Street Demonstration in the Second Wave

3. Street Demonstration in the Second Wave

To governmental officers’ surprise, a series of large-scale street protests were triggered by the announcement of the improvement plan. The change in route created new stakeholders along the new line. These

stakeholders were educated about the harmful effects of the maglev project through earlier protests, and feel victimized when they realize the government sacrificed them for the sake of others. Demonstration burst out without warm-up period like in the earlier stage. In the first weekend of 2008, protesters accumulated

automatically and walked around their communities. The following day, also a holiday, protests with even bigger scale ensued, and the crowd marched to essential districts that had an impact on the traffic. The police was in position and some protesters with white ribbon on forehead were arrested and released.

The government responded by holding several meetings with the voluntary delegations of the protesters, yet no satisfactory results were generated. Protesters took causal walks along the river bank in the following every evening, intending to mobilize a greater one in the coming weekend. Although the government

seemed to get nervous and started to crackdown evening walk alone the bank, the protests in the weekend was still very successful in have about one thousand protesters marching on the People’s Avenue and gathering on the People’s Square. Although after these protests the government responded friendly by slowing down the progress,⁸ some protesters launched another attach by applying for a legal demonstration with participants over 6000. Although the authority eventually turned down the application, this political move successfully created great pressure on the government mainly because of the potential scale of the participants that may embarrass the city government in the annual democratic episode, the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), will be staging soon.

March has always been a politically sensitive season because above two conferences will be convoke in Beijing. They are democratic symbols of this one-party system and carry the responsibility of getting people’s interests represented and conflicts should be mediated and resolved in these occasions. Although the representatives of these two organizations might not actually have any administrative power or specified jurisdictions, they might actually speak up for the protests, call for attention to specific events or phenomena, and thus embarrass the in-charge officers openly. Once be named in such face-losing occasions, the political career might be in danger. The best policy for the mayor and party secretary was therefore keep low profile and make peace with the protestors to avoid being put under the spotlight. Therefore, the mayor of clearly expressed that the project of maglev was still under review by independent specialists and thus final decision was still pending. The policy seemed to fade away when its substitutes, the traditional high-speed rail

8 Slowing down the progress, or “xu tu zhi” (literally pursuing it slowly) in Party Secretary’s wording, should be another important policy turn because by doing so, it could not be possible to have an opening ceremony with the World Expo. It means a formal detach of these two big projects

connecting Shanghai and Hangzhou and the subway route 2 connecting two international airports were in operation lately.

Discussion

Although in a lot of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) protests could be observed in different corners of China since after economic and political liberalization in recent decades, collective actions against governmental decisions are still taboo for CCP and street protests in such scale are still not often-seen. It is even more puzzling why the city government has been responding to these two waves of protests in such a favorable manner. After all, yielding to a NIMBY case tends to have an annoying sequela of encouraging similar protests in the future. Several reasons might serve to explain such unusual success of the citizen in making the government responsive to societal demands.

First, Shanghai has been a city of the most advanced capitalism in China. Capitalistic practices have

equipped its citizens with the strongest awareness in civil and property rights. Protests mostly emerged from communities of commercial housing in which many residents had rich experiences in fighting for their rights against the real estate companies. In forcing the construction companies to respond, many communities experienced the problems of collective action and found solution to overcome the free-riding issues. In seeking legal resources to solve their disputes with the companies, many citizens have been aware of the principle of the rule of law, meaning that everybody, including the rich businessmen and powerful public officers, needs to follow the same set of laws and respect others’ rights specified in the laws. Since real estate property involves a very huge stake for each middle-class citizen, once the property is in danger, he or she will have a very strong incentive to fight for it.

Second, homogeneous population and geographic distribution of protesters matter too. While the maglev line is going through three districts (qu, an administrative level lower than city government), Pudong, Xuhwei, and Minxing respectively, the mobilization of protests in Minxing have been most successful. One reason is that Minxing has a large number of newly constructed, commercial housing communities and thus has a huge base of population with similar backgrounds: well-educated white color, internet literate, and carrying

formidable home loans. They were living close to each other, and geographical proximity allowed the morale and anger of the protesters to be shared by potential participants who had similar concerns and stakes.

The shared open space along the Dingpu River had functioned as platform through which progressive

protesters gathered, performed, interacted with the audience, and convoked supporters. With the advantage of available civil space, the mobilization has been much more effective than the previous wave and

large-scale protests could burst out after a very short nourishing stage.

Third, what has been less well perceived is the influence of grassroots elections on the emergence of these movements. By 2006, about half (53%) of the communities have experienced direct elections for positions

in communities, including members/chairman of Residential Committee, those of Home-owner Committee, and representatives of People’s Congress. In the course of promoting grassroots elections, the city

government intentionally chose those communities of commercial housing with homogeneous, middle-class residents to be the showcase and to assure a smooth process. Therefore many of the protesting communities were chosen to demonstrate the practice of grassroots democracy. These elections, however, were largely known as a controlled process in which the party cadres, in the position of as administrators, orchestrated the whole process to assure the superiority of one-party democracy. Two criteria have been set up for this purpose. One is a high turnout rate to show high level of democratic participation and assure the legitimacy of the elections. The other is a high concentrate rate, meaning that votes should concentrate as much as possible on the candidates that the party supported. This criterion indicates the possibility of harmony under one-party dominancy.

These agenda for election administrators, in contrast to such western criteria as neutrality and fairness, has turned the exercise of civil rights to political campaigns. The party cadres in grassroots level were put in a competition with very clear indicators to measure their performance. Nevertheless, they had very limited means to pursue these goals. They themselves might not have the financial capacity to buy a unit in these communities. Take Mr. Cao in XB community for example, he dispatched himself to remote rural place since his youth to sponsor the campaign for the intellectual to serve in the countryside in the cultural revolution spending most of his productive life as a nonprofessional labor before coming back to become a social worker. The position of Branch Secretary of Party in community that he eventually climbed up to was neither a prestigious or lucrative position for him to gain superior status among the new-rich residents, let alone to give commands to community folks in a bossy manner. There was no administrative jurisdiction for them to coerce compliance from the liberalized urban dwellers. It was not an easy task for them to carry out.

What made the situation more complicated was the fact that some of the seemingly nominal titles actually involved attractive interests and thus made some of these elections very competitive. Overall, the

chairperson of home-owners committee has been a very attractive position because the committee is in charge of signing contract with property maintaining company which provides security, cleaning, and

repairing/maintenance services for the community. To secure the contract, the companies have full intention to please the chairperson of the committee. In some occasions in which the homeowners have dispute with the construction company who usually also run the property maintaining company, the chairperson would also be the delegated negotiator in such occasion. This put the chairperson of this committee in an advantageous position to access to lucrative rewards from negotiating opponents. Further, the committee is also in charge of the management of common property, such as leasing some units of common spaces or public facility (such as swimming pool) to run specific businesses. In addition to the managerial discretion, the chairman might also control a considerable amount of cash flow as the revenue of community. Both give the chairman great

chances for extra-legal benefits.

When these benefits attracted broad rent-seekers to compete in these electoral arenas, the challenges that party cadres encountered tended to be phenomenal because competition divide the votes and the concentration rate would be low. One strategy for the party cadre to cope with the problem is to side with the prospective winner.

The problem is that, however, it might not been clear which candidate would win. In addition, sometimes the prospective winner could be too bossy to work with, especially when the party cadre has to count on him or her to get outstanding performance.

No matter what, to run such political campaign successfully, grassroots party cadres need to find out, revitalize and strengthen existing social networks for political mobilization, not only for defeating those competitors that rejected to withdraw from elections, but also for cope with the administrative chores in orchestrating three consecutive elections (Residential Committee, Home-owner Committee, and Community Representative of People’s Congress) . Since such networks as community chorus, bridge club, and other social groups for leisure purposes that can be found in community tend to be autonomous in such a capitalistic urban society, they are hard to manipulate. Actually the party cadres are in an imbalanced power structure:

the cadres need the social elites and their networks to accomplish missions more than the social elites need from them, the best strategy is to ally with them, to help them hooking up even thicker networks so that both can party cadres and social elites would benefit.

The natural consequence is that social networks were strengthened in many communities after elections of 2006. Once an external threat was imposed to the community to raise a common concern, these revitalized social networks were ready to serve to mobilize collective action right away. Since the social elites had been engaged in mobilizing votes in elections, they were naturally considered as the leaders in the subsequent protests. Many social elites actually met the expectation by organizing effective protests. More

interestingly, the party cadres were in a very awkward situation. As the surrogates of the ruling party in the community, they needed to faithfully implement the policy from above. Yet as comrades of the social elites in earlier election mobilizations, they felt the need to stand with the communities. Since the election would be held every three years, they need the cooperation in this repeated game scenario.

Consequently, some cadres actually played some auxiliary roles in helping social elites to organize protests.

They offered insider information from above; they acted as messengers to between communities and upper level governments; sometimes they even offered some useful tactics to avoid troubles in protests. After all collective protests were still a taboo for this regime, and thus the protesters needed to know where the red line was to avoid unnecessary risk. Most protests followed a simple tactic of brinksmanship: to try their best to catch public attention and supports without stepping on the line. On the one hand, protesters could do it on a try-and-error basis, yet the costs of making an error could be very high. On the others, they also have very strong intention to find out the line by all means. Party cadres could serve as a reliable source via liaison between protestors and the party.

Conclusion

Two stages of Anti-maglev movements in Shanghai surprised the China watchers in at least two respects: very effective mobilization of collective action to express social requests and very positive responses from the public authority. Success in both demand side and favorable response in supply side make a whole accountability story, while reasons for their success vary. The genuine reason for favorable governmental response can hardly be confirmed, while possible candidates range from bureaucratic politics between Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Science and Technology to personal concerns or stumble of such high-echelon officers as the former mayor Chen Liangyu. No matter what, utterance of social demands in a controlled political environment has been a noticeable phenomenon that may present some ideas about holding accountability in an authoritarian regime.

Although this case may shed an optimistic light on the trend of political development in China, it has many idiosyncratic features that might not be applicable to other cases. For example, this case involves a large number of high-income-level and internet-literate citizens, capitalistic culture, commercial housing communities with a large number of homogeneous residents, and maybe some spacial advantage for collective actions. While all these factors may have contributed to very effective mobilization of collective protests, this research intends to illustrate the role of less well-received factor, grassroots elections in

improving accountability. It worked less by threatening to drive the incumbents out of office. After all, the positions subject to elections have been too low to impose any credible threats to political elites who make public policies. Nor did it work by forcing these elected officers to give up their loyalty to the party by joining the collective protests. What actually worked, however, were the social networks that have been strengthened in holding grassroots elections. They were considered as political campaigns that have to rely on multiple networks to get satisfactory results. While the communist leaders might still very sensitive to the threat of social organizations in connecting anti-government forces, grassroots elections have

unintentionally built them up and enhancing their functions in pressing social demands on the government.

附件二：議會接受發表函

國科會補助專題研究計畫項下出席國際學術會議心得報告

日期：2012 年 11 月 17 日

一、參加會議經過

該會議於美國的印第安那州的印第安那波利斯舉行。印地安納州位於美國中西