Rights Consciousness and Rules Consciousness among Rural Protesters in China: An Analysis of the Wukan Incident

Abstract

Yan Liu – Researcher, Center for Chinese Rural Studies, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China. Email: karenly_62@mail.ru

The rights consciousness of Chinese rural protesters is mainly studied in the context of democratic legal relations between state and citizens. This has meant insufficient attention has been paid to the relations between rights consciousness and the protesters’ adoption of socialist doctrine, rural culture, and other ideologies. Nevertheless, the few studies devoted to this problem have largely discussed the consciousness of subsistence rights. It is of particular importance to analyze the rights / rules consciousness of protesters in the more economically developed rural society of China, where the subsistence of village residents is not threatened. Based on this research interest, the Wukan protests are analyzed, and the influence of ideological packages on rights / rules consciousness are studied by employing the method of frameanalysis. The data analysed here consist of texts, photos, and videos that
present the actual protest scenes and discourse of protesters, as well as the response of local governments. The results show that Wukan residents protested because they believed that the distribution of income from transactions with collective land was unfair, resulting in them becoming an underprivileged social class. The rights consciousness of Wukan residents is shaped on the basis of party ideology and rural culture, and differs from civil rights consciousness. Rights consciousness on the basis of rural culture intensifies protests, while rights consciousness based on party ideology strengthens the
authority of the Communist Party. Rules consciousness is concerned with the need to legitimize protest, which leads to a decrease in the violence and political sensitivity of protests. This reflects the role of China’s official ideology (rule by law and party ideology) in the 'depoliticization' of rural protesters.