TYPE OF DATA PROJECT: Active Citation Compilation
TITLE: “Power Relations at the Alley Level†– Chapter 4 in Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei (2012, Stanford University Press)
AUTHOR: Benjamin L. Read, Politics Department, UC Santa Cruz (bread@ucsc.edu)
KEYWORDS: China, clientelism, community, neighborhoods, organizations, social networks, state-society relations, Taiwan
PROJECT SUMMARY:
Drawing on participant observation, surveys, and interviews in Beijing and Taipei, the book from which the activated chapter was drawn shows that state-sponsored neighborhood organizations remain salient and deeply rooted in certain parts of urban society, even as other constituents ignore or reject them.
China’s ruling Communist Party has redoubled its commitment to the longstanding Residents’ Committees (jumin weiyuanhui; RCs), now widely integrated into larger entities called “communities,†primarily as a means of keeping tabs on the country’s rapidly changing urban neighborhoods and bolstering its organizational presence there. In Taiwan, the Neighborhood Wardens (lizhang, each one in charge of a li office) have historically formed elements of the Kuomintang’s mobilization apparatus but became politically plural as the ROC democratized starting in the 1980s. Although they differ significantly in their political roles, for residents they are similar: all-purpose focal points of local authority, providers of services, organizers of neighborhood events and activities, and liaisons to city government. A close look at these organizations shows how state-society relationships vary across people and neighborhoods: while in some settings they form an important underpinning for repressive regimes, in others they show that institutions once created to control societies can evolve in ways that empower them.
The chapter being activated addresses the book’s central question: why would anyone approve of a government-sponsored office in one’s neighborhood, a state outpost that recruits locals into service roles and facilitates various programs of administration, surveillance, policing and even (in China) repression? The chapter begins to adjudicate among some of the possible answers, such as, for instance, “clientelist rewards.†It explains what kinds of residents might have material things to win or lose in their dealings with the neighborhood organizations. It assesses the extent to which neighborhood leaders have arbitrary authority to bestow tangible favors on people they like. The thrust is that while some residents can be said to have clientelist ties with these organizations, there are considerable limits to this characterization, and it forms a relatively small part of the overall picture. These points are developed within an exploration of the lived experience of people in Beijing and Taipei in relation to these institutions, which makes clear the kinds of power the RCs and the li offices have and do not have.
DATA ABSTRACT:
While other portions of the book are based in part on two original surveys, the activated chapter is entirely qualitative. Data were gathered during repeated site visits between 1998 and 2011 to 10 neighborhoods in Beijing and 13 in Taipei, including long semi-ethnographic visits in neighborhood offices. Government records concerning each city and its neighborhoods, including the official city yearbooks, were consulted. For Beijing, unpublished records containing aggregate data on neighborhood-level elections for 2000, 2003, and 2006 were obtained. In Taipei, the city election commission published detailed reports on neighborhood elections, going back a few decades. Important parts of these were photocopied for several years, and for the past two or three elections use was made of available digital files containing the same kind of data.
The author conducted 48 in-depth interviews with Beijing residents concerning their interaction with the RCs and was given access to 25 transcripts from interviews by two Chinese researchers. One of these researchers and his wife were later also hired by the author to carry out 25 additional interviews from 2003 to 2005. Interviews for a separate project on homeowner organizations provided further material on newly built neighborhoods. Between 2000 and 2007 the author studied 23 such cases, all but one of them in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In Taiwan, together with three research assistants, the author conducted in-depth interviews with about 30 residents of Taipei. In all cases the interviewees were recruited through personal contacts and random encounters of the author and his acquaintances, with an eye toward obtaining a diverse set of backgrounds. All citations in the chapter being activated refer to interviews and site visits conducted by the author himself.
FILES DESCRIPTION: The interview data are either transcriptions of notes taken by hand (earlier interviews) or directly typed (in the later period of the data collection). The ethnographic / observational data from Beijing, with its more tense political climate surrounding research on official institutions, are notes taken by hand during or immediately after a site visit, and then transcribed. In Taipei, the author sometimes used the same method and sometimes took notes on a laptop computer during the site visit. For the government records, the files are a mix of photocopies of some records and notes entered directly into Excel on a laptop in the Taiwan national library.
LOGIC OF ACTIVATION AND ANNOTATION:
AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS OF FILES: The data are somewhat sensitive. The data from resident interviews and observation in neighborhoods concern everyday dealings with the state, some of which are innocuous, some of which involve some degree of wrongdoing or deception (corruption or defiance of authorities, for example.) They are quite personal. For both cities, the author has given pseudonyms to all interviewees and informants as well as their neighborhoods, and has obscured details that would obviously identify them. Generally, promises were given to all research subjects that they would not be named or identified without their permission. Since the aim of this active citation collection is to allow the author to stay true to this promise, there might be additional limitations imposed on access to some files.