ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, James Scott transformed peasant studies with his work on ‘weapons of the weak’. Several years later, with Scott’s (1985, 1990) books firmly in mind, Lianjiang Li and I started noticing something a bit different in China. Rather than cloaking their dissent in dissimulation, deniability and ambiguous gestures, people we called rightful resisters were challenging the powerful head-on. In particular, when faced with illegal extraction, rigged elections or corrupt cadres, villagers were deploying the policies, laws and commitments of the state to combat local officials who were ignoring those policies, laws and commitments. Whereas Scott’s everyday forms of resistance were quiet, disguised and anonymous, rightful resistance was noisy, public and open. Whereas everyday resistance focused on relations between subordinates and superordinates, rightful resisters were engaged in a three-party game where divisions within the state and elite allies mattered greatly. Over the next decade, as we gained access to protest leaders in parts of Hunan where rightful resistance was especially vibrant, we concluded that this type of protest had four main attributes: it operated near the boundary of authorized channels, employed the rhetoric and
I am grateful to Jun Borras for suggesting that I ‘revisit’ rightful resistance and to Sara Newland for research assistance on other types of resistance. I would like to thank Tamara Jacka, John Kennedy, Sally Sargeson, James Scott, Rachel Stern and Emily Yeh for comments on an earlier draft. Generous financial support was provided by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. For a nearly career-long collaboration and for teaching me far more than I ever taught him, I am indebted to Lianjiang Li.
