Description

Many scholars have analyzed pathways to mobilization for myriad challengers confronting all types of governments. Fewer have examined the decisions of states to repress, accommodate, or ignore protesters – even though the importance of state response is universally recognized, particularly in authoritarian settings. When challenges come from groups who had benefited from the pursuit of one vision of modernity and progress, but who have lost out after the state changed direction ideologically, the influence of regime reactions to citizen activism is further heightened. In both contemporary China and New Order Indonesia, responses to contention have varied significantly over time and across place. Why do governments – even the most authoritarian and autonomous ones – fail to respond consistently to similar challenges? Drawing on a comparative analysis of contention by Chinese laid-off workers and Indonesian Islamic student groups, I argue that states with high capacity seek to accommodate protesters, while those with weaker capacity usually seek to repress unrest, and those lacking sufficient capacity to repress or accommodate implore outside entities to buy off resisters, enlist third party violent actors to repress them, or fail to mount any meaningful response at all.

Professor William Hurst, assistant professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 2005. His prior work has centered on contemporary Chinese labor, particularly the social and political impacts of mass lay-offs from state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 forthcoming) and an editor of Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009 forthcoming). He is currently working on articles comparing state repression of contentious challengers in China and Indonesia, and analyzing the social roots of contention and quiescence in rural China. His ongoing research focuses on the institutional workings of the Chinese legal system, as well as on labor markets, working class politics, and the legal system in Indonesia.