Trust transformation and behavioral patterns : peasant resistance under land property conflicts in rural China

Abstract

Authoritarian China provides a unique context to explore resistance strategies. For one thing, it is alert to both institutionalized resistance and non-institutionalized one. For another, China is different from traditional authoritarian state due to the change of state legitimacy. It now gains support from the public by economic performance rather than ideology control, making it tolerant of resistance claiming for economic requests. Previous literatures have discovered different types of peasant resistance. However, they fail to highlight the diversity in peasant resistance that different types co-exist. Furthermore, prior studies seldom focus on analyzing the rationale behind peasant behaviors.

This thesis examines the state–society relationship by exploring peasant resistance to land conflicts in rural China. Trust in the state is an important intermediate variable that shapes peasant responses to state policy. Through 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 45 land-lost peasants in 2 villages, the study finds an interplay between peasant trust and behavior toward state policy. More specifically, the way people trust the central government leads to different resistance strategies. This study uncovers four types of trust in the central government and shows how they lead to specific social actions in terms of intention and capacity: Justice Bao (morally good intention and large capacity), Judge (legally just and large capacity), Clay Bodhisattva (good intention and small capacity), Monster (bad intention and large capacity). Accordingly, peasants develop four types of behavioral patterns based on the trust types: state-dependent and norm-based, state-dependent and policy-based, self-dependent and policy-based, self-dependent and norm-based. It also investigates the opposite process of how those actions lead to a reshaping of trust in the state. In other words, this study places the evolution of trust in a cyclic lifetime learning model where trust shapes behavior and is in turn reshaped by the consequences of those behaviors.

This study contributes to the existing literature in three main aspects. Firstly, it identifies that peasant trust in the central government is diverse rather than monolithic as found by current literatures. Secondly, it displays the connection between trust in the state and corresponding behavioral patterns towards the state policy. Thirdly, it enriches the current literature on trust by indicating that trust evolves in a lifetime learning process. It on one hand influences peasants’ behavioral patterns; on the other is reshaped by the consequences of behaviors.