Speaker: Prof. William Hurst, Northwestern University
Date: Monday 18 March 2013
Time: 6.30-8 pm
Location: NAB 1.15 (New Academic Building, first floor)
Chair: Dr. Dann Naseemullah, Department of Government
Based on our analysis of a survey of 120 villages across six Chinese provinces, as well as more than 100 in-depth interviews across these same regions, we found two distinct pathways to local political stability. A “virtuous path”, based on civic participation and engagement, in which autonomous or quasi-independent organizations play important roles in collective action and promoting good governance, appears robust, but also clearly bounded by region, effective only in parts of Fujian province. A more sinister path, based on parasitic and violent co-dependency of local states and crime syndicates – what we term insidious symbiosis - seemed, if anything, more widespread across other regions. This contrast carries broad implications for the study of China and subnational governance and contention more generally.
Speaker biography
William Hurst is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He works on labor politics, contentious politics, political economy, and the politics of law and legal institutions, principally in China and Indonesia. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge) and co-editor ofLaid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics(Palgrave-MacMillan) and has published numerous articles and book chapters. His current and ongoing research focuses on the politics of legal institutions in both China and Indonesia. For this work he has completed more than one year of fieldwork in each country since 2006.