“China’s Grassroots Movement Toward Greater Freedom”

During the last few decades, China has been witnessing the success of unorganized, leaderless grassroots movements in bottom-up expansion of civil rights. Whether resisting the restrictions on freedom of movement or seizing individual liberties gradually conceded by the government, unorganized, non-ideological, and apolitical grassroots movements have fundamentally altered key elements of China’s one-party regime and its society at large.

In this Feature Service article, Dr. Kate Zhou, associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, argues that this freedom-seeking spirit of the ordinary Chinese has been driving the country’s booming economy and it has affected many elements of daily life. The Chinese Government reacts rather than leads in this transformative process. Whenever the regime is slow to adjust, public dissatisfaction is no longer restricted to low whispers in the back rooms of houses; it takes place on the streets, in online chat rooms, and in courts.

“For the past thirty years, ordinary Chinese citizens have seized significant freedoms in defiance of their government, including mass rural-urban migrations and the rise of private enterprise,” Zhou says. “The transformations have created a parallel society alongside the authoritarian state – a burgeoning civil society has begun to take root, where people can now, to some degree, wield control over their lives.” But Zhou also warns that notwithstanding its progress, the liberalization movement confronts significant challenges; notably, a weak rule of law, a lack of unity among various movements, and a prevailing hyper-nationalism that threatens prospects for peace and stability. The future will depend upon the tenacity of the Chinese people in their struggle for liberalization and how far the state is willing to go to stop them.

Article at a Glance

• Over the last few decades, unorganized and leaderless grassroots movements in China have led to the bottom-up expansion of civil rights.

• A grassroots social revolution is taking place in China through the rise of entrepreneurship, migration of millions from the countryside to cities, and an explosion of information available to ordinary people.

• This grassroots social revolution is moving China towards a more liberal society, regardless of whether the government remains in its current illiberal mode.