurred.Footnote 1 In February 2016, on the second day of the Chinese New Year, a group of rights campaigners staged a public protest in Shanghai's People's Park, holding up a banner that read: “Release all prisoners of conscience immediately!” They also sent New Year's greeting cards to some 200 political prisoners, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波. No police presence or violence was reported.Footnote 2
These protests directly violated a political taboo and exemplified a type of popular contention that has received insufficient attention from scholars of Chinese contentious politics: value-driven contention. We use this term to refer to popular protests advocating non-materialist and public interest claims that are at odds with the ideology and practices that undergird the political regime.
Value-driven protests contradict prevailing beliefs about popular contention in China in two ways. First, scholars have paid extensive attention to protests driven by materialist and exclusive group interests, such as state workers’ protests against retrenchment or peasants’ resistance against taxation.Footnote 3 Evidence on contention driven by non-materialist and public interests has been largely reduced to exceptionally attention-generating events, such as the 1999 Falun Gong protest, the 2008 Charter 08 movement, the 2011 Southern Weekly incident, or the 2022 protests against Covid regulations.Footnote 4 However, events of such national relevance have been exceedingly rare in the post-1989 era. The above examples point to an everyday form of value-driven activism that has largely escaped scholarly analysis. How frequent are such forms of protest? What claim-making tactics do they employ? How do they differ from the routine repertoire of contention?
Second, scholars have suggested that protests driven by dissident values in China are consistently being repressed.Footnote 5 The harsh suppressions of the pro-democracy movement in the late 1980s and the Falun Gong movement in the late 1990s, as well as the recent crackdown on human rights lawyers, seem to support that argument. However, the above examples suggest that violent coercion is not a given, and the form, timing and intensity of state repression may vary. How does the Chinese state respond to everyday forms of value-driven protest? To what extent does it treat them differently from other social protests?
In this study, we address these questions with a sample of value-driven protests (N = 67), embedded in a unique hand-coded and multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities between January 2014 and May 2016. We begin by conceptualizing value-driven activism in the Chinese context and reviewing the existing literature on political opportunities. Then, we introduce our data and measurements, which we follow with qualitative and quantitative descriptions of our cases. We further model state responses to value-driven protests statistically, before deliberating our findings in an extended discussion section and then summarizing the insights gained in the conclusion.
Conceptualizing Value-driven Contention
What is value-driven contention and how can we position it within the landscape of contention in China? In authoritarian regimes, social movements and popular protests can be driven by a repertoire of claims, ranging from revolutionary claims that aim to overthrow the incumbent regime, to reformist ones that aim to alleviate grievances under the current system.Footnote 6 In the case of China, scholars have distinguished between protests making materialist and non-materialist claims.Footnote 7
In materialist protest, citizens exert pressure on state or non-state actors, such as factory owners, to force them to concede to demands for group-specific material benefits. These protests do not usually question the legitimacy of the regime. Over the past three decades, a rich literature has covered materialist protests staged by such groups as peasants,Footnote 8 workersFootnote 9 and homeowners.Footnote 10 These protesters tend to restrict their claims to material interests that are exclusive goods and which benefit their delimited group.Footnote 11 They typically frame their demands around official rules and ideology, which they accuse their targets of violating.Footnote 12 Instead of challenging the regime itself, such “loyalist protest” seeks to engage the state to help resolve parochial grievances.Footnote 13
In contrast, non-materialist protests are frequently characterized by claims for public goods and advocacy for civic values. These can include values with less direct implications for the regime's operating rules, such as feminism or LGBT rights.Footnote 14 Alternatively, non-materialist claims also appear in nationalist protests.Footnote 15
In this research, we focus exclusively on civic values that are at odds with the ideology and practices that define and undergird the incumbent political regime, such as demands for the direct election of national leaders, due process and the rule of law, full transparency of officials’ assets, and the protection of human rights. We understand a contentious gathering where such value claims are made to be a “value-driven contention.” Protests in support of activists pursuing such aims are also included in our definition, because participants thereby align themselves with the values advocated by the supported activists. Additionally, protests by activists striving for value-driven claims also fall within this scope. In such cases, the initial disputes may revolve around materialist and private issues, but when dissidents join the ranks, contention becomes politicized.Footnote 16
The Political Opportunity for Value-driven Contention
Scholars of Chinese politics assume that the regime is highly intolerant of value-driven protests. However, a scholarly consensus has emerged that the state shows conditional tolerance or even makes concessions to the predominantly materialist protests with non-civic claims.Footnote 17 Such protests are believed to be helpful for central leaders to identify social grievances, monitor local state agents and gather public opinion on state policies.Footnote 18 Many protests are not too costly to appease with concessions,Footnote 19 so the state tries to avoid excessive repression, fearing potential damage to regime legitimacy.Footnote 20 In some cases, local officials even capitalize on protests to advance their careers.Footnote 21
However, the suggested mechanisms underlying conditional tolerance of contention in China all hinge on the precondition that claims focus on materialist and private interests. Historically, “protests motivated by explicitly religious or political agendas” have been treated very differently than those motivated by subsistence claims.Footnote 22 Since 1989, there have been no visible disagreements among CCP leaders regarding political reforms advocated by ideational activists. Such advocacy has universally been viewed as sedition.Footnote 23 If citizens begin to make value-driven claims, it is believed that the state perceives such protests to be “regime-threatening” rather than “regime-engaging” and responds with repression.Footnote 24
Indeed, the party-state has good reason to remain wary of value-driven protests. Protests with such claims are not centred on the exclusive interest of “communities of ‘victims’” but instead make civic claims on behalf of the public.Footnote 25 Hence, their demands may resonate with a wider constituency and thus such contention has a greater potential to diffuse across classes or regions. If not contained in a timely manner, such protests could disrupt the operation of the political system and undermine the ruling party's core ideological principles.Footnote 26
The heavy-handed crackdowns on the student movements of the 1980s, the Falun Gong movement and the Charter 08 democracy campaign seem to support the state's consistent repression of value-driven protests. In the Xi Jinping 习近平 era, the state appears to have intensified its repression of activists and organizations that advocate for civic-political values, such as human rights lawyers, leftist students and church leaders,Footnote 27 and has toughened its response to routine protesters.Footnote 28
These assumptions are useful yardsticks for painting an overall picture, but as the above examples illustrate, they may be insufficient for anticipating state responses to value-driven protests in concrete instances. Different forms of civic mobilization may be perceived differently by the state in terms of the degree of threat. For instance, protests by human rights campaigners in a single city may not be deemed as equally threatening as coordinated protests at the national level. A protest by a small group without recognizable leaders is viewed differently to one staged by a large group with a charismatic leader like Li Hongzhi 李洪志 in the Falun Gong movement. A protest solely demanding human rights protection is not as threatening as one advocating immediate regime change. Moreover, when examining state responses to popular protests, we need to consider the intensity of repression. The mere presence of police to disperse crowds at a protest site differs from a police presence involving arrests, although these are all indicators of repression. Thus, how does the government handle value-driven protests? Does it repress all of them, and if so, how? Does the state ever grant concessions to activists?
Data and Measurement
Data collection
We explore our questions using a hand-coded dataset of 3,104 protest events in three Chinese megacities (Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing) between January 2014 and May 2016.Footnote 29 We suppose that value-driven protests predominantly occur in urban centres with international exposure, dense networks of activists, symbolically potent locations at which to stage contentious performances, and important political institutions to target. Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing are the political, economic and cultural hubs of south, east and west China, and the fifth, third and largest cities in the country, respectively.Footnote 30 The sites of data collection thus maximize the likelihood of finding value-driven protests.
To identify protest events, we followed Charles Tilly's definition of a contentious gathering as “an occasion on which a number of people (here, a minimum of ten) outside of the government gathered in a publicly accessible place and made claims on at least one person outside their own number, claims which if realized would affect the interests of their object.”Footnote 31 To prevent the duplication of protest events, we followed the Dynamics of Collective Action project. We coded gatherings with the same location, group and issue, and with no more than 24 hours between them, as one protest event. When the gap between events with these same attributes exceeded 24 hours, we recorded them as separate events in a series of protests.Footnote 32
We collected data from four types of sources: (1) international English and Chinese language news media outside of the direct influence of Chinese censorship,Footnote 33 (2) domestic news media, (3) dissident media and (4) social media. We manually extracted international English media through keyword queries from the LexisNexis database, which contains more than 1,000 global news outlets.Footnote 34 Using similar procedures, we collected international Chinese and domestic media from the Wisenews database, which contains over 600 Chinese-language newspapers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and South-East Asia. In addition, we screened three major Chinese language news media platforms (BBC Chinese, Duowei News and Radio Free Asia Chinese) manually or with search engine keyword queries, depending on the source. We collected Chinese dissident media sources from six websites renowned for reporting sensitive political news and protests in mainland China (Boxun 博讯, China Labour Bulletin, Canyu 参与, Minsheng guancha 民生观察, Zhongguo molihua geming 中国茉莉花革命 and 64tianwang 64 天网). Again, we screened them manually and through search engine queries. We gathered events posted on social media from the Wickedonna blog, which was compiled and published online by activists Lu Yuyu 卢昱宇 and Li Tingyu 李婷玉. The data comprise more than 200,000 social media posts related to more than 70,000 protests.Footnote 35 To the best of our knowledge, ours is the most source-diverse dataset on popular contention in China available.
Measurement of value-driven contention
Based on our conceptualization, we measured value-driven contention with variable batteries that recorded, first, the key issues or claims driving the protests and, second, the shared social identities of participants. Value-driven claims were recorded when demands for political (elections) and civic rights (freedom of expression, assembly, association, due process), human rights, disclosure of officials’ assets, the election of labour union representatives, etc. were present. We also included cases where protests were organized in support of individuals who frequently engage in activism for political or human rights causes. Value-driven identity was recorded when there were clear indications of the presence of individuals making such claims.Footnote 36 A key distinction for value-driven activists is that they engage in causes that go beyond an exclusive concern with specific injustices that is typical of protests in China.
We reassessed the original coding of every case to make sure only those where both codes could be confirmed with a very high degree of confidence were included in the analysis. This led us to exclude 22 cases previously coded as either containing value-driven claims or identities, rendering a final sample of 67 value-driven protests (see Appendix B in the online supplementary material for details). We identified 2.15 per cent of all protests (and 2.27 per cent of protests with non-missing values on our two dimensions) as value-driven.Footnote 37
Measurement of protest attributes and responses
To understand the basic protest attributes, and in particular those that could be relevant for state responses, we looked at the location of the event (Guangzhou, Chongqing or Shanghai), the year the event took place, the number of participants (the mean of the highest and lowest protest estimates, if more than one was available), and if a protest occurred in a highly visible central location of a city (i.e. in districts with either major government institutions,Footnote 38 the most important shopping streetFootnote 39 or the two tallest sky scrapers in the cityFootnote 40). To gauge potentially relevant protester behaviour, we looked at disruptive action (for example, if protesters engaged in blockades of traffic or buildings, if they used violence against people or property), if they displayed loyalty to the CCP or the national leadership, if they used central policy to support their demands, and the level of government the protest targeted.
In terms of protest responses, we considered the following. First, we tapped state repression with three frequently used binary variables: policing (whether police were reported to be present at the protest site), arrests (whether arrests at the protest site were reported) and coercion (whether coercive methods were used). These were recoded into a categorical variable with three outcomes: 0) no policing, 1) police only (without coercion or arrests) and 2) policing with arrests or coercion. Second, we also considered whether protesters experienced non-state repression through private security, thugs or other non-state actors. Third, we measured if the protest targets responded to protests with forms of concessions. We noted if at least one of the issues driving the protest had been resolved, had a promise to be resolved or if the targets of the protest responded in any non-repressive way (including engaging in dialogue with protesters) either directly on site or within one week of the protest. We further controlled for the sources of information described above.
Variables were coded by three coders who, after establishing sufficient interrater reliability, independently coded the data under the close supervision of one of the authors. The interrater reliability from parallel coding throughout the coding process for the variables coded from media content is reported in Appendix C in the online supplementary material.
Findings
To make the most of our medium-N sample of value-driven protests and the fact that we have both detailed case descriptions and the coded dataset, we combine qualitative and quantitative strategies for our analysis. We begin with a typology of value-driven protests discerned from a close reading of our cases. We then proceed with a descriptive quantitative analysis of basic attributes before estimating regressions to explore associations between value-driven protests and state responses.
A typology of value-driven contention
When value-driven activists engage in collective action, they embrace contentious performances that are distinct from ordinary protests. Some of them express “solidarity” (shenyuan 声援) with well-known dissidents. The case in support of “prisoners of conscience” (liangxin fan 良心犯), mentioned above, is one example. The term “prisoners of conscience” reappears repeatedly. In another case in 2014, a group of petitioners in Shanghai demonstrated in a busy historic district. They waved banners stating, “anti-violence hero Gong Jinjun 巩进军 is innocent, resist violent interception and black jails.”Footnote 41 This shows that mutual support protests sometimes expand their claims to civic values. In another case, in 2016, a small group of activists in Shanghai held banners demanding the release of human rights lawyer Guo Feixiong 郭飞雄.Footnote 42 The practice of forming solidarity groups was similarly seen in Chongqing. For instance, in 2016, around 300 activists, including Huang Qi 黄琦, the founder of the dissident 64tianwang website, gathered in front of a local court to express solidarity with two prisoners.Footnote 43
Other protesters make claims more explicitly, expressing support for alternative political regimes. In two cases, claimants expressed their dissatisfaction with the incumbent regime by praising its rival. On Chinese New Year's Eve in 2014, 500 petitioners demonstrated in Shanghai. They condemned the government for its abuse of power and disregard of the rule of law and waved the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) based in Taiwan.Footnote 44 Similarly, in the Chongqing case discussed in the introduction, activists marched on a major street waving a canvas banner bearing a portrait of Sun Yat-sen alongside his political slogans such as freedom, democracy and no dictatorship.Footnote 45 The activists’ selection of reference groups was probably strategic, as they tactically avoided referring to Western liberal democracies. Sun Yat-sen and his ROC were a less offensive alternative because Sun is also recognized as a nationalist hero by the CCP.
In other cases, protesters pointed the finger at the incumbent regime. In one such regime-critical protest, in 2014, around 1,000 activists demonstrated before the Shanghai city government. Some waved placards with moderate political claims, such as “sweeping corruption within the political and legal affairs agencies,” but one demonstrator was wearing a top bearing the phrase, “eliminate communist bandits.”Footnote 46 In 2014, a few days after the outbreak of the Hong Kong Occupy Central movement, a group of elderly activists unfurled a banner in Shanghai's People's Park that read: “We stand with the people of Hong Kong, we want universal suffrage too.”Footnote 47 On Human Rights Day in 2014, Shanghai activists publicly requested that the state “stop human rights abuse and establish constitutional democracy.”Footnote 48
Value-driven protests in comparison
We identified 2.27 per cent of all protests as value-driven. In Shanghai, Chongqing and Guangzhou, the percentages were 4.15, 2.34 and 0.23 per cent, respectively. Given that value-driven protests were previously assumed to be practically non-existent, this is remarkable. Table 1 displays the comparison of value-driven and other protests according to key attributes. Appendix D (online) displays the relevant logit regression model.
Table 1. Key Attributes and Sources of Value-driven and Other Protests
Notes: 1 n (%); Median (CIs). Missing values for different variables have been excluded. 2 Pearson's Chi-squared test; Wilcoxon rank sum test; Fisher's exact test. P <= 0.05 highlighted in bold.
Value-driven protests are not outstanding in terms of their distribution over the years, but they are less disruptive than other protests. They (almost) never use the disruptive tactics of blockades or violence, while these methods are used in 24 per cent and over 4 per cent of other protests, respectively. By contrast, value-driven protests more often display loyalty to the CCP or leadership (10 per cent) or cite central policy (19 per cent) to frame their claims. However, their less disruptive tactics are not significant in the regression model.
Value-driven protests are decidedly more ambitious with regards to their target and choice of location. They are much more inclined to target the state and higher levels of authority in particular. A stunning 49 per cent target the central government and 24 per cent target the province or city government. By comparison, just 0.2 per cent and 3.6 per cent of other protests take aim at these levels of authority. The targets are significant predictors of value-driven protests in the regression model as well. This ambitious targeting also explains the frequency with which central policies are cited. Moreover, 68 per cent of value-driven protests take place in a central (and symbolically significant) location in a city. This is the case for only 27 per cent of other protests (this variable is not significant in the regression).
The mean number of participants is not significantly different in the bivariate comparison, but it becomes negatively significant when the number of participants is logged and included in the regression model. Hence, an increase in participants reduces the likelihood of a protest being value-driven (once log-transformation leads the atypical events with many participants to have less influence). Lastly, mirroring previous findings,Footnote 49 value-driven protests are less often reported in social media but much more often reported in dissident and international media (this variable is significant in the regression model).
In terms of location, it is noteworthy that only 3 per cent of the protests took place in Guangzhou, and 57 per cent occurred in Shanghai. We cannot exclude that existing networks of political activists do not take to the streets in Guangzhou. However, given Guangzhou's comparatively “liberal” tradition within China, this is unlikely. It is more likely that the dissident media outlets, where most of the cases were reported (85 per cent of cases were reported in such outlets), had stronger ties to activists in Shanghai and Chongqing. This, in turn, suggests that we have not caught the full population of events.
In summary, value-driven protests are less disruptive but are, by nature of their aims, much more inclined to target the state. Almost half target the highest level of authority, a tactic virtually never employed by other protests. How does this combination of mildness and boldness play out in terms of state responses, and in terms of responses by the non-state agents of violence that are known to target protesters in China?Footnote 50
State and non-state responses
Value-driven protests seem to provoke state and non-state responses that are markedly different to the responses elicited by other protests. Table 2 displays the simple frequency distribution of value-driven and other protests in terms of state repression, concessions and non-state repression. Surprisingly, given the expectations in the scholarly literature, value-driven protests are much less often policed or met with state repression. While 69 per cent of value-driven protests are not policed, the same applies to only 44 per cent of other protests. Conversely, 16 per cent of value-driven protests are policed only and 16 per cent are policed and repressed. For other protests, the same applies for 27 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively. Moreover, while almost 10 per cent of other protests experience repression from non-state agents, this does not happen at all for value-driven protests. Finally, value-driven protests are much less likely to be met with concessions (3.3 per cent, compared to 15 per cent for other protests).
Table 2. State and Non-state Responses to Value-driven and Other Protests
Notes: 1 n (%); Missing values for different variables have been excluded. 2 Pearson's Chi-squared test.
In the next step, we test if these differences hold when we control for key attributes and sources of protests, explored above. We do not model non-state repression because there is no variation along the value-driven dimension. The bivariate comparison here is sufficient to conclude that value-driven protests are systematically different.
Table 3 displays a multinomial logit model on the likelihood of protests being policed and repressed (see Appendix E (online) for the uncontrolled model). All else being equal, value-driven protests are 88 per cent less likely to be policed and 93 per cent less likely to be repressed compared to other protests. When we change the reference category from “no police” to “police only” (see Appendix F for the uncontrolled model and Appendix G for the controlled model), we find that value-driven protests that are being policed are not less likely to be repressed than other protests that are being policed.
Table 3. Multinomial Logit Model on State Repression (Ref.: No police)
Notes: 1OR = Odds Ratio, CI = Confidence Interval. The control variable source type is not displayed. P <= 0.05 highlighted in bold.
Thus, value-driven protests have a lower risk of being repressed because they are less often policed. The much lower likelihood of being policed cannot be accounted for by any of the variables we control for in our models. There is something beyond these factors that leads value-driven protests to be met with significantly less state repression than is the case for other types of protest.
Table 4 displays logit regression models on concessions, with value-driven protests as the predictor of interest and the other protest attributes and information sources serving as control variables (see Appendix H for the uncontrolled model). In Model 1, we control for all variables except for the target of protest. Here, value-driven protests are significantly (85 per cent) less likely to elicit some form of concession than is the case for other types of protest. However, when we introduce the variable of protest targets in Model 2, the significance of the coefficient vanishes.Footnote 51
Table 4. Logit Models on Concessions
Notes: 1OR = Odds Ratio, CI = Confidence Interval. The control variable source type is not displayed. P <= 0.05 highlighted in bold.
Appendix I shows that among the protests included in Model 2, the rate of concessions hovers between 14 and 17 per cent when protests target non-state entities and levels of government that are below the centre. Only protests targeting the central government never win concessions. Of the 18 cases included in Model 2 that target the centre, 16 are value-driven protests. Hence, it is the strong inclination of value-driven protests to target the highest level of authority that is behind their lower likelihood of winning concessions.
Discussion
This analysis reveals a pattern of state responses to value-driven activism that is remarkably different from responses to ordinary social protests in China. Beginning with the least counter-intuitive, we find that value-driven protests are much less likely to extract concessions. Concessions, in turn, are absent from protests that target the central government – and almost all protests targeting the central government are value-driven protests. When the level of the protest target is controlled for, value-driven protests are no longer systematically different from other protests. Value-driven protests’ low likelihood of gaining concessions is thus a function of their targeting central authorities (and their challenging claims).
Moreover, we find that the state does not outsource the repression of value-driven protests to non-state agents of violence. This outsourcing strategy is primarily used by local officials to handle civil disputes such as housing demolition protests or land seizures.Footnote 52 Since value-driven protests mostly target higher levels of authority, they are at a lower risk of non-state repression. Moreover, we can safely assume that many of the activists involved in these events are under state surveillance. Thus, the state may block the involvement of non-state actors in these matters.
Our most surprising finding is that value-driven protests are systematically less likely to be policed and met with coercion or arrests. These differences are at odds with the scholarly literature and demand an explanation. How can we make sense of this?
One interpretation could be that the findings are the result of media bias. Most of our value-driven protests were reported in the dissident media. Christian Göbel and H. Christoph Steinhardt have shown that the dissident media we consulted are strongly inclined to report acts of state coercion,Footnote 53 while the opposite is true for government and commercial news media.Footnote 54 Thus, if anything, the bias of our main sources points in the opposite direction to that of our findings. Moreover, the dissident news media often report detailed information such as the names and telephone numbers of protest participants, indicating that they have in-depth knowledge of the events, which apparently often comes directly from participants.Footnote 55 Thus, both “information reporting” and “information gathering” biases about repression are highly unlikely.Footnote 56 Finally, we control our regressions for the type of sources that record an event. Media bias is therefore unlikely the reason for the lower likelihoods of repression we find.
What else could account for the results? We offer three interpretations. First, although our events make regime-challenging claims and/or have political activists as participants, their “cellular,”Footnote 57 “fragmented”Footnote 58 and “parochial”Footnote 59 form does not constitute an imminent threat to the regime. All value-driven protests in our dataset occurred at the local level only. Effective cross-regional mass mobilization usually requires the presence of charismatic leaders and organizational structures to facilitate collective actions and maintain group solidarity. Capable potential leaders are usually known to local officials and are likely to be monitored or pre-emptively detained.Footnote 60 Politically motivated organizations are ruthlessly repressed. Without these elements, it is extremely difficult for value-driven activists to make unified claims and stage cross-regional protest campaigns comparable to the Falun Gong movement. The fact that many value-driven protests take the form of expressing mutual support with detained activists and involve only a small number of participants (36 on average) points to the weakness of such protests vis-à-vis state power, despite their ambitious claims.
Much anecdotal evidence suggests that when localized value-driven protests start to diffuse cross-regionally and escalate, the state is compelled to resort to hard repression. For example, in 2015, Beijing-based lawyers went to Heilongjiang to protest the police killing of a petitioner. The protest gained momentum on social media, garnering support from rights lawyers nationwide. The authorities detained 14 lawyers, an act which attracted the attention of more lawyers. Later, 660 lawyers signed an open letter condemning police brutality, transforming a local dispute into a national campaign that prompted the state to use repression.Footnote 61 Similarly, in 2018, the government initially took a tolerant view of students supporting workers’ activism in the Jasic factory in Shenzhen. Only when more activists at home and abroad expressed solidarity did a nationwide crackdown ensue.Footnote 62 Thus, protest fragmentation may partially explain why value-driven protests are not met with increased repression. But why, holding other protest attributes equal, are value-driven events even less likely to be repressed than other protests? Our second and third explanations attempt to answer this question.
Second, central and local governments may perceive the threat of value-driven protests differently. The central government prioritizes regime survival, making it averse to political opposition.Footnote 63 But local authorities, who are at the frontline of protest management, are possibly more worried about disruptive actions that draw mass attention and harm their performance evaluations. They may choose to ignore small-scale and non-disruptive protests.Footnote 64 Compared to ordinary protests, value-driven protesters almost never use disruptive tactics, thus their actions do not necessitate policing to keep public order. Moreover, given that value-driven activists are committed, local officials may deliberately avoid confronting them to prevent becoming their targets and potentially attracting even more attention.Footnote 65 Therefore, as long as value-driven protests remain peaceful and go unnoticed by higher authorities, local officials may choose to ignore them.
In contrast, when value-driven protests have the potential to draw mass attention, local authorities are inclined to act. On 31 December 2014, a fatal stampede occurred near Chen Yi Square 陈毅广场 in Shanghai, leaving many dead. On 6 January 2015, many value-driven activists, who were not directly linked to the incident, gathered in the square to commemorate the victims. Although the act was peaceful and small-scale, the local government promptly detained some activists.Footnote 66 Arguably, this happened because the incident was a broadly shared concern and contentious sentiment could have easily escalated.
Third, repression is not limited to policing on the protest site. In our dataset, state repression is measured as conventional police action, in terms of on-site presence, coercion and arrests. But nowadays, the state has a wider repertoire of protest-control tactics, including surveillance, pre-emptive repression and post-hoc punishment. The state closely monitors political activists, and security organs regularly detain dissidents prior to sensitive periods that are known to everyone and could facilitate protest coordination, such as the annual “two sessions.”Footnote 67 Owing to pre-emptive repression, it is likely that those protests taking place are already “filtered” according to their perceived threat level and regarded as less dangerous by the state.Footnote 68
Moreover, extensive surveillance implies that sending the police to a protest site to gather basic information may not be necessary. Our finding that value-driven protests are policed less frequently than other protests – but are equally likely to experience coercion or arrests when they are policed, points in this direction. Finally, the surveillance of key activists allows the state to impose punishments at a later point, should it deem it necessary. In fact, policing regulations specify that “making arrests on the scene” is “generally not advisable” owing to the risk of a repression backlash.Footnote 69
Conclusion
This article examines value-driven protests and state responses in contemporary China. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we find that a non-negligible underbelly of everyday value-driven activism exists in urban China. The events largely take the form of demonstrating mutual support, where value-driven activists take to the street to express their support for detained dissidents. We also find cases where activists openly advocate for alternative political systems or demand fundamental changes in the prevailing political order. Compared with other protesters, we find that value-driven protesters use comparatively mild tactics but are much more ambitious in their targets.
In terms of state responses, the value-driven protests in our data were never repressed by non-state actors and almost never extracted concessions. Counter-intuitively, we find that value-driven protests are less likely to be policed and repressed. While bias can never be completely excluded in media-based protest event data, our data make bias a highly unlikely explanation for this observation. Instead, we offer three interpretations about patterns of state repression that can help to make sense of these findings. In essence, we suggest that the Chinese state appears to be quite capable of distinguishing between value-driven protests that pose a manifest threat and require swift repression, and other types of protest that are less likely to spill into wider society and can be contained. Also noteworthy is that the authorities do not seem to regard it as necessary to visibly repress all, or even most, of the value-driven protests in order to send a signal of deterrence to society.
We argue that it is useful to think of the state's threat perception as a two-dimensional space. Aside from the nature of claims (value-driven versus non-value driven), the scale of mobilization (local versus cross-regional) is critical for the state to decide if repression is necessary. When only one of these dimensions is transgressive, such as claims in the present cases, or scale in recent research on cross-regional mobilization,Footnote 70 protests remain in a grey zone where the option for non-repressive responses or casting a blind eye remains open. When claims and scale are both transgressive, harsh repression is almost unavoidable.
Three points of caution are needed when considering broader implications for Chinese politics. First, the three interpretations of our findings cannot be effectively tested with the present data, but they should be the focus of future studies. Second, our dataset does not cover recent years, during which the political space for value-driven protests may have contracted. Scholars have noted an overall increase in repression in the Xi era,Footnote 71 and a particular intolerance of civil society activists.Footnote 72 However, value-driven protests do not seem to have disappeared. It is not difficult to find such protests from more recent years. For instance, on International Human Rights Day in 2020, a group of Shanghai activists, including well-known dissidents, collectively petitioned in Beijing, demanding human rights protection and judicial justice.Footnote 73 On the same day in 2021, they again petitioned in Beijing, shouting regime-challenging slogans.Footnote 74
Third, the prevalence of value-driven activism is almost certainly greater than we have observed, as we rely on information about street contention. Since the Xi government became more repressive, activists such as human rights lawyers, church leaders and NGOs have tactically refrained from public activities in exchange for survival.Footnote 75 But they maintain private networks and communicate their claims clandestinely. In addition, despite the state's extensive censorship efforts, in some domains oppositional discourse has intensified in cyberspace.Footnote 76 In other words, the potential threat posed by value-driven protests to the political regime may be more profound and enduring than what is observable on the surface.
The existence of everyday value-driven protests in Chinese urban centres shows that the occasional but more spectacular eruptions of politically inspired protests do not come out of nowhere. While it is not known to what extent, for instance, the participants in the protests against Covid regulations in November 2022 were influenced by value-driven activists who were involved in the cases that we have examined, it is plausible that intellectual or personal linkages exist.Footnote 77 The general rule that “activism begets activism” likely also applies to value-driven activism. Thus, although our findings point to a repressive apparatus that is well capable of adjusting the intensity of its repression, the underbelly of value-driven activism poses a constant threat to regime stability in China.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741024001085.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council's Early Career Scheme (Grant No. 24615215). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference, 16–19 March 2023, and at a workshop at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), 7–8 December 2023.
Competing interests
None.
H. Christoph STEINHARDT is an associate professor in the department of East Asian studies, University of Vienna. He conducts research on contentious politics, state–society relations, surveillance, social trust and political identities in Chinese-speaking societies. He previously held positions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore. His work has appeared in disciplinary journals such as Political Studies, European Political Science Review, Social Indicators Research and Mobilization, and in area studies journals including The China Journal, Modern China and Journal of Contemporary China.
Kai YANG is an assistant professor in the department of government and international affairs, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research interests include contentious politics, political trust and state–veteran relations. His research articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Comparative Politics, The China Journal, The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China and Modern China.
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