The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China? After the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, stability became one of the keywords in the
CCP’s political lexicon and a core tenet of the regime.1 The idea, which stipulates that
social disorder must be avoided at all cost, was further entrenched after the party-state
learned the lessons of Soviet Union’s collapse and, later, the Falungong threat. In the
late 1990s, stability is further turned into action. What was known as stability
maintenance (weihu wending 维护稳定 and, later, the shorthanded weiwen 维稳) has
gained an increasing appearance in party pronouncements and the media, and
gradually expanded into a broader policy imperative that combines the maintenance
of law and order, surveillance as well as the management of protests.2 In the 17th
Party Congress in 2007, stability maintenance has acquired a new significance under
the slogan of “harmonious society”, a leitmotif lying at the core of the Hu-Wen
administration.3 In 2011, the party-state budgeted over RMB 624 billion on public
security, which for the first time exceeded the military expenditure.4 On the other
hand, the rapid growth in popular protests in China and the outbreak of Arab Spring
cautioned party leaders to stay vigilant against the risk of a Chinese-style revolution.
The 12th Five-Year announced in 2011 put further emphasis on stability by proposing
tighter public security, the reduction of mass incidents and the implementation of
“social management” (shehui guanli 社会管理), now named “social governance”
(shehui zhili 社 会 治 理), a nationwide program in which stability plays an
underpinning role.5
Concurrently, the constant emphasis on preserving stability becomes a source from
which the party-state claims popular political support. Social stability has been
framed as the “fundamental interest of the Chinese people”, without which economic
development could halt while China could plunge back into political chaos. One
1
CCP is the abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party.
Qian Gang, “Preserving Stability”, China Media Project, 14 September 2012.
3
Hu Jintao, “Goujian hexie shehui” [“On Building Socialist Harmonious Society”], 19 February 2005.
4
Data from the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China on 10 July 2012.
5
“NPC adopts 12th Five-Year Plan”, Xinhua News Agency, 14 March 2011; Joseph Fewsmith, “Social
Management as a Way of Coping With Heightened Social Tensions”, Hoover Institute China
Leadership Monitor, Vol. 36, January 2012.
2
1 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China People’s Daily editorial, for example, has the title “Harmony, stability and faster
reform is the consensus of all Chinese people”.6 In a party study session, President Xi
Jinping said, “what Chinese people fear is chaos, what they want is stability, and what
they hope for is world peace”.7 Posing as the representative of the Chinese, the partystate vows that the preservation of China’s social stability will be its principal
objective.
The fanfare of stability conceals two key questions. Under what political context did
the idea of stability (wending) and the practice of stability maintenance (weiwen)
emerge? Are they successful in bolstering CCP’s political legitimacy? This paper
argues that promoting the idea of stability on a national level is CCP’s attempt to relegitimate its rule through defining the continued maintenance of social order as a
mark of popular consent to the party-state, a causal relationship that escapes
conventional social science assumption. However, as it further shows, while this
might have created a new source of legitimacy for the authoritarian regime, the
largely coercive practice of stability maintenance has gradually roused citizen
discontent against the party-state and backfired on the attempt of re-legitimation. The
paper explains why the paradox happens by exploring two disparate processes. The
first, which I call “institutionalization”, is a process in which security-related
institutions multiply and penetrate the grassroots society, drawing in non-state actors,
technology and market forces. The second, which I call “bureaucratization”, is the
incorporation of the cadre accountability system into stability maintenance, which
turns the latter into a routinized mode of governance. The mutual reinforcement of the
two processes has led to the CCP’s “panoptical control” of the Chinese society, and its
tendency to depend on coercive strategies continues to undermine its regime
legitimacy. Such paradox has important implications on Chinese politics. Examining
it will help us make sense of why, even though the notion of stability has been shaped
as a critical legitimacy source, the practice of stability making as part of the state's
quest for legitimation turns out to have a rather erosive effect on public trust on the
party-state. The paper will conclude by showing how this paradox challenges the
6
“Hexie wending yu jiakuai fazhan shi quan zhongguo renmin de gongshi” [“Harmony, Stability and
Faster Reform is the Consensus of all Chinese People”], Renmin Ribao [People’s Daily overseas
edition, hereafter, RMRB], 23 April 2005.
7
“Xi Jinping: zhongguoren pa dongdang, qiu wending, pan tianxia taiping” [Xi Jinping: Chinese
People Fear Turmoil, Want Stability and Wish for World Peace], Sohu News, 29 January 2013.
2 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China widely-adopted paradigm of authoritarian resilience.
Stability as a marker of legitimacy in China Social science research has generally considered social stability as the manifestation
of political legitimacy. This conventional understanding harks back to Max Weber’s
account of legitimacy. Weber identified legitimacy as an explanatory factor of regime
stability. For him, legitimacy engenders stability because faith in a particular social
order is more likely to produce regularities that are more stable than those resulting
from the pursuit of self-interest or rule following.8 Samuel Huntington had a similar
interest in examining the factors that explains stability. But unlike Weber who was
more interested in the ways in which rulers gain acceptance from the ruled,
Huntington focused on a much broader set of factors that influence regime stability.
For Huntington, order and stability were crucial objectives for developing countries;
but their stability depends less on the forms of government and more on their social
characteristics, including urbanization, literacy and the ratio of political
institutionalization to participation.9 Legitimacy influences political stability through
these factors rather than purely determined by the form of government. Yet despite
this nuance, common to both is a causal relationship that explains regime stability by
the degree of legitimacy, a premise that strongly informs the study of democratization
in Western scholarship.10
While the concept of legitimacy is less commonly seen in mainstream empirical
political research, China scholars have brought back legitimacy to understand China’s
transition from state socialism to market authoritarianism and the puzzle of
8
Max Weber, A. M. Henderson, and Talcott Parsons, Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic
Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 124.
9
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
10
Seymour Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political
Legitimacy”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 53 (1959), p. 69-105; Robert Dahl,
Polyarchy: Participation & Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971; Uriel Rosental,
Political Order: Rewards, Punishments and Political Stability (Brill, 1978); Juan Linz, “Legitimacy of
Democracy and the Socioeconomic System", Comparing Pluralist Democracies (1988), p. 65-113;
Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman:
University of Oklahoma, 1993), pp. 384-406; Bruce Gilley, “The Determinants of State Legitimacy:
Results for 72 countries", International Political Science Review, Vol.27 (2006), p. 47-71.
3 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China “authoritarian resilience”. 11 Gilley, Sausmikat, Heberer and Schubert argued that
institutional changes of the party-state under the reform have engendered new sources
of legitimacy which in part contributed to China’s post-Tiananmen regime stability.12
Holbig, on the other hand, sees ideological shift from communism to popular
sovereignty, legal norms and constitutionalism key to sustaining the legitimacy of the
CCP.13 Zhao added nationalism, arguing that the CCP has emphasized its role as the
“paramount patriotic force” and the “guardian of national pride” particularly since
1989.14 Others, however, are more skeptical about the conclusion that the party-state
has achieved some degree of legitimacy. Chen observed that the post-Tiananmen
party leaders has sought re-legitimation through economic performances, but argued
that this strategy has also created long-term problems such as weaker social cohesion
and betrayal of its socialist underpinning, thereby weakening regime stability. Zhao
shared this view and held that performance legitimacy is “intrinsically unstable
because it carries concrete promises and therefore will trigger immediate political
crisis when the promises are unfulfilled”.15 Despite their difference in views16, it is
worth noting that they all share the assumption that legitimacy is the source of
stability and that instability reflects the lack of legitimacy.
11
Andrew Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience”, Journal of Democracy, Vol.14 (2003), p. 6-17.
Bruce Gilley, “Legitimacy and Institutional Change The Case of China”, Comparative Political
Studies, Vol.41, No.3 (2008), p. 259-284; Bruce Gilley and Heike Holbig, “The Debate on Party
Legitimacy in China: A Mixed Quantitative/Qualitative Analysis”, Journal of Contemporary China,
Vol. 18, no. 59 (2008), p. 339-358; Gunter Schubert, “One-Party Rule and the Question of Legitimacy
in Contemporary China: Preliminary Thoughts on Setting up a New Research Agenda”, Journal of
Contemporary China, Vol.17, No. 54 (2008), p. 191-204; Nora Sausmikat, “More Legitimacy for Oneparty Rule? The CCP's Ideological Adjustments and Intra-party Reforms" ASIEN, Vo. 99 (April 2006),
p. 70-91; Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert, “Political reform and Regime Legitimacy in
Contemporary China", ASIEN 99 (April 2006), p. 9-28.
13
Heike Holbig, “Ideological Reform and Political Legitimacy in China: Challenges in the Post-Jiang
Era." GIGA Working Papers, No. 18 (2006).
14
Suisheng Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals' Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the
1990s", China Quarterly, Vol.152 (December 1997), p. 725-745.
15
Dingxin Zhao, “The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and
Contemporary China", American Behavioral Scientist Vol.53, No.3 (2009), p.416-433; Feng Chen,
“Order and Stability in Social Transition: Neoconservative Political Thought in Post-1989 China.” The
China Quarterly, Vol. 151 (September 1997), p. 593-613.
16
For scholars who see party re-legitimation as a source of post-Tiananmen stability, stability is more
so conceived as the long-term regime survival and the absence of cataclysmic upheavals, rather than
the daily outbreak of social unrest. To the extent that the CCP can maintain its rule without severe
challenge, China will be stable. On the other hand, for those who see problems in relying certain basis
of legitimation as the source of instability, their conception of stability seems to lie the other way round,
emphasizing more the occurrence of contention.
12
4 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China However, in contemporary China, it is possible that a reverse causal process is
simultaneously taking place – a process in which a “stability” discourse contributes to
regime legitimation by defining the continued maintenance of social order as a mark
of popular acquiescence to CCP’s authoritarian rule. Rather than a consequence or
indicator of political legitimacy, the preservation of stability has been heralded as the
source of legitimacy in the regime legitimation of post-Tiananmen China. In other
words, the objective state of social order no longer matters as much in reflecting
whether a regime is legitimate. What matters more is the action to enforce social order,
or at least the very claim to do so. Stability is not the a priori requirement for
legitimacy; it is a means to project an imaginary state of stable order that lies in the
indefinite future, a source from which legitimacy could be cultivated.
Such process is similar to what Tilly describes in the relationship between “warmaking” and “state-making”, in which nations are legitimized to expand extractive
capacities (e.g. taxation) within state boundaries and offer “protection rackets” to
citizens under the exaggerated likelihood of war-making with neighboring nations. As
governments often act as “a local strong man” who “forces merchants to pay tribute in
order to avoid damage – damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver” by
simulating, stimulating or fabricating threats of external war, they operate essentially
like racketeers. 17 More recently, scholars have begun to argue that Western
democratic governments are racketeering in the name of preventing crime and
terrorism. 18 This approach might also be valuable in understanding the political
process of authoritarian regimes. In this respect, China, where the party-state has been
harnessing the idea of stability to generate legitimacy, offers an illustrative case.
Regime legitimacy in China has gained considerable scholarly attention. Gries, Rosen
and Brady have demonstrated the shift of the party-state’s source of legitimacy in the
17
Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”, in Peter Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (ed.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985).
18
Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Paul Chevigny, “The Populism of Fear: Politics of crime
in the Americas”, Punishment & Society Vol.5, No.1 (2003), p. 77-96; Benjamin Goold, CCTV and
policing: Public area surveillance and police practices in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2004); Jonathan
Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and
Created a Culture of Fear (New York: OUP, 2007); David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime
and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
5 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China post-Tiananmen period from the communist ideology to bases of support that rely
more on popular persuasion. 19 But while scholars tend to highlight economic
performance and nationalism, few have focused on stability as an equally important
source. Although Chen observed that stability was promoted both by the party-state
and some intellectuals following the Tiananmen crackdown20, its role as a source of
legitimation has not attracted much attention until more recently.21 Shue took a step
further and placed the role of stability under scrutiny. She argued,
It is the government’s capacity to sustain stability and social order that is generally held up as the
touchstone value…The present regime stakes its legitimacy [...] not on its technical capacity to steer
and to grow the economy, but on its political capacity to preserve a peaceful and stable social order
under which, among other good things, the economy can be expected to grow.22
Shue rejects the functionalist view of legitimation in which one coherent set of
uncomplicated beliefs is being unplugged and replaced by another set of beliefs.
Citizens, she argued, “almost never swallow whole the legitimacy claims of their
rulers”. Thus, legitimation cannot be simply read as reductionist process in which
ideology is substituted by economic performance and nationalism. For her, “the
legitimacy claims of the state are layered deep historically, multi-stranded, and
complex”, and this is marked by the search for stability and order which has been
deeply rooted in the political culture of imperial China.
While Shue recovered the significance of stability in post-Tiananmen China, her
argument is suggestive rather than well-substantiated by empirical evidence. The gap
is addressed by Sandby-Thomas, who analyzed party propaganda on stability during
the 1989 student protests, the 1999 anti-Falun Gong campaign and the 2005 antiJapan demonstrations. He argued that at these critical junctures the party-state
deployed stability as a legitimation strategy to associate the notion positively with
future economic development and CCP’s leadership. He also points out that the
legitimation process mystifies the notion of stability, allowing it to be “discursively
19
Peter Gries and Stanley Rosen (ed.), State and Society in 21st Century China: Crisis, Contention,
and Legitimation (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 16; Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing
Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2008).
20
Chen, “Order and Stability in Social Transition”.
21
Michael Schoenhals, "Political Movements, Change and Stability: The Chinese Communist Party in
Power," The China Quarterly, Vol.159 (September 1999), p. 595-605; Susan Shirk, China: Fragile
Superpower (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 55.
22
Vivienne Shue, “Legitimacy Crisis in China?”, in Gries and Rosen, (ed.), State and Society, p. 24-49.
6 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China flexible”.23 But the shortcoming of his work is that it focused only on discourse
analysis but did not explore the everyday practice of legitimation. Meanwhile, the
growing body of literature on stability maintenance has rather focused on its erosion
on the CCP’s political legitimacy despite its ability to maintain tight control on
Chinese citizens. Most of them focused on the repressive and authoritarian aspect of
the government suppressing dissents and policing protests. Yet although few of them
directly discuss the concept of legitimacy, the implication that stability maintenance
undermines regime legitimacy is nevertheless clear.24
This paper aims to bridge the discussion between regime legitimation and stability
and also reconcile the inconsistency regarding the role of stability on regime
legitimation in the existing body of literature. It covers both discourse and practice by
examining the discursive process in which the party-state attempts to re-legitimate
itself through the promise of political stability, while highlighting the paradox in
which the party-state maintains stability through the relentless expansion of state
power at the grassroots, a process that undermines rather enhances regime legitimacy.
It does not aim to dive into a thorough theoretical discussion on political legitimacy.
The purpose here is rather to understand legitimacy in terms of the ongoing
legitimation practices in post-Tiananmen China.
Broadly speaking, legitimacy is defined as the degree to which citizens generally
recognize their political order from a public perspective as rightful and just in
exercising powers. This means that, for a political order to have legitimacy, it is not
enough to have the empirical support, submission or non-defiance on the part of the
citizens vis-à-vis the state; such spoken or unspoken consent, as Beetham and
Habermas reminds us, has to be also justified normatively in their own belief
23
Peter Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the Chinese Communist Party since Tiananmen: A Critical
Analysis of the Stability Discourse (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
24
Chongyi Feng, “Preserving Stability and Rights Protection: Conflict or Coherence?”, Journal of
Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013), pp. 21-50; Xi Chen, “The Rising Cost of Stability”,
Journal of Democracy, vol. 42, no. 1 (2013), pp. 57-64; Jonathan Walton, “Intensifying Contradictions:
Chinese Policing Enters the 21st Century”, The National Bureau of Asian Research, February 2013, pp.
7-41; Karita Kan, “Whither Weiwen? Stability Maintenance in the 18th Party Congress Era”, China
Perspectives, no. 1 (2013), pp. 87-93; Xie Yue and Wei Shan, “China Struggles to Maintain Stability:
Strengthening its Public Security Apparatus”, East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore,
Background Brief, no. 615 (2011).
7 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China system.25 In that sense, North Korea cannot be considered to be a legitimate order
even though citizens support the state unanimously.
Two more distinctions ought to be made. The first concerns the object to which
citizens relay political legitimacy. David Easton makes a distinction between “diffuse
support” and “specific support”. The former refers to the more basic and direct
support to the system of governance taken as a whole, while the latter is directed to
“perceived outputs and performance of the political authorities [as distinguished from
the regime]”, or more specifically the “decisions, policies, actions, utterances or the
general style of these authorities”.26 The distinction is useful in separating a broadly
conceived regime from the political authorities as well as specific policies and actions
that represent such regime. The central vs. local government distinction in China is
one of its incarnations. Survey result has shown that Chinese citizens tend to have
higher trust on the distant central government than on local authorities whom they
interact on a more frequent basis. The second related distinction concerns the
conceptual difference between legitimacy and legitimation. Legitimacy refers to “a
particular type of reason or explanation on the basis of which members of a political
order generally view the order of rule as acceptable”. Legitimation, on the other hand,
refers to the “acts or processes through which views about the worthiness of an order
are established”. Both distinctions are associated with one another, but should not be
obscured conceptually. For our present purpose, these distinctions will help us
understand why the state's quest for legitimacy – through its process of legitimation –
has paradoxically eroded the political support for the state.
The emergence of stability discourse after the Tiananmen crackdown Although the pursuit of social harmony is deeply imprinted on Chinese cultural
history27, the emergence of stability discourse is a rather recent phenomenon that
began roughly in the 1980s when China embarked upon her economic opening while
25
David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International,
1991), pp.11; Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Oxford, Polity Press, 1973), pp.95.
26
David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1965);
David Easton, “Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support”, British Journal of Political Science
vol. 5, no. 4 (1975), pp. 435-457.
27
Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 11-43.
8 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China encountering restive demands for political liberalization. By and large, the shift of
emphasis to stability was an ideological departure from the Mao era, when chaos and
change took over as the order of the day. Revolution occupied a central position in
Mao’s political morality. Mao was obsessed with the idea of chaos (luan 乱) and
insisted to revolutionize China through spontaneous and unrestrained mass
movements. For Mao, chaos was progressive; to rebel was justified (zaofan youli 造
反有理).28 Even though Mao brought up the need for tranquility towards the end of
the Cultural Revolution, the emblem of chaos and disorder has already left behind an
indelible mark on this turbulent period.29
Post-Mao politics began with the disavowal of chaos and revolution. In 1978, the 11th
Third Plenum repudiated both class struggle and permanent revolution and shifted
focus towards economic reform. Social order replaced chaos as the political norm of
the market reforms. For example, the strike-hard (yanda 严打) anti-crime campaigns,
beginning sporadically in the early 1980s and extending until today, exemplified how
Maoist mass campaign was recreated in policing crimes under the new state
imperative of a stable social order.30
Nevertheless, the circulation of the stability discourse did not come of age until late
1980s. Stability was only then framed as a contingent response to the student
demonstrations in 1986. In light of the protests, which eventually led to the ouster of
Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping evoked the notion of stability in several diplomatic
occasions in 1987, where he repeatedly stated that the importance of a stable political
environment. In February 1989, while meeting with the then US President George
Bush, Deng stated that “stability overrides everything”. “Without a stable
environment”, Deng announced, “nothing could be done and even existing
accomplishments will be lost.”31 Hu Yaobang’s death in April 1989 triggered a new
28
Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p.172.
In August 1974, Mao said, “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been going on for eight
years. Now, it is better to have stability. The entire party and the entire army shall be united.”
30
Harold M. Tanner, Strike Hard! Anti-Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice, 1979–1985
(Cornell University East Asia Papers, 1999); Murray Scot Tanner, “State Coercion and the Balance of
Awe: The 1983-1986 Stern Blows Anti-Crime Campaign”, The China Journal, No. 44 (Jul., 2000), pp.
93-125; Susan Trevaskes, Policing Serious Crime in China: From “Strike Hard” to “Kill Fewer”, Vol.
3 (Routledge, 2010).
31
Deng Xiaoping, “Wending yadao yiqie” [“Stability Overrides Everything”], The Collected Works of
29
9 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China wave of demonstrations with scale surpassing the 1986 demonstrations. Students
flooded the Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu’s death and began to shower demands for
democracy. The rapid escalation of the protest provoked party conservatives to adopt
a tougher stance against the protesters. The student demonstrations were branded as a
counter-revolutionary rebellion.32
The official endorsement of stability as a state motif was inextricable from the
Tiananmen Movement. On 28 April 1989, during the height of the Tiananmen sit-in,
People’s Daily published an editorial entitled “maintain the overall situation, maintain
stability”.33 It contended that China needed stability because “China has experienced
too much turmoil” under the exploitation by imperialism, feudalism and numerous
political movements. Thus, China must secure its hard-won stability through “the
adherence to the Four Cardinal Principles and the persistence of reform and opening
up”. The demands of the protesters were unjustified because democracy was not about
creating social disorder. “Under socialism”, it argued, “stability and democracy are
consistent and non-contradictory notions.” “Without the stable environment of the
past ten years”, it continued, “there would not have been any democratic
development.” The purpose was to create the fear of chaos by invoking past turmoil in
Chinese history. Stability appeared as a bulwark against China’s relapse into social
disorder and a positive catalyst for China’s modernization. It could only be
safeguarded under the party-state’s leadership. Protests, on the other hand, were
denigrated as undesired elements that would damage China’s interests.34
The first post-Tiananmen mention of stability appeared in October 1989 when Deng
met with the former US President Richard Nixon. With firm emphasis, Deng repeated
his words with Bush: “The goal is to achieve stability; only stability can enable
economic construction. The logic is simple. China has too many people and too weak
a foundation. Without a stable social order, nothing can be achieved. Stability
Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 3, pp. 279.
32
“Bixu qichi xianming di fandui dongluan” [It is Necessary to Take a Clear Stand Against
Disturbances], RMRB, 26 April 1989.
33
“Weihu daju, weihu wending” [Maintain Overall Situation, Maintain Stability], RMRB, 28 April
1989.
34
Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the CCP, pp. 62-78.
10 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China overrides everything.”35 The People’s Daily editorial on New Year’s Day in 1990
similarly stated that stability was the prerequisite for realizing China’s
modernization.36 A subsequent People’s Daily editorial hailed the lifting of the martial
law on 11 January 1990 as a “symbol of stability”.37 The June 4th editorial, published
a year after the crackdown, reiterated the positive value of stability to China’s
economic and political development.38 In December 1990, Deng said again, “I have
not only spoken once – stability overrides everything. The democratic dictatorship of
the people cannot be lost.”39
What Deng meant was political stability.40 A party-sponsored newspaper, Guangming
Ribao, defined it as “the ability to maintain the fundamental structure of a political
system when social contradictions develop and the ability to resolve social tension
and eradicate unstable elements”.41 It identified three conditions: first, a stronger
societal force must be formed to mediate the “internal contradictions among the
people”; second, destabilizing forces must be eradicated; and third, external threats
against China, namely the “peaceful evolution” (heping yanbian 和平演变) that was
seen as the reason behind the collapse of the Soviet Union, must be prevented at all
cost.
The state-led profusion of the stability discourse, driven by the urgency to regain
popular support from the Chinese mass over the Tiananmen repression, extended well
into the mid-1990s. In the 14th Party Congress of 1992, which heralded a victory for
Deng’s renewed reform program, Jiang Zemin – the new Party Secretary – put the
imperative of maintaining political stability on par with the Four Cardinal Principles,
seeing them as the preconditions for a thriving economy. Reciprocally, for Jiang, a
35
Deng Xiaoping, “Jiesu yanjun de zhongmei guanxi yaoyou meiguo caiqu zhudong” [Ending the
Grim Sino-US Relations Requires U.S. Action], 31 October 1989.
36
“Manhuai xinxin yingjie jiushiniandai” [Confidently Welcome the 1990s], RMRB, 1 January 1990.
37
“Zhongguo wending de zhongyao biaozhi” [The Symbol of China’s Stability], RMRB, 11 January
1990.
38
“Wending yadao yiqie” [Stability Overrides Everything], RMRB, 4 June 1990. Further analysis see
Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the CCP, pp. 78-87.
39
Deng Xiaoping, “Shanyu liyong shiji jiejue fazhan wenti” [Make Good Use of Opportunities to
Address Development Issues], 24 December 1990.
40
Deng made a relentless effort to prevent the conservative faction from interpreting stability in
economic terms which was to rein in the market reform by state control.
41
Hang Jian, “Zhengque chuli renmin neibu maodun yu zhengzhi wending” [Dealing Properly with
People’s Internal Contradictions and Political Stability], Guangming Ribao, 30 April 1990.
11 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China sustained commitment to economic development was indispensable for achieving
stability.42 In the national propaganda work conference held in 1994, Jiang proposed a
twenty-Chinese-character principle: “seize the opportunity, deepen reform, open
China to the world, promote development and maintain stability”.43 A year later,
during the 14th Fifth Plenum, he called for a proper understanding on the relationship
between “reform, development and stability” (gaige, fazhan yu wending 改革、发展
与稳定). Jiang argued that the three notions were inherently linked.44 Many of these
ideas were captured in a book entitled “China Cannot Afford Chaos”, published by
the Central Party School in 1994, which explained the need to stability for the
protection of interests of all social classes.45
By the mid-1990s, stability had been elevated to one of the highest political doctrines
for the Chinese party-state, on par with economic reform. Through party-state
propaganda, stability was projected as a prerequisite for the economic reform, a
protection against the threat of political disintegration similar to the Soviet collapse,
and even as micro as individual well-being.46 Stability even became a measure of
public political support47, and was also ratified by some Chinese intellectuals who
stressed importance of stability to China’s modernization. 48 Presented as a
fundamental national interest, stability became a marker of legitimacy, a selfengineered source to bolster popular support, as the preservation of social stability
gave the party-state a strong reason to defend the status quo, and hence, to maintain
42
Jiang Zemin, “Jiakuai gaigekaifang he xiandaihua jianshe bufa duoqu you zhongguotese shehuizhuyi
shiye de gengweida shengli” [Accelerate Reform and Opening Up and Modernization to Maximize the
Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics], Report to the 14th National People’s Congress, 12
October 1992.
43
Jiang Zeming, Speech to the National Propaganda Work Meeting, 29 January 1994.
44
Jiang Zemin, “Zhengque chuli shehuizhuyi xiandaihua jianshe zhong ruogan zhongda guanxi”
[Correctly Treat Several Major Relationships under Socialist Modernization], The Fifth Plenary
Session of the 14th Central Committee, 28 September 1995.
45
Lijun Qiao and Tianze Chen, Zhongguo buneng luan [China Cannot Afford Chaos], (Beijing: Central
Party School Press, 1994).
46
Joseph Fewsmith, China since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001), pp. 88.
47
Jie Chen, Popular Political Support in Urban China, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp.
105-106.
48
In the early 1990s, neoconservatives such as Xiao Gongqin argued that a strong political authority is
the guarantee of social stability and economic success. See Feng Chen, “Order and Stability in Social
Transition”. Even liberal intellectuals like Li Zehou who supported the Tiananmen protests began to
stress the importance of stability. Li co-authored an influential book with Liu Zaifu in 1995, entitled
“Farewell Revolution”, in which they criticized political radicalism. See Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu,
Gaobie Geming [Farewell to Revolution] (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1996).
12 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China its authoritarian rule.
Institutionalization of weiwen at the grassroots Party-state’s effort in promoting social stability gradually extended beyond merely
discourse. Beginning in the early 1990s, party-state has begun the effort of reifying
the abstract notion of stability into policy practices, entrusting power to ad hoc as well
as permanent agencies that specialize in public security enforcement. Through these
institutions and their practices, the call for preserving stability is materialized into
concretized practices of stability maintenance (weiwen 维稳). The institutionalization
of weiwen began with the reinvigoration of the Political and Legal Apparatus (zhengfa
xitong 政法系统) in early 1990. Established as a leading small group in 1958, the
Central Political and Legal Commission (zhengfawei 政法委) was turned into a
permanent institution in 1980, led by the party veteran Peng Zhen. The Commission
held enormous power because virtually all legal enforcement authorities came under
its supervision.49 Despite reforms in the late 1980s which was intended to curtail the
dominance of zhengfawei, the effort was only partial as many local Commissions
ignored the central order.50
The Tiananmen turmoil reversed the suspension of zhengfawei. In light of the threat
of resurging chaos, the Commission was re-established in April 1990, and stepped up
its effort in restoring stability and order, which was a prioritized goal. According to
the directive, the rebooted zhengfawei was to serve as the instrument for the “people’s
democratic dictatorship” to carry out reinvigorated class struggle against the counterrevolutionaries – a decade after its renunciation. Whilst the army served as what Mao
Zedong called the “gun barrel” (qiang ganzi 枪杆子), zhengfawei would be the “knife”
49
Zhengfawei controls the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Ministry of
Justice, Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security. See Susan Finder, “Supreme
People's Court of the People's Republic of China”, The Journal of Chinese Law, Vol.7 (1993), p. 145.
50
“Guanyu chengli zhongyang zhengfa lingdao xiaozu de tongzhi” [CCP Central Committee Notice on
the Establishment of the Political and Legal Leading Small Group], 19 May 1988.
13 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China (dao bazi 刀把子) of the party, the apparatus responsible for internal public security
matters.51
Different types of weiwen institutions
The re-establishment of zhengfawei in each level of government paved the
infrastructural basis for the ensuing institutionalization of weiwen across the nation.
Under the leadership of zhengfawei, stability maintenance was promulgated through
an initiative called “Comprehensive Management of Public Security” (CMPS)
(shehuizhian zonghezhili 社 会 治 安 综 合 治 理 ), announced in February 1991. 52
Carrying the word “comprehensive”, CMPS aimed to mobilize a range of party and
state institutions and utilize multifarious means – educational, administrative,
economic and legal – to eradicate factors that endanger stability. The underlying idea
was to build a “public security defense network” (zhian lianfang wangluo 治安联防
网络) spanning the tiao-kuai system, which encompasses functional agencies and
different territorial levels of government, although focus would be placed particularly
on the latter which stand on the battlefront of social unrest.
The organization of CMPS committees was rooted historically in the “Jiangxi model”,
a provincial experiment beginning in April 1991, in which local CMPS committees
were established at every administrative level of government (provincial,
county/municipal, township/street, village/community) and co-supervised under the
dual leadership of a local party cadre and a government official at that level of
government. At each level, the CMPS committee served as a coordinating nexus
between the tiao units which handle different aspects of weiwen, including the
zhengfawei, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Propaganda, and so on. At the
grassroots (jiceng 基层) layer, the CMPS would draw in mass organizations such as
the residents’ committees to collaborate on weiwen.53 National rollout of the CMPS
51
“Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu weihu shehui wending jiaqiang zhengfa gongzuo de tongzhi” [CCP
Central Committee Notice on Safeguarding Social Stability and Strengthening Political and Legal
Work], 2 April 1990.
52
“Zhonggong zhongyang guowuyuan guanyu jiaqiang shehuizhian zhonghezhili de jueding” [CCP
Central Committee and State Council Decision on Strengthening Comprehensive Management of
Public Security], 19 February 1991.
53
Benjamin Read, Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and
Taipei (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012).
14 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China following the Jiangxi model was announced officially in the early 2000s.54 The result
was the mushrooming of CMPS committees at various localities, and their de facto
integration into the existing structure of zhengfawei (because local CMPS committees
are often supervised by leaders of the local zhengfawei), which significantly expanded
the territorial coverage of the public security apparatus to the uncharted grassroots
terrains. According to official statistics, the number of CMPS centres across China
reached 100,000 by 2009, and employed around 1.3 million paid personnel and more
than 3 million volunteers.55
The Falungong movement in the late 1990s led central authorities to step up the effort
in expanding the weiwen apparatus. On 25th April 1999, some 18,000 Falungong
practitioners laid siege to Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the central government in
Beijing. That night, Jiang wrote a letter to top party leaders and described the siege as
the largest collective action since the 1989 student protests.56 The need to purge Falun
Gong gave central authorities the pretext to strengthen weiwen institutions through
setting up a leading small group (lingdao xiaozu 领导小组) that dealt specifically
with the repression. 57 As an extra-legal, Politburo-run public security apparatus
established on 10 June 1999, the ad hoc group was given enormous power due to its
Politburo connection.58 Known as the 610 Office, it was primarily responsible for
dealing with Falun Gong issues. The group was renamed into “the Leading Small
Group for Preventing and Handling the Problem of Heretical Organizations”
(zhongyang fangfan he chuli xiejiao wenti lingdao xiaozu 中央防范和处理邪教领导
问 题 领 导 小 组 ) in order to expand its activities. In 2000, central authorities
established a separate group, “the Leading Small Group for Maintaining Stability”
54
In 2003, a meeting was convened in Nanchang, Jiangxi to summarize the Jiangxi model, which
formed the backbone of national implementation.
55
“Zhongyang zongzhiban: qintixing shijian ji xinfang zongliang xiajiang mubiao shixian” [Central
CMPS Commission: Reduction Targets of Mass Incidents and Petitions Realized], China Net, 6
February 2009.
56
James Tong. “Anatomy of Regime Repression in China: Timing, Enforcement Institutions, and
Target Selection in Banning the Falungong, July 1999”, Asian Survey, Vol. 42 (November 2002), pp.
795-820.
57
Xie Yue, “The Political Logic of Weiwen in Contemporary China”, Issues and Studies, Vol. 48,
(September 2012), pp. 1-41.
58
Alice Miller argues there are eight major leading groups in Chinese policy-making. Their
responsibilities range from foreign affairs to economics, with subsidiary entities running down the
Party’s system and State Council offices. See Alice Miller, “The CCP Central Committee's Leading
Small Groups”, China Leadership Monitor (September 2008).
15 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China (zhongyang weihu wending lingdao xiaozu 中央维护稳定工作领导小组), which
dealt with broader public security problems ranging from the state-owned enterprises
mass layoffs to the surge of collective protests. Established under the roof (heshu
bangong 合署辦公) of the Central Political and Legal Commission, the group became
a parallel apparatus to the CMPS committee, enlisting members from the public
security, propaganda and judiciary departments so as to better coordinate weiwen
tasks among various party organs.59
The Falungong saga triggered a sudden spike in the media mention of “stability
maintenance” in 1999. And as Hu Jintao came to power, the weiwen imperative
gained further momentum, and that was coincided by the first time use of the
shorthanded form of “stability maintenance”, weiwen, in the People’s Daily in 2002.60
Under the leadership of Politburo Standing Committee member Luo Gan and Zhou
Yongkang, political and legal work and the weiwen effort was boosted, as reflected by
the rapid rise in the public security expenditure.61 When Zhou succeeded Luo in 2007,
the appearance of weiwen climbed new heights in the media, and kept a high rate ever
since.62 Zhou’s ambitious blueprint was to incorporate the weiwen apparatus in the
grassroots governance structure. Since 2009, many provincial authorities began to
build weiwen service centres (jiceng xinfang zongzhi weiwen zhongxin 基层信访综治
维稳中心) in each of the three administrative levels of urban (municipal, street,
community) and rural (county, township, village) areas, and positioned them as onestop shops for petition reception, conflict mediation and other public security
matters.63 Localized at the grassroots, these service centres serve as the customer 59
Despite the creation of a standalone unit, its intricate relations with the latter often resulted in
overlapping authority and unclear responsibility between different institutions. Some critics referred to
the problem as “two titles, one team”, referring to the fact that too much power is vested in the hands of
Political and Legal apparatus.
60
Qian, “Preserving Stability”.
61
Luo Gan, jinyibu shehui pingan jianshe, nuli weihu shehui hexie wending” [Further Deepen Peace
Building, Protect Social Harmony and Stability], 17 April 2007; Zhou Yongkang, “Quanmian tuijin
shehui zhian zonghe zhili gongzuo, quebao renmin anju leye shehui hexie wending” [Comprehensively
Implement Comprehensive Management of Public Security, Ensure People’s Well-being and Social
Harmony and Stability], 16 June 2009.
62
Qian, “Preserving Stability”.
63
Zhou Yongkang, “Shenru tuijin shehui maodun huajie, shehui guanli chuangxin, gongzheng lianjie
zhifa, wei jingji shehui youhaoyoukuai fazhan tigong gengjia youli de fazhi baozhang” [Further
Promote Social Conflict Mediation, Social Management Innovation, Impartial and Clean Law
Enforcement, and to Provide More Effective Protection for Economic and Social Development by the
Rule of Law], Qiushi, 16 February 2010.
16 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China facing platforms of the local CMPS committees to which they are accountable. They
also consolidated the local CMPS committees, police stations (paichusuo 派出所),
letters and visits offices (xinfangban 信访办), anti-cult offices (fangxieban 防邪办)
and the local judiciary organs in one location. According to a newspaper report, a
citizen commented:
“Before when people wanted a divorce, or had a dispute, they didn’t know who to go to. They would
have gone to the village secretary. Now they are all directed to the weiwenban, where they will be
coordinated and passed on to the right body.”64
Division of labour is practiced at different levels of weiwen service centres. Each
level specializes on specific tasks depending on the proximity to citizens. In Guigang,
Guangxi Province, weiwen service centres at the two upper levels (municipal/county,
street/township) are responsible for carrying out the functions of supervision, petition
reception and legal service provision; and the lower level (community/village),
because of its proximity to grassroots citizens, focuses on dispute mediation and
information gathering.
Most notably, the Guangdong provincial authorities have embarked on a massive
effort to establish weiwen service centres in each level of government. By 2010 it has
built 121 county/city weiwen service centres, 1,584 township/street sub-centres,
25,779 village/community workstations and 5,500 workstations in schools and
enterprises, reaching a ratio of 1:13:258 at the three levels.65 A similar ratio of
1:15:229 is observed in Guigang, a city of 4 million people, where 5 county/city
weiwen centres, 74 township/street sub-centres and 1,148 village/community
workstations were established.66 Such ratio, if reproduced nationally, will result in a
gigantic figure of service centres across China. In some regions, weiwen institutions
are transgressing state contours. In Guangdong, Fuzhou and Zhejiang, private
64
Tang Yonglin, “Zhen weiwenban de ‘shengyijing’” [The Business Story of the County Weiwenban],
Southern Weekly, 25 February 2010.
65
“Guangdong zongzhi xinfang weiwen pingtai gongzuo sannian sandabu” [Three Huge Steps in Three
Years: Guangdong Comprehensive Management, Letter and Visits and Stability Maintenance Work],
Renmin Net, 20 December 2011.
66
“Weiwen liliang shentou jiceng meige jiaoluo” [Weiwen Power Penetrating Every Corners of the
Grassroots], Legal Daily, 24 December 2009.
17 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China enterprises are responding to the party’s call, and set up their own internal weiwen
units in order to contain potential disorder within their own enterprises.67
Comprehensive management: reducing reliance on repression?
Meanwhile, institutional proliferation was accompanied by a shift in governmental
technique from repressive control to “comprehensive management” (zonghe zhili 综
合治理) which rely on a range of non-state actors and strategies to deal with social
unrest. As the threat of large-scale political movement subsided, central authorities
began conceiving protests as the “reflection of social contradictions and negative
factors” rather than criminal, counter-revolutionary or politically subversive activities.
This shift in focus gave justification to the need for “comprehensive management”,
which involve not only the use of coercion, but also a range of precautionary
strategies, comprising what officials called prevention, education, management,
organizational building and transformation.68
The shift from repression to “comprehensive management” was partly triggered by
the integration of weiwen with the new phase of economic reform after 1992. In July,
the central authorities circulated a directive that stressed the connection between
political and legal work and “reform and opening up”. Accordingly, the objective of
weiwen was no longer class struggle, but the facilitation of economic development;
weiwen tasks were no longer limited to the social domain, but also the increasingly
complex and volatile economy where more social discontent are generated. Tasks
include, for example, the regulation of the emerging contractual relations in the
market economy and the provision of proper legal environment to protect the interests
of investors and risk-takers. It also called for a renewed focus on fighting economic
crimes, while urging for more leeway for reformers and entrepreneurs who “dare to
experiment”.69
67
Tang Huangfeng, “Zhongguoshi weiwen – kunjing yu chaoyue“ [Chinese-style Weiwen: Difficulties
and Transcendence], Wuhan University Journal, Vol. 5 (2012).
68
“Zhonggongzhongyang, guowuyuan guanyu jiaqiang shehuizhian zhonghezhili de jueding”, 19
February 1991.
69
“Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu jiaqiang zhengfu gongzuo, genghaode wei gaigekaifang he jingji
jianshe fuwu de yijian” [CCP Central Committee Opinion on Strengthening Political and Legal work to
Better Serve Reform and Opening Up and Economic Construction], 22 July 1992.
18 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China With the shift towards comprehensive management, increasing emphasis was placed
on the use of preventive strategies in maintaining stability. As state authorities began
to acknowledge the socioeconomic causes of instability, weiwen’s focus also shifted
towards the root causes of social tensions. For example, the emergence of a rural
migrant underclass became a major urban problem in the 1990s. Seeing this group as
a potential source of instability70, state authorities have singled them out for particular
weiwen attention, and attempted to mitigate and control their grievances through new
welfare measures, surveillance technologies and crowd control equipment. 71 One
initiative under “comprehensive management” was to institutionalize a population
management system that handles their welfare needs and monitors their activity to
prevent large social unrest.72
Learning from its socialist past
Aside from such invented management technologies to deal with instability, state
authorities are also relying on techniques from the socialist past in reshaping
contemporary form of weiwen. While state authorities discouraged the revival of
Maoist mass dictatorship (qunzhong zhuanzheng 群众专政), they emphasized that
weiwen should combine socialist mass line tactics (qunzhong luxian 群众路线) with
specialized work (zhuanxiang gongzuo 专项工作) to promulgate what was called
“mass prevention and treatment” (qunfangqunzhi 群防群治). This combination was
epitomized by the Fengqiao experience from the early 1960s. During the Mao era,
Fengqiao, a city in Jiangsu Province, was selected in 1963 as one of the pilot sites for
the Socialist Education Movement under which the five black categories (heiwulei 黑
五类) were put under thought reform. The locality preached minimal prosecution and
mass line class struggle through reasoning (wendou 文斗) rather than violence
(wudou 武斗), and allegedly maintained a stable public order by combining partystate leadership, mass mobilization and conflict mediation, which led Mao to praise it
70
“Mass Migration, Major Problems”, China Daily, 10 October 2011.
Dorothy Solinger, “The Creation of a New Underclass in China and its Implications”, Environment
and Urbanization, Vol.18 (April 2006), pp. 177-193.
72
“Zhongyang shehuizhian zonghezhili weiyuanhui guanyu jiaqiang liudong renkou guanli gongzuo de
yijian” [Central Comprehensive Management Public Security Committee on Strengthening the
Management of the Floating Population], 19 September 1995.
71
19 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China as a prototype of public security enforcement.73 In the late 1990s, Fengqiao re-entered
party repertoire, and was hallowed as a valuable “experience” for weiwen – the role
model of conflict resolution in which “small matters do not go beyond village, large
matters do not go beyond counties and tensions do not move up”.74
Shortly put, the essence of Fengqiao was to contain and resolve problems at the
grassroots, a strategy that involves the revitalization of Residents’ Committees and
the creation of communities as new administrative governing units, which brings in an
integrated system of policing, surveillance, conflict resolution, party building and
welfare provision.75 Incorporated in the recalibration of local governance includes the
effort to create localized “public security defense networks”. Beneath the high-level
institutional building, state authorities encourage the formation of localized network
at the grassroots consisting of the local party units, police stations and ordinary
citizens in residential neighbourhoods. More recently, state authorities introduced an
even more meticulous governmental technique called “grid management”
(wanggehua guanli 网格化管理), under which urban space is partitioned into small
grids such that each would be carefully monitored.76
Co-opting ordinary citizens into weiwen
Within the public security network, citizen informants, consisting of retired cadres
and the elderly, are recruited as volunteers to patrol neighbourhoods, mediate
conflicts, and report crimes. In turn, they receive monetary compensation after
accumulating certain level of “work points”. An initiative called the “red armband
project” (hongxiubiao gongcheng 紅 袖 標 工 程 ) has been introduced to enlist
volunteers, who will wear red armbands while patrolling, as was done by the Red
Guards in the Cultural Revolution. A Chinese newspaper found that in Suqian, a small
73
“Fengqiao jingyan de chansheng guocheng” [The Emergence of Fengqiao Experience], Fengqiao
Police website, accessed 12 May 2013, <http://fengqiaopolice.com/fqjy/jyjj.asp>.
74
The Central CMPS Committee decided on its 2004 national congress held in Hangzhou that the
Fengqiao experience was to be promoted. For more, see Zhou Yongkang, “Jianchi bing fazhan
‘fengqiao jingyan’” [Carry On and Promote Fengqiao Experience], China Peace, 25 November 2008;
Zhao Yang, “Fengqiao Jingyan: xiaoshi bu chucun dashi bu chuzhen, maodun bu shangjiao” [Small
Matters Do Not Go Beyond Village, Large Matters Do Not Go Beyond Counties And Tensions Do Not
Move Up], Legal Daily, 25 November 2008.
75
Read, Roots of the State, pp. 6; David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The
Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), pp. 157-194.
76
“Gedi yunyong wanggehua guanli tigao shehui guanli fuwu shuiping” [Localities Are Using Grid
Management to Enhance The Service of Social Management]，Xinhua News, 18 February 2011.
20 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China municipality in Jiangsu, the CMPS office has recruited 38,000 volunteers to maintain
public security in merely a year since establishment, amounting to 0.7% of the
population. According to a local party cadre who described such effort as “a people’s
war”, the large-scale volunteer mobilization was a practical consideration because
local governments simply do not have enough policemen.77 During the 18th National
Congress, Beijing reportedly recruited 1.4 million public security volunteers to ensure
stability, in which one in fourteen Beijing citizens volunteered.78 On the other hand,
under the new People’s Mediation Law of 2010, local governments are required to
establish a mass organization called the “people’s mediation committee” (renmin
tiaojie weiyuanhui 人民调解委员会), consisting of mediators who are responsible for
dispute resolution, information gathering and the prevention of social unrest. 79
According to an official report, in Taiyuan, which has 1.7 million people, there are
2,622 mediation committees by 2009, employing 18,442 mediators (1% of
population).80 This strategy of volunteer mobilization, which resembles the Maoist
mass line, implicates a large number of citizens who do not necessarily have party or
government connections into the weiwen cause. Without becoming formal state actors,
citizens nevertheless carry out the state objective of weiwen by becoming volunteers,
thereby tacitly sanctioning weiwen and becoming the de facto agents of the party-state.
Leveraging technology and market
On the other hand, the “People’s War” was complemented by the use of technology
and partnership with private enterprises. Surveillance technology is an illustrative
example of both. To penetrate the corners of the urban milieu, state authorities are
undertaking a massive Orwellian campaign to install surveillance cameras in streets,
public facilities and neighbourhoods. In Guangzhou, according to government figures,
the number of cameras reached 268,000 in 2011, each covering 48 people.
77
“Suqian: meige jumin louxia douyou zhian zhiyuanzhe” [Suqian: Every Building Is Guarded By
Public Security Volunteer], Southern Weekly, 19 August 2010. Police shortage has been raised as a
problem within the government. See “Jiceng minjing mianlin zuida de kunnan shi jingli buzu” [The
Biggest Problem Civilian Police Is The Shortage Of Police], Renmin Net, 9 March 2013; “China's
police complain of manpower shortage in countryside despite crime rate falling”, Xinhua News English,
15 November 2006.
78
“Beijing shibada zhian zhiyuan zhe zongshu da 140 wanren” [Public Security Volunteers at Beijing’s
18th National Congress Reached 1.4 million], Legal Daily, 31 October 2012.
79
The People’s Mediation Law of the People’s Republic of China was adopted on 28 August 2010 and
has come into force since 1 January 2011.
80
“Taiyuan datiaojie jizhi jiangyou fazhi baozhang” [Taiyuan’s Grand Mediation Mechanism Will Be
Protected By Law], Legal Daily, 13 February 2010.
21 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China Guangdong province has 1.1 million cameras and is targeting to double the figure in
the next three years.81 Chongqing under the former party secretary Bo Xilai started an
ambitious project known as “Peaceful Chongqing” with an aim to build the “safest
city” in China, under which as many as 500,000 surveillance cameras would be
installed, surpassing the heavily-guarded Beijing with 400,000 cameras. 82 In
comparison, Chicago has 10,000 cameras and New York 8,000.83 The UK, which is
described as the “most surveilled country”, only has around 1.8 million cameras, a
trivial figure compared to a few Chinese cities combined. 84 Regarding the fastgrowing Internet, substantial state-led effort have been taken to boost the efficacy of
online censorship via more sophisticated technology, such as keyword filters, IP
cameras, assisted by an enormous team of Internet police.
Weiwen, more generally, results in a burgeoning demand for public security products.
With explicit party-state support of the private security industry 85 , in which
businesses are subcontracted by the Ministry of Public Security to both domestic and
multinational private security firms, the industry has grown rapidly in recent years,
reaching a market size of USD 56 billion in 2012 and covering a range of products
including CCTV, IP cameras, online censorship software and various private security
services.86 Benefiting from state-led mega projects, the CCTV market, for example,
has become one of the fastest growing subsectors.87 Besides domestic giants such as
Hikvision, Dahua and CSST, which have received state investment, market growth is
81
Zhu Wenbin, “Guangdong weilai sannian jiang xinjian gaijian 96 wange dianziyan” [Guangdong
Will Install And Upgrade 960k Surveillance Cameras In The Next Three Years], CN Stock, 15 June
2012.
82
“Jiankong de shengyan” [THE FEAST OF SURVEILLANCE], Southern Weekly, 15 November
2011; “Beijing gonggong shexiangtou da 40 wange fugai zhuyao daolu shangchang yinhang” [400,000
Surveillance Cameras Are Coving Beijing’s Major Roads, Malls and Banks], Beijing Ribao, 22 April
2010.
83
“Chicago’s video surveillance cameras: a pervasive and unregulated threat to our privacy”, ACLU of
Illinois, February 2011.
84
“You're being watched: there's one CCTV camera for every 32 people in UK”, The Guardian, 2
March 2011.
85
“Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu jiaqiang zhengfu gongzuo, genghaode wei gaigekaifang he jingji
jianshe fuwu de yijian”, 22 July 1992.
86
“China’s Surveillance and Security Market 2012 and Prospects of 2013”, IHS IMS Research,
<http://www.asmag.com.cn/special/2012gaofeng/ims.html>.
87
A spokesman from the Ministry of Public Security even specifically stated that that "China's security
cameras play an important role in countering crimes and maintaining social stability”. See Tuo Yannan,
“New standard for security”, China Daily, 28 March 2012.
22 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China also driven by multinationals such as Cisco, Bosch and Panasonic.88 The result is a
competitive marketplace with the complex involvement of state, private and foreign
capital – a process through which the political objective of weiwen is marketized as
commercial matters between buyers and sellers, which obfuscate the moral and
political side of surveillance concerning matters such as privacy and power abuse. On
the other hand, outsourcing weiwen allowed local authorities to shuffle off dirty work
to third parties. As journalistic investigations discovered, these third parties
companies often use illegal practices to carry out outsourced weiwen tasks. Examples
include companies that intercept petition seekers from going to upper levels of
government, provide “web scrubbing” (shantie 删贴) services and operate black jail
to imprison protestors and troublemakers.89 Although state authorities have started to
crack down some of these companies, the effort remains piecemeal given the
established presence of the lucrative weiwen value chain, and the fact that these
commercial interests seem to dovetail with the party-state weiwen imperative.
Bureaucratizing weiwen into a policy process
A parallel process is also taking place in which weiwen institutions are bureaucratized
into the framework of daily governance. This process, which I call bureaucratization,
refers to the ordering, formalization and standardization of the weiwen procedures90,
and is driven by the incorporation of “public security accountability” (zhian zeren zhi
治安责任制) in the cadre evaluation system. Introduced not only in party-state organs
but also in some social and economic domains, the accountability system aims to
make party cadres and managers responsible for internal public security such that
order could be procured within individual units. The idea, as it stated, is to enact the
principle of “whoever in charge will be accountable” (sheizhuguan sheifuze 谁主管谁
负责), which delegates weiwen responsibilities from the central government to local
cadres, and “territorial management” (shudi guanli 属地管理), which ensures that
88
Loretta Chao, “Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens”, Wall Street Journal, 5 July
2011.
89
“Shantie shengyi, yitiao huise chayelian” [Post-deleting Business, A Grey Industry Chain], Caixin,
18 February 2013.
90
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
23 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China cadres will be accountable for local instability at the territory under their
administration.91
The institutional bedrock of public security accountability is the cadre evaluation
system which ties together the financial and promotional incentives of party cadres
and their administrative performances. Local party cadres commit to a set of hard
(primary) and soft (secondary) targets as well as priority policies specified in the
“performance contracts”, according to which they would be evaluated annually to
determine bonus and promotional prospect. Specified on the contract, public security
is designated as one of the two priority targets along with birth planning. Cadres’
performance on public security undergoes an evaluation process presided by
authorities of one administrative level above.92 Taking a Jiangxi county government
as example, the evaluation is based on a score that runs from 0 to 100 points. The
measure of social stability constitutes the largest portion, and it is dependent upon the
outbreak of political incidents, crimes, major accidents, Falungong activities and
public feeling of safety. Other components include the assessment on the weiwen
infrastructure, implementation of the accountability system, success of conflict
mediation, risk assessment system and information gathering system, as well as the
frequency of positive reporting about the local weiwen experience in the media.93
Poor performances result in different levels of punishment, including criticism,
warning, and the one-ballot veto (yipiao foujue 一票否决). The veto mechanism
stipulates that if local cadres fail to maintain stability under their territory of
jurisdiction, all other performances, however outstanding, will be cancelled out in
counting towards their bonus and promotion. The purpose is to create a system of
“incentive” and “check-and-balance” combining reward and punishment. 94 Social
91
“Zhonggongzhongyang, guowuyuan guanyu jiaqiang shehuizhian zhonghezhili de jueding”, 19
February 1991.
92
According to Whiting, public security performance is evaluated separately by the Political and Legal
Commissions. See Susan H. Whiting, “The Cadre Evaluation System at the Grass Roots: The Paradox
of Party Rule”, in Barry Naughton and Dali Yang (ed.), Holding China Together: Diversity and
National Integration in the Post-Deng Era, (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 101-119.
93
This is summarized from an assessment guideline on party cadre’s performance on maintaining
public security in Xunwu, a county in Jiangxi. The guideline is dated 2011:
<http://www.cjzxx.net/Article/Open/Notice/201112/3134.html>.
94
“Zhongyang shehui zhian zonghe zhili weiyuanhui guanyu shixing shehui zhian zonghe zhili yipiao
foujue zhi de guiding” [Regulations On Implementing The One-Ballot Veto Mechanism in
24 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China stability will be evaluated in terms of the frequency, scale and nature of mass
incidents of that locality. In Guangzhou, for example, protests involving 50 to 100
people result in “yellow-card warning” for the cadres in charge. Protests involving
above 100 people, or those causing labour strikes or mass disturbances, result in the
veto ballot. Well-performing units or cadres, on the other hand, will be acknowledged
as “advanced weiwen unit”, and the person-in-charge will be given a bonus up to three
months of salary.95
The accountability system became a basic framework for national emulation in local
CMPS offices and weiwen service centres throughout the 2000s, although localities
have developed their own formulae for evaluation. More recently, the accountability
system was integrated into the Regulations on Letters and Visits (xinfang tiaoli 信访
条例) in 2005, which requires local governments to deal with petitions concerning
issues under their sphere of control. The amendment was meant to channel grievances
to legal and administrative institutions while reducing petitions spilling over to upper
levels of government – a norm in Chinese popular contention.96 Failure to contain
petitions and large-scale protests within their jurisdiction can easily destroy officials’
careers. This coincided with the dramatic drop of the petition figures since 200597,
which suggest that this might have been caused by the fact that local cadres are
incentivized by the new measure to stop people from lodging petitions.
Nevertheless, despite the keen effort to promote national implementation, the
integration of the accountability system into the weiwen apparatus is drawing
widespread criticisms. The incorporation of weiwen into local cadres’ administrative
responsibility is leading to what Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, calls rigid stability (gangxing weiwen 刚性维稳). According to Yu,
the current weiwen approach is rigid because it “seeks absolute social tranquility as a
Comprehensive Management of Public Security], The 4th Congress of the Central CMPS Committee,
25 December 1991.
95
“Guanyu yinfa ‘guangzhou shi weihu wending ji shehui zhian zonghe zhili lingdao zerenzhi shishi
banfa’ de tongzhi” [Notice on the Implementation of the Cadre Accountability System In Guangzhou’s
Stability and Public Security Maintenance], Guangzhou Municipal Committee, 17 June 2003.
96
Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li. “The Politics of Lodging Complaints in Rural China”, The China
Quarterly, Vol.143 (September 1995), p. 756-783.
97
“Zhongguo xinfangliang 2005 nian yilai lianxu xiajiang” [China’s Letters and Visits Figures
Continue to Drop after 2005], Xinhua News Agency, 13 July 2013.
25 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China goal of governance, viewing all forms of protest…as a form of disorder and chaos that
begs suppression by any means”.98 Sociologist Sun Liping argues that the division of
weiwen responsibility among different levels of administrative hierarchy is
reproducing the propensity to suppress social unrest at all costs. Since social
instability is a somewhat flexible notion, local cadres could exercise a lot of discretion
in deciding how they suppress contention.99 The imperative tends to produce an
excessive use of force against petitioners and protesters so as to pacify them or
threaten them into silence. Not wanting to get their hands dirty openly, local officials
are incentivized to delegate weiwen tasks to informal and illegal institutions, such as
black jails, mental health institutions or criminal gangs.100 Hence, suppression of
social unrest not only results in blatant mistreatment of protesters, but also breeds
future instability. Increased instability in turn justifies a larger public security budget
and tougher weiwen measures. Ironically, this creates a vicious cycle in which
instability and weiwen reinforce each other. State authorities have noted these
criticisms, but so far little has changed. 101 Some analysts have pointed out the
accountability system is in fact an effective mechanism for monitoring lower level
party officials, which might be a reason for its resilience against reforms. As Whiting
observes, “paradoxically, even as the evaluation system has exacerbated problems in
policy implementation, it has simultaneously contributed to the durability of rule by
the CCP.”102
Panopticon of control: inevitability of repressive tactics The reinforcement between the parallel processes of institutionalization and
bureaucratization has resulted in an increasingly comprehensive, multi-layered and
complex weiwen system that penetrates and regiments China’s social space for tighter
public security. One could even speak of a Foucauldian “Panopticon of control”,
98
Jianrong Yu, “Reassessing Chinese Society’s ‘Rigid Stability’: Stability Preservation Through
Pressure, Its Predicament and the Way Out”, The China Story, 27 January 2003.
99
Liping Sun, “zhongguo de weiwen moshi shi yizhong keyi fuzhi de zuoe shouquan” [China’s Model
Of Stability Maintenance Is A Delegation Of Reproducing Evil], accessed on 13 May 2012,
<http://blog.163.com/llzg168@126/blog/static/76853940201266113858789>.
100
Kan, “Whither Weiwen”.
101
Weibin Gong, “Dangqian shehui guanli zhong de liuge wuqu” [Six Errors in Contemporary Social
Management], Study Times, 15 October 2012.
102
Whiting, “The Cadre Evaluation System at the Grass Roots”, p.118.
26 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China under which ordinary Chinese citizens are disciplined under greater securitization,
surrounded by the universal gaze of the Chinese government. On the one hand, with a
legitimate pretext to maintain stability and strengthen the party-state’s role as the
legitimate guardian of the people, not only more types of weiwen institution endowed
with coercive capacities are created, these institutions have also become more
versatile in terms of tactics and inclusive with respect to the range of actors and
technologies involved. Hence, over the past two decades, we can observe the
mushrooming of such institutions across the nation and down into the lowest
administrative hierarchy. From the perspective of the party-state, this greatly expands
their infrastructural power at the grassroots layer where traditional socialist control
has been radically undermined by rising social mobility and fragmentation under the
market reform.103 From that of Chinese citizens, however, these weiwen institutions
have become the nerve tips of the party-state for identifying dissenting behaviour, and
at the same time legitimate platforms for exercising state coercion in the name of
maintaining stability. On the other hand, by quantifying the abstract notion of stability
into measurable policy targets, weiwen responsibilities are effectively incorporated
into party cadres’ and government officials’ incentive structures. Social stability
becomes normalized as an administrative necessity; and consequently, the highly
political process of weiwen can be executed as banal administrative goals.
Even though the rhetorical emphasis on “comprehensive management” aims at
diluting the repressive tendency of the weiwen apparatus by the increased use of
preventive and negotiative strategies, such resulting panoptical system has largely
resumed its repressive character. One reason, as Walton argues, has to do with the
Chinese policing organs’ inheritance of “ideological legacies and outdated practices
from the Mao and Deng era, including a highly political view of crime and unrest,
which contributes to arbitrary and overly harsh methods of social control”.104 Another
reason has to do with the CCP’s political monopoly under the absence of democratic
monitoring, press freedom and a robust rule of law. The party-state’s unchecked
103
Mann introduces the concept of infrastructural power, which he sees as the capacity of the state to
penetrate civil society and to use this penetration to enforce policy throughout its entire territory”.
Infrastructural power is to be distinguished from the despotic power of the state. The latter refers to the
power of state over society, while the former refers to its power through society. See Michael Mann,
“The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms and Results”, European Journal of
Sociology, Vol. 25 (1984), p. 185-213.
104
Walton, “Intensifying Contradictions”.
27 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China dominance allows government officials to always switch back to the repressive mode
as a last resort to restore order when benign strategies are not helpful. A final clue lies
in the bureaucratization of weiwen as a policy imperative for local officials. As have
been discussed, local instability can be a career stopper for grassroots officials. This
incentivized them to use excessive force against protesters so as to end the protests
before they escalate into larger unrest and reach the ears of senior officials in the
province or as far as Beijing.
This continually repressive aspect of weiwen has been explored in great detail by
China scholars. Although some scholars have recently turned to less coercive aspect
of weiwen 105 , most of the current literature has shown how the excessive and
illegitimate use of coercive has led to the frequent abuse of basic human rights, how
the ever-expanding weiwen apparatus gives rise to unsustainable financial burden,
how the imperative of weiwen has spurred party-state functionaries to go beyond their
nominal roles, sometimes even bending the law and using unruly means themselves,
just to keep protesters and petitioners in silence, and how suppressing dissents leads
to more instability. While the panoptical weiwen system is certainly effective at
quelling popular protests and removing sensitive posts from the Internet, it must be
noted that the highly coercive tactics have undermined rather than upheld the CCP’s
regime legitimacy. In an opinion poll conducted by party mouthpiece People’s Forum
(renmin luntan 人民论坛) in 2010, more than 80% respondents agreed that local
governments have behaved improperly or abused their powers in the name of
maintaining stability.106 In another polling conducted by the same magazine in 2014,
a majority of respondents agreed that coercive weiwen tactics are conducive to violent
crimes. 107 Such negative impression on weiwen is also reflected in everyday
conversations. In popular usage, the word weiwen carries a rather derogatory meaning,
often referring to the way protests are unduly suppressed and the blatant censorship of
105
Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang, “The Power of Instability: Unraveling the
Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China”, American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 6
(2013), pp. 1475-1508; Jonathan Benney, “Stability Maintenance at the Grassroots: China’s Weiwen
Apparatus as a Form of Conflict Resolution”, Loewe Research Focus, Working Paper, no. 8 (2013).
106
“Weiwen: yihua yu daijia” [Stability Maintenance: Alienation and Cost], Renmin Luntan Zhazhi
[People’s Forum Magazine], vol. 27, 2010.
107
“Diaocha xianshi duoshuren renwei gangxing weiwen yi daozhi jiduan shijian” [Polling shows the
majority believes that rigid stability maintenance is conducive to extreme crimes], Renmin Luntan
Zhazhi, 14 March 2014. http://news.sina.com.hk/news/20140314/-9-3212785/1.html, accessed on 7
April 2014.
28 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China dissenting or sensitive opinions. Another colloquial way to express weiwen is to say
that something or someone is being “river-crabbed” (hexie 河蟹), which is the
homophone of “being harmonized” (hexie 和谐) in Chinese. The metaphor has
inspired an eclectic range of resistance discourse to mock at government censorship,
including the Grass Mud Horse (cǎonímǎ 草泥马), which adopts the homophone of a
Chinese curse word and is widely used as a form of symbolic defiance against the
government’s “river crabs”. Such use of everyday language as the “weapons of the
weak” is a stark reminded of how weiwen practices have eroded CCP’s regime
legitimacy.
The above discussion helps us explain the seeming paradox between the appealing
notion of stability (wending) and the repressive practice of stability maintenance
(weiwen). Their juxtaposition harks back to our earlier distinctions between “diffuse
support” and “specific support” and also between legitimacy and legitimation. While
the notion of stability acts as a source of legitimacy and serves to bolster the diffuse
support for the CCP taken as a whole, the quest for stability has rather worked
towards the opposite direction, undermining regime legitimacy and eroding the
specific support over specific policies and actions by local governments or grassroots
officials. Moreover, although diffuse support and specific support are designed to be
conceptually distinct, the continual erosion of specific support at the local level could
eventually chip away the diffuse support for the regime. In real terms, this means that
Chinese citizens’ distrust of local governments and officials can accumulate and
spread from within the local level to the national level, eventually undermining the
existing high trust on the central government.
The implication is crucial. The possible convergence between diffuse and specific
support could challenge the paradigm of “authoritarian resilience”. Such thesis, which
presumes that the CCP has strong regime resilience because of its ability to
institutionalize power transition and flexibly adapt its authoritarian system, is the
counter opposite of the “China collapse” paradigm which was popularly received in
the early 1990s, and has taken over and dominated the field of China studies over the
29 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China past decade.108 Recently, however, scholars have begun to express doubts upon the
resilience paradigm, and this article poses to deepen these suspicions. 109 As the
repressive practices of weiwen continue to shred away specific support for the regime,
the CCP’s regime stability may be more fragile than had been thought. Even if a
“tipping point” has not been reached, the authoritarian system might already be
crumbling from within.
Conclusion The case of contemporary China reveals to us that stability is not always the product
of state legitimation as conventionally conceived in Western literature. As the
political events in post-Tiananmen China show, stability can be a source of
legitimacy, a marker to make governments legitimate. This paper demonstrated how
the stability discourse, by emphasizing the overriding need for social stability, has
been promoted by the CCP to make stability a marker of legitimacy. Similar to what
Tilly sees as the conjoined process of war-making and state-making, stability in postTiananmen China was offered by the party-state as the “protection racket” to
legitimize its rule and the expansion of state capacity to further penetrate the
grassroots. But different from external war-making, the Chinese case features internal
threats of social unrest. As long as the threat of instability lingers, this “protection
racket” remains a useful source of legitimacy.
On the other hand, the extensive practices of stability maintenance have undergone
rapid expansion as weiwen institutions, operating under an elaborate system of partystate functionaries, ordinary citizens, private enterprises and informal institutions,
have proliferated across the nation and penetrated the grassroots. The imperative of
weiwen has been bureaucratized into a routinized administrative responsibility of the
local governments, interwoven with the career incentives of party-state officials. The
resulting system is a comprehensive, complex and multilayered Panopticon of control
108
To name just a few examples: Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience”; David Shambaugh, China's
Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008);
Frank Pieke, The Good Communist: Elite Training and State Building in Today’s China, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
109
Bruce Gilley, “The Limits of Authoritarian Resilience”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 14, no. 1
(January 2003), pp. 18-26; Cheng Li, “The End of the CCP’s Resilient Authoritarianism? A Tripartite
Assessment of Shifting Power in China”, China Quarterly, vol. 211 (September 2012), pp. 595–623.
30 The Politics of Weiwen: Stability as a Source of Political Legitimacy in Post-­‐
Tiananmen China under which dissenting behaviour are vigilantly policed by these plentiful party-state
nerve-tips. The effort to replace repression by more benign, non-coercive weiwen
strategies, meanwhile, was greatly hampered by the inheritance of Maoist and Dengist
legacies in the policing organs, the CCP’s political monopoly and local officials’ risk
aversion to protests and disorder. Repression, often involving excessive and
illegitimate forces, thus remains an essential feature of the practice of stability
maintenance. This leads to the erosion of public trust on the local governments and
their officials, which is reflected in everyday language and even in statecommissioned opinion polls.
The twin distinctions between diffuse and specific support, and between legitimacy
and legitimation, enable us to understand the paradox between the simultaneously
constructive and erosive role of “stability” on regime legitimation. While the
appealing notion of “stability” becomes a source of diffuse support for the CCP taken
as a whole, the everyday mundane practice of “stability maintenance” is shredding
away the specific support at the local level. The potential convergence of both types
of support poses an imminent question: how resilient is China’s authoritarian
resilience?
31