Communist Regime and Private Entrepreneurs: A Variety of Cooptation in China

Juan Wang, McGill University

Theories of the state have evolved in the past decades. Following Marxist view on the left and pluralist understanding on the right about the state as reflection of selective societal interests, certain scholars stressed the importance of seeing the state as an autonomous actor (Skocpol 1985) or as an activated effect derived from the elusive boundary between the state and society (Mitchell 1991). Studies of the third world challenge these universalistic views by showing how the state functions distinctively in the newly independent countries where the state needs to compete with other societal forces and organizations to establish authority, or the so-called “state-in-society” perspective (Migdal 2001). This paper suggests that the state in regimes that went through revolutionary transformations also need to be theorized differently because popular mobilization coexists with authoritarianism in such regimes and that the society is often mobilized to serve certain state functions, i.e., the “society-in-the state.” This paper focuses on the practices of policing in the People’s Republic of China to illustrate this point. The police are perhaps one of the least questioned apparatuses that “belong to” the modern state that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. However, this paper shows that, the public can be mobilized by the state in post-revolutionary regimes to function as the police, to surveil and to punish. This paper looks at two time periods of policing practices, 1963-1965, and 2020-2022, where policing was highly politicized during the first period and highly depoliticized during the second. This empirical survey showcases the complexity in the relationship between repression and popular mobilization in post-revolutionary authoritarian regimes such as the PRC. The population is not simply subjugated by the state but mobilized and incorporated into the state to serve coercive purposes.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 98. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: The Long Chinese Revolution in Comparative Perspective