Kevin J. O’Brien, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
| DATE: | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 4:30 PM |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | IEAS Book Series: New Perspectives on East Asia |
| SPONSORS: | Institute of East Asian Studies |
How can the poor and weak ‘work’ a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This ‘rightful resistance’ has far-reaching implications for our understanding of political change in contemporary China.
Kevin J. O’Brien is a Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Reform Without Liberalization: China’s National People’s Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change as well as numerous articles on legislative politics, local elections, and village political reform.
