‘Know Who’ may be better than ‘Know How’: political connections and reactions in administrative disputes in China

Abstract

How do disputants in China solve conflicts involving state actors in their daily life? We analyze the above questions using a representative national dataset and argue that it depends on either ‘Know Who’ or ‘Know How’. We further categorized three potential strategies in solving administrative dispute: Rule-bending, Rule-bound, and Rule-breaking. We find that while elites tend to approach the legal and bureaucratic system, encouraged by political connections, non-elites have to appeal outside the official justice system through petition. The findings herein suggest that China is pursuing regime stability through elite co-optation, which is in line with the theory of political survival.

Keywords:

• Regime stability
• political connection
• administrative dispute
• China

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization; Bueno de Mesquita et al,, The Logic of Political Survival; Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience,” 6–17; Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Wang, Tying the Autocrat's Hands.

2 Ansani and Daniele, “About a Revolution,” 1–24.

3 According to Sun Ligping, a well-known sociologist at Tsinghua University, the number of incidents (qunti shijian) rose five times from 1993 to 2003 and the total number of cases is believed to exceed 180,000 in 2010, “Shehui shixu shi dangxia di yanjun tiaozhan” (Social disorder is the biggest challenge in Contemporary China), see http://www.eeo.com.cn/eobserve/Politics/by_region/2011/02/28/194539.shtml.

4 Bernstein and Lu, Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China; Cai, State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China; Ho and Edmonds, eds. China's Embedded Activism; O'Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China; Perry and Selden, eds. Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance.

5 ‘Wen jia bao: nuli jianshe renmin manyi de fuwuxing zhengfu’ (Wen Jiabao: Our Goal Is To Be a Government Which Services Peoples' Interests), see http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2010-03/05/content_13102634.htm.

6 For example, Cai, Collective Resistance in China; He, “Maintaining Stability by Law,” 849–873; Lee and Zhang, “The Power of Instability,” 1475–1508; Minzner, “Xinfang,” 103–179.

7 Wang and Minzner, “The Rise of the Chinese Security State,” 339–359; Zhou and Yan, “The Quest for Stability,” 3–17.

8 Almen, “Only the Party Manages Cadres,” 237–254”; Zhang, “Reexamining the Electoral Connection in Authoritarian China,” 1–27.

9 Liebman, “Legal Reform,” 96–109; O'Brien and Li, “Suing the Local State,” 75–96.

10 Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State; Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy; Wank, Commodifying Communism.

11 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival; Svolik. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.

12 Goldstone and Tilly, “Threat (and Opportunity),” 179–194.

13 We have a different opinion than Cai that approaching an upper level official should not be viewed as a form of ‘petition’, see Cai, “Social Conflicts and Modes of Action in China,” 89–109. As this paper indicates, such a classification would yield the result that a petition is the most common solution mode, even among elites, which is contradictory to the empirical observations. Several other national surveys in China, such as the Asian Barometer 2008 (ABS 2008) and the Institutionalization of Legal Reforms in China (ILRC) also found that protests or demonstrations are not commonly used in state–citizen dispute resolution. In ABS 2008, the ratio was 52 out of 5098 cases, whereas in ILRC, it was 21 out of 524.

14 Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State, 115–121; 126–127.

15 The 1989 version of the ALL is applicable in the following circumstances: (1) citizens’ refusal to accept administrative sanctions, such as property confiscation, the rescinding of a license or permit, or the suspension of production or business; (2) citizens’ refusal to accept compulsory administrative measures, such as the seizure of property or restrictions on personal freedom; (3) state infringement on an individual’s business franchise; (4) the refusal of an administrative agency to respond to or issue a license to an eligible applicant; (5) the failure of an administrative agency to respond to or fulfill a legal obligation to protect individual or property rights; (6) the failure of an administrative agency to issue a pension as required by law; (7) the ordering of an invalid obligation by an administrative agency; and (8) an administrative agency’s violation of personal or property rights in any other manner, see Finder. In 2015, a new version of the ALL became effective. Subjects of a suit are now included with open information, social security, and educational rights.

16 Pei, “Citizens V. Mandarins,” 832–862; it is also worth mentioned that when we use the same method as Pei to calculate the remedy chance, it falls below 30% in the 2000s and now it is below 10% since 2010.

17 Liebman, “Legal Reform,” 96–109; Also see Whiting and Shao, “Courts and Political Stability,” 222–247.

18 Minzner, “Xinfang,” 103–179.

19 Article 18 in Regulations on Letters and Visits, http://www.gjxfj.gov.cn/2009-11/24/c_133327663.htm.

20 Zhao, “Guonei shoufen xinfang baogao huo gaoceng zhongshi” (Top Leaders Pay Attention to the First Report on Collective Petition].”

21 He and Feng, “Mismatched Discourses in the Petition Offices of Chinese Courts,” 212–241.

22 O'Brien, “Neither Transgressive nor Contained,” 51–64.

23 Cai, Collective Resistance in China.

24 Social stability maintenance is the so called ‘one vote veto’ item in the performance evaluation of local officials. Failure by a local official to meet this criterion typically results in a sanction or demotion, even if other items are fulfilled. For a discussion of this issue, see Heberer and Trappel, “Evaluation Process, Local Cadres' Behavior and Local Development Process,” 1048–1066; Cai and Zhu, “Disciplining Local Officials in China,” 98–119.

25 Goebel, “Social Unrest in China: A Bird's Eye Perspective.”

26 Miller and Sarat, “Grievances, Claims, and Disputes,” 525–566.

27 Michelson, “Climbing the Dispute Pagoda,” 459–485.

28 Ang and Jia, “Perverse Complementarity,” 318–332.

29 The dataset used by Ang and Jia does not directly measure firm owners’ legal knowledge or consciousness. Alternatively, they constructed an indicator to measure the availability of legal professionals and the efficiency of courts in processing cases in one province called ‘Legal Service Capacity’. In other words, in a province where ‘Legal Service Capacity’ is high, the legal knowledge gap between firms should be smaller.

30 Wank, Commodifying Communism.

31 Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy.

32 Guo, “Organizational Involvement and Political Participation in China,” 457–482.

33 Walder, “The Party Elite and China's Trajectory of Change,” 189–209.

34 Gallagher and Yang, “Getting Schooled: Legal Mobilization as an Educative Process,” 163–194; Also see Michelson, “Dear Lawyer Bao,” 43–71.

35 Michelson and Read, “Public Attitudes toward Official Justice in Beijing and Rural China,” 169–203.

36 He, Wang and Su, “Above the Roof, beneath the Law,” 703–738.

37 Li, “Political Trust and Petitioning in the Chinese Countryside,” 209–226.

38 Cheung, “Institutional Options for Administrative Disputes in China—From the Perspective of the Needs of the Public,” 144–160.

39 Hosmer, Lemeshow, and Sturdivant, Applied Logistic Regression, 408.

40 Lieberthal and Oksenberg, Policy Making in China.

41 See note 28 above.

42 Whiting and Shao, “Courts and Political Stability,” 222–247.

43 Wu and Cheng, “The Emerging New Middle Class and the Rule of Law in China,” 43–70.

44 Bian, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility,” 91–116; Lin and Wu, “The Transformation of the Chinese Class Structure, 1978–2005,” 81–112.

45 See note 27 above.

46 A commonly used indicator of regime support or legitimacy is political trust, which is defined as people’s evaluation of how well the government produced outcomes consistent with their expectations. See Hetherington, “The Political Relevance of Political Trust”. Numerous studies have found that China’s central government has continuously enjoyed incredibly high political trust facilitated by economic performance since the 1990s, for example see Li, “Trust in Rural China,” 228–258; Wang, “Explaining Regime Strength in China,” 217–237; Yang and Tang, “Exploring the Sources of Institutional Trust in China,” 415–436.

47 Chen and Li, “Explaining Comparative Administrative Law,” 87–131; Ieong, “The Development of Grand Mediation and Its Implications for China's Regime Resilience,” 95–119; Lu, “Social Policy and Regime Legitimacy,” 423–437

48 For example, see Lee and Zhang, “The Power of Instability,” 1475–1508 and Tomba, The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China.

49 As far as we know, no existing dataset covers such information.

50 Li, “Political Trust and Petitioning in the Chinese Countryside,” 209–226; Tsai, “Constructive Noncompliance,” 253–279; Lorentzen, “Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime,” 127–158; Lorentzen, “Designing Contentious Politics in Post-1989 China,” 1–35.

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Meng U. Ieong

Meng U. Ieong is a lecturer at the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Macau. His research interest is comparative authoritarianism with specific region interest of the great China region.