CIVIC AND NONCIVIC ACTIVISM UNDER AUTOCRACY: SHIFTING POLITICAL SPACE FOR POPULAR COLLECTIVE ACTION*

Abstract

China is an authoritarian state with different sophisticated strategies for dealing with popular contention. Research shows that the Chinese state sharply distinguishes between popular protests on materialist claims and those on nonmaterialist claims, but it is rarely recognized that in China civic activism faces a dramatically different political environment than noncivic activism. While the distinction between civic and noncivic activism has seldom played an important role in differentiating state strategies in democracies and some other authoritarian regimes, I contend that the Chinese state has developed sharply different strategies based on this distinction throughout the history of People’s Republic. To account for different strategic patterns, we need to investigate the functions that different types of popular collective action can fulfill and the threats they may pose to the regime. Using labor and feminist activism as examples, this article examines the evolution of the space for civic and noncivic activism in three historical periods—Mao’s era, the Reform era, and Xi’s era. It elucidates how regime transformations interacted with the nature of claims to produce different political environment for popular collective action in China.