The advocacy trap: Transnational activism and state power in China 9781526119483

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Series editors’ foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The superpower’s dilemma: to appease, repress, or transform transnational advocacy networks?
Mechanisms of persuasion: when and how are advocacy campaigns effective?
The power of state preferences: the ‘natural cases’ of the campaigns for Falun Gong and IPR protection
Reading the ‘lay of the land’: intercessory advocacy and causal process in the HIV/AIDS treatment and dealth penalty abolitionist campaigns
State-directed advocacy: the ‘drift’ phenomenon in the ‘free Tibet’ and global warming campaigns
Strategic considerations, tough choices: how state preferences influence campaign forms
Conclusion: State power as reality
References
Index

Citation preview

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The advocacy t rap

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ALTERNATIVE SINOLOGY

Series editor: Yangwen Zheng This series provides a dedicated outlet for monographs and possibly edited volumes that take alternative views on contemporary or historical China; use alternative research methodologies to achieve unique outcomes; focus on otherwise understudied or marginalized aspects of China, Chineseness, or the Chinese state and the Chinese cultural diaspora; or generally attempt to unsettle the status quo in Chinese Studies, broadly construed. There has never been a better time to embark on such a series, as both China and the academic disciplines engaged in studying it seem ready for change.

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THE ADVOCACY TRAP Transnational activism and state power in China

Stephen Noakes

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Stephen Noakes 2018 The right of Stephen Noakes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester m1 7ja www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn  978 1 5261 1947 6 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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Contents Series editors’ foreword Acknowledgements

Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma: to appease, repress, or transform transnational advocacy networks?

1 Mechanisms of persuasion: when and how are advocacy campaigns effective? 2 The power of state preferences: the ‘natural cases’ of the campaigns for Falun Gong and IPR protection 3 Reading the ‘lay of the land’: intercessory advocacy and causal process in the HIV/​AIDS treatment and death penalty abolitionist campaigns 4 State-​directed advocacy: the ‘drift’ phenomenon in the ‘free Tibet’ and global warming campaigns 5 Strategic considerations, tough choices: how state preferences influence campaign forms

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70 104 136

Conclusion: state power as reality

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References Index

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Series editors’ foreword

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he study of China has in recent decades seen an explosion as many universities began to offer modules ranging from Chinese history, politics and sociology to urban, cultural and Diaspora studies. This is welcome news; the field grows when the world is hungry for knowledge about China. Chinese studies as a result have moved further away from the interdisciplinary tradition of Sinology towards more discipline-​based teaching and research. This is significant because it has helped integrate the once-​marginalised Chinese subjects into firmly established academic disciplines; practitioners should learn and grow within their own fields. This has also, however, compartmentalised Chinese studies as China scholars communicate much less with each other than before since they now teach and research in different departments; the study of China has lost some of its exceptionalism and former sheen. Alternative Sinology calls for a more nuanced way forward. China scholars can firmly ground themselves in their own perspective fields; they still have the advantage of Sinology, the more holistic approach. The combination of disciplinary and area studies can help us innovate and lead. Now is an exciting time to take the study of China to new heights as the country has seen unprecedented change and offers us both hindsight and new observations. Alternative Sinology challenges China scholars. It calls on them to think creatively and unsettle the status quo by using new and alternative materials and methods to dissect China. It encourages them to take on understudied and marginalised aspects of China at a time when the field is growing and expanding rapidly. The case of China can promote the field and strengthen the individual discipline as well. The advocacy trap:  transnational activism and state power in a rising China launches the series. Post-​Mao China opened its door to not just economic reform but also many transnational civil organizations, from HIV/​ AIDS prevention to environmental protection groups. Doing business with an authoritarian state is precarious. How such groups engage with a rising economic superpower that has not played by their rules, and increasingly would like to set its own, makes a fascinating study. The book probes how China has dealt with these global activist networks and their operations; it

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Series editors’ foreword   vii argues for what the author terms ‘advocacy drift’. Instead of insisting on their iron principles, trans​national advocacy groups have learnt to negotiate and accommodate in order to achieve their larger goal. This is significant because these trans​national civil society organisations have been persuaded; it reveals China’s ability to set its own rules. This level of dynamics and complexity will have implications for many in the decades to come as China rises to challenge the world’s norm-​setters. Zheng Yangwen and Richard Madsen

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Acknowledgements

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his book was made possible by a transnational network of committed supporters. I am particularly indebted to Bruce Gilley and Kim Nossal, and to Joe Wong at the University of Toronto for their unfailing words of wisdom. Many others in the Canadian, US, UK, Australian, Chinese, and Kiwi academies have shaped the project in ways big and small. In no particular order, I wish to thank Edward Friedman, Bill Hurst, Bernie Frolic, Wendy Wong, Jessica Teets, Elizabeth Perry, Joe Fewsmith, Lynette Ong, Andrew Mertha, Victor Shih, Kathryn Sikkink, Sidney Tarrow, Dave Zarnett, Richard Madsen, Zheng Yangwen, Tom Dark, Alun Richards and all at Manchester University Press, Zsuzsa Csergo, Scott Matthews, David Haglund, Wayne Cox, Wenran Jiang, Dru Lauzon, Brandon Tozzo, Rémi Léger, Roxanne Razavi, Paul Clark, Hilary Chung, Mark Mullins, Melissa Inouye, Tom Gregory, Julie MacArthur, Gerald Chan and all my colleagues at the University of Auckland, Hyung Gu Lynn, Zhang Zhiyao, Charles Burton, André Laliberté, Marc Lanteigne, He Baogang, Guo Dingping, Ren Junfeng, Tim Cheek, Paul Evans, Fu Tao, the China Development Brief, John Kielty, Wang Limin, Richard Choi, Marguerite Luong, Victor Radujko, Peter Henshaw, Caylan Ford, Jared Pearman, Ken and Lolan Merklinger, Tim Roxburgh, Kimberley Manning, and Emily Hill. Faculty and staff at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs, which served as a base of operations for field research in China, showed me incredible hospitality. Jing Yijia, Sang Yucheng, and Wang Yangyang all deserve special mention. Thanks also go to Jennifer Falle, Amelia Ponte-​Vivieros, Barb Murphy, Jeananne Vickery, Karen Vandermey, Frances Shepherd, Eileen Lam, Amy Dutton, Laura Bunting, Lisa Jagoe, Ali Bensemann, Jane Kim, Adam White, Anna Ma, and Yvonne Hannah for their capable research assistance and administrative support. Financial contributions the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the R. S. McLaughlin Fellowship, and the Timothy C. E. S. Franks Research Travel Grant are gratefully acknowledged. A  further debt is owed to my students at Queen’s, the University of Toronto, and the University of Auckland, whose curiosity

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Acknowledgements  ix and enthusiasm for studying China’s politics moved me to investigate angles I had not thought of previously and kept me buoyant week after week. Last, but certainly not least, I  wish to express my gratitude to family and friends, especially Sarah, for her patience with me during the final push (“Yes, I do think you will finish your book. Yes, I think it will be fine”), and my children, Ezra and Nori, who keep me focused on what really matters. My parents Don and Jan Noakes, my sister Shannon, Scotty Young, Jack Noakes, Ryan Edwardson, Keren Bromberg, Scott Wilson, Keren, Christina Dabrowski, Jeff, Heather, and Jordan Wilson, Brian and Diane Wilson, Murray and Heather Kennedy-​MacNeill, Dorothy MacNeill, Sophie and Emma MacNeill, Paul and Rosemary Morrison, Neel Jethwa, Adrian Elliot, Ross Cameron, Jessica Davis, Sam Young, and Marin “Mutiny” McGinnis all deserve to be singled out because of the love, good company, meals, and occasional overnight accommodation they provided.

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Introduction

The superpower’s dilemma: to appease, repress, or transform transnational advocacy networks?

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he tale of transnational advocacy networks (TANs), as told by students of international politics, is typically one of non-​state actors reshaping world politics through the power of persuasion and principled ideas. In its most familiar telling, global partnerships of activists, non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, and technical experts play the foil to unrestrained national interests, developing, diffusing, and monitoring compliance with norms (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Khagram et al., 2002; Price, 2003). It is a classic underdog story, in which state preferences are transformed and conventional notions of power in the international system are upended by those armed with little more than the courage of their convictions. Many versions also include a feel-​good component, in which people from many walks of life, bound and driven by common devotion to their beliefs, take on well-​ armed, sometimes oppressive, and occasionally murderous governments for the protection and betterment of their fellow human beings. What could be more inspirational, more romantic? This book is about the unromantic and often uncomfortable realities of transnational advocacy in a strong authoritarian state and rising world power. Drawing together case studies that span a range of issues, repertoires, and results of advocacy, it elaborates the constitutive role of the state in contemporary transnational activism. This argument is not only disquieting because it points to the growing influence of Chinese values at odds with those of the US-​led post-​Cold War global order, but because it is precisely the opposite of what so many activists –​and the governments and interstate bodies that sponsor them –​set out to achieve when China opened itself to the outside world. Indeed, in the three-​and-​a-​half decades since Deng Xiaoping initiated the policy of reform and opening up, China’s global integration has mainly been seen as a way to promote reforms from the outside in. Instead of isolating China, engagement would serve as a means to socialize the country’s

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2  The advocacy trap communist leadership to the rules and mores of responsible global citizenship, transforming it into an upstanding member of the international community. Activists, working in and through international NGOs, were the tip of the spear, serving as carriers of transnational norms and agents of change. Though it is not always stated explicitly, this view is deeply rooted in the foreign policies of many Western governments. ‘American exceptionalism is missionary’, wrote Henry Kissinger in On China. ‘It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world.’ According to this ethos, values like democracy and human rights were universally applicable and their acceptance was inevitable. Operating on the front lines of norm diffusion in many of the world’s dictatorships, including China, activists and NGOs were cast as the emissaries of progress. This book asks what happens to transnational civil society actors as a result of their engagement with China, recognizing China’s power and influence as both real and meaningful. It aims to explain the multiple, divergent pathways or functional forms of advocacy campaigns in China. These forms matter because they affect activists’ ability to have an impact on their targets, and provide important clues about when and why some become politically salient while others do not. Brimming over with empirical anomalies, or ‘things that shouldn’t be’ (O’Brien, 2004: 38), China presents the perfect opportunity to explore such questions, being at once resiliently authoritarian and capable of resisting the input of external actors, and yet increasingly open and welcoming to forces from beyond its borders. Indeed, growing connections with the outside world since 1978 have generated broader awareness of the issues facing China and the importance of these for the international community. China’s rising presence on the global stage, its status as the world’s fastest-​growing economy, the largest producer of carbon emissions, and enduring reputation as a human rights violator all contribute to the growing focus on China by a huge number of activist organizations. However, efforts to sway official policy have been met with mixed reactions from the central government, which responds to transnational advocacy on various issues in quite different ways, picking and choosing what and whom it listens to, and when (Perry, 2002; Zheng and Fewsmith, 2008:  5). The selective acceptance of transnational claims to suit China’s changing needs and development agenda enables us to understand why activist campaigns come in a variety of forms, and why some are better received than others by China’s government. Approach of the book The book takes a process-​based and interactive approach, using the case of China to disaggregate the processes of transnational issue advocacy. It

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma   3 is process-​based in the sense that the case studies comprising its empirical chapters take on a narrative style, with the aim of unearthing the mechanisms, sequences of events, and critical junctures that produce the range of functional forms evident among transnational advocacy campaigns in China. It is interactive in that it seeks to show how these myriad forms arise from the TAN–​state nexus. As such, the book has much in common with other works of political science carried out in the qualitative tradition. However, the small-​n, comparative historical methodology of the book reflects a sensibility more common in sociology than political science, save for a few classic notables like Theda Skocpol’s States and social revolutions. Thus, the approach here is more ‘tried and true’ than brand new, and is a mélange of politics, international relations, sociology, and history. The chief advantage of this approach is that it facilitates the side-​by-​side comparison of divergent cases that together produce some surprising conclusions. The empirical core of the book is built around a selective but representative sample of six transnational advocacy campaigns spanning a range of issues in mainland China. These include the campaigns to cap China’s greenhouse gas emissions, strengthen its intellectual property rights (IPR) laws, improve and expand HIV/​AIDS treatment programmes, abolish capital punishment, obtain justice for the Falun Gong religious movement, and achieve Tibetan independence. These were chosen deliberately, and with several criteria in mind. First, these campaigns reflect the full range of transnational advocacy in China. Their results, conceived in terms of effectively influencing the adoption of national policy, vary widely, from the failure of Falun Gong advocates to undo the official ban on the group and bring Jiang Zemin to justice, to the relative success of global warming activists in helping to ratchet down China’s carbon outputs. Similarly, the campaigns elaborated here capture an assortment of functional forms or mobilization sequences and the role of the state in each, showing the benefits and drawbacks of different campaign strategies in different contexts, and raising new questions about the nature of TAN ‘effectiveness’ and causality itself. No less important is the methodological rationale underpinning the selection of diverse cases. Accounting for the varied outcomes and processes of TAN campaigns by exploring a breadth of campaign types not only limits selection bias, but normative bias as well, a mostly unacknowledged but nevertheless palpable characteristic of much research on TANs within international relations, which has tended to focus on progressive political and social causes. A key advantage of the interactive approach of this book is that it calls attention to the divergent and often contradictory points of view surrounding an issue, raising the question ‘progressive for whom?’ Second, these campaigns were chosen specifically for their national importance and for their significance to China as a whole, since issues deemed

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4  The advocacy trap unimportant by the central state would presumably not factor into national-​ level policy considerations one way or the other. Issues of strictly regional or local concern are more likely to be dealt with by provincial, county, or village governments, the inner workings and priorities of which have been discussed at length elsewhere (e.g. O’Brien and Li, 1999; Tsai, 2007; Yang, 1997), and lie beyond the empirical focus of this study. Third, capturing the attention of the central government presupposes the formation of a campaign as a logically and analytically prior condition for its effectiveness. Just as not all campaigns effectively influence states, not all issues become campaigns (Carpenter, 2007). As measuring the impact of non-​issues makes little sense, this study takes campaign existence for granted, and consists only of those that pressed their concerns to the target state. A fourth criterion was ease of measurement –​a not insignificant consideration when studying activism in a place like China, and on issues of political, social, or economic sensitivity. The combination of these four criteria –​that cases be diverse, seek national level impacts, exist as campaigns, and are measurable –​significantly narrowed the number of TANs available for study, but left behind a set of six ‘most different’ ones. The precise basis for their comparison is elaborated in greater detail in the next chapter. For now, the campaign cases are each presented as ‘analytic narratives’, a technique similar to process-​tracing but distinguished from historiography by the presentation of data so as to serve the greater tasks of testing and building theory (Bates et al., 1998). This design allows for elaboration of the mechanisms and sequences of events that connect possible causes to observed outcomes, a key benefit of process-​tracing (George and Bennett, 2005), as well as comparison across cases. A  ‘pattern-​matching’ technique (Mahoney, 2000, 2003; Sewell, 1996) is then applied to discern from the cases any causal regularities, recurring sequences, or lessons of value from the experiences of transnational advocacy in China. Empirically, the cases are constructed from a blend of documentary and interview data collected between 2009 and 2015. Interviews took the form of semi-​structured conversations with NGOs, government officials and spokespersons, trade associations and other civil society organizations in mainland China, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong. University ethics protocols –​and a genuine concern for participants in some TANs that address highly sensitive political issues in China –​preclude the identification of individuals by name, and in many cases, by their organizations. Instead, I refer to participants simply by their location and organizational type, and where possible, their job title (e.g. former press officer of a Shanghai-​based environmental NGO).

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma    5 This is not just a book about China, but also one that uses China as a case study to generate some insights about the nature of transnational advocacy and the cohesion of activist networks. It is not, and cannot be, an exhaustive account of contentious politics in China, Chinese civil society, or the domestic lobbying industry. Nor is it meant to facilitate a detailed dissection of the Chinese state that furnishes a more fine-​grained understanding of how (and how well) its many layers function together. Rather, the book offers insight into when and why some activist issues gain currency in China domestically while others do not, giving a sense of the factors that determine the position of an issue on the central government’s priority list, as well as the spectrum of campaign pathways that emerge from interaction with a powerful central state. Of course, the limits of the China case are worth remembering too, as are the constraints imposed by dependent variable selection. The results and pathways probed here are only a small part of the still-​emerging picture of TAN behaviours more generally, and domestic policy change is only one measure of TAN effectiveness, though it is probably the one that appears most commonly in the scholarship. Besides pressuring states for specific policy concessions, advocacy networks also seek to shape the nature and terms of the debate itself by raising consciousness, setting agendas, and developing the capacities of domestic NGOs and other non-​state advocacy groups. All of these may serve as useful indicators of successful or ‘effective’ campaigns in their own right, or they may be key ingredients in a larger attempt to eventually transform the practices of states or international organizations. Here, however, TAN ‘effectiveness’ is gauged by its role in observable changes in central government policy. Bridging (sub-​)fields Different academic disciplines employ differing understandings of transnationalism. In anthropology, sociology, and history, for example, the term is often applied in studies of diaspora communities living in different countries, separated from each other geographically but linked to a homeland and each other through shared memories or myths. Here, however, it refers to groups of activists living in different countries who wage cross-​border campaigns to change state policies in a given issue area. Common devotion to an idea or principle, rather than national or cultural affiliation, supplies the motivation for collective action. Understood in this way, there is no categorical requirement that individuals or organizations in TANs have any active, physical presence in the state they target, though they may and often do. In their

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6  The advocacy trap landmark work on TANs, Keck and Sikkink famously described the ‘boomerang pattern’ in which grassroots activists form linkages with allies in other countries and apply the resources of transnational space to their struggles at home, resulting in domestic-​level policy changes (1998: 12–​13). Because transnational networks are significant globally and domestically, this book speaks to students of comparative and international politics, bridging what is treated here as a superficial divide between the sub-​fields. True, the two developed as distinct disciplines, each with their own assumptions, methods, approaches, and analytical blind spots. Over time, however, this differentiation has faded and been replaced with a greater degree of topical and theoretical convergence (Haynes, 2005: 4–​5; Milner, 1998). One key point of convergence concerns explanatory frameworks in the field of transnational advocacy. Scholars from both sub-​fields have borrowed extensively from various schools of social movement theory to describe the conditions under which TANs succeed or fail, adapting them to suit the transnational milieu in which TANs operate. Resource mobilization theory, typically centred on movement structures and their interaction with the external environment (McCarthy and Zald, 1977), has been redeployed in terms of network characteristics to capture the internal organizational features and processes that bear on advocacy campaigns. The concept of political opportunity structures, which encompasses a broad array of context-​ based institutional and historical factors (Meyer and Minkoff, 2004), has been adapted to include exogenous environmental characteristics, both within the target state and internationally, that can enhance or limit the chances for TANs to achieve their goals. Finally, the characteristics of specific issues promoted by TANs have a strong affinity to cultural or ideational theories emphasizing the symbolic component of collective identity (e.g. Melucci, 1989). Transnational activist networks and state preferences All social networks are inherently ‘network[s]‌of meanings’ (White, 1992: 67). In the case of TANs, these meanings take the form of moral sentiments or beliefs about the rights and obligations of certain actors in relation to others. Those that concern us here are ideational constructs, ‘distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values motivating their formation’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 3). At the same time, TANs are also rational, communicative structures that make use of voluntary, reciprocal information exchange to coordinate their activities among a wide variety of member organizations. These may include international and domestic NGOs, academics and scientific experts, charitable foundations, media outlets, religious

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma   7 communities, trade unions and consumer groups, as well as fragments of intergovernmental and national government bodies. As strategic yet fundamentally principled actors, TANs seek to export the belief systems they embody. Relying on persuasion and framing instead of disruption or violence, they develop, disseminate, and enforce shared normative standards, acting out of conscience to change behaviours they deem morally objectionable. This is frequently (though not exclusively) achieved by waging campaigns to optimize leverage over actors more materially powerful than themselves. Sometimes it involves ‘naming and shaming’ those politicians or countries concerned about their international reputation. In other instances, it means mobilizing reliable information or recognized expertise on a given issue in ways conducive to placing it on the global agenda, or otherwise influencing policy coordination and discussion (Haas, 1992: 3; Price, 2003: 586–​588). TAN activity has been documented on a huge and diverse set of issues including weapons control (Price, 1998; Price and Tannenwald, 1996; Rutherford, 2000), gender equality (Berkovitch, 1999; Clark et  al., 1998), environmental protection (Gough and Shackley, 2001; Wapner, 2002), human rights (Burgerman, 2001; Clark, 2001), and democratization (Riker, 2002; Schmitz, 2006), to name only a few. The salience of TANs is conventionally linked to their ability to alter the policies and practices of states. When and where these campaigns are effective  –​and they are not always effective  –​advocacy networks are seen as remodelling world order by troubling conventional notions of state power in international politics (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Risse and Sikkink, 1999). Thus, their role in global politics is most often posed as a rebuttal to the state-​ centric structural realist paradigm in international relations (Katzenstein et al., 1998; Keohane, 1989; Krasner, 1985; Waltz, 1979). The cornerstone of this understanding of TANs is the belief that transnational activists socialize states to new standards of behaviour, not the other way around. Indeed, transnational civil society was imagined to be a space beyond the reach of nation-​states, outside their sphere of influence. The problem is that this common framing limits our impression of the scope of activist–​state relationships and over-​determines our sense of the process by which advocacy campaigns unfold. Posing the question as one of activists affecting states forecloses the possibility that the reverse may also be true: states influence advocacy networks just as advocates may influence those states. I argue that state preferences are central to understanding how advocacy campaigns unfold because they affect the choices activists make and hence the pathways their campaigns take. More specifically, I  analyse the phenomenon of multiple, differentiated causal pathways produced by the interaction of target interests and individual network attributes and incentives –​a

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8  The advocacy trap perspective that accounts for the simultaneously principled and strategic nature of transnational activist organizations. Accordingly, a core contention of this book is that the degree of conviction held by activists matters as much as the principles themselves. It is not simply a matter of what activists believe, but how committed they are to those values that shape the form an advocacy campaign takes. The intent is not to pass judgement on which TANs show purity of heart and which do not, but rather to shine a light on the principles–​rationality nexus that exists within every TAN. Doing so allows us to glimpse those factors that tell us how far activists are willing to go to achieve their goals, what they may be willing to sacrifice along the way, and when they choose to dig in their heels when confronted with immutable or non-​negotiable target state preferences. As a factor affecting transnational civil society, state preferences or ‘national interests’ are underappreciated. I  argue that national interests as expressed through soft power influence the courses charted by TAN campaigns. Here, soft power refers to the practice of ‘catching more flies with honey’ than with vinegar. A vehicle for the advancement of one’s own interests by non-​ coercive means, it relies upon the magnetism and seductiveness of the user to shape the preferences of others by making certain options appear more or less attractive (Nye, 2004). Though indisputably backed by enormous coercive capability, soft power persuasion for the advancement of its interests is nevertheless an announced priority of China’s central government. It was a favoured tool of the fourth generation of leadership of Hu Jintao, which saw soft power as a means to trumpet Chinese culture and development to the world and promote a harmonious socialist society (shehui zhuyi hexie shehui) at home by balancing economic gains with the redistribution of wealth, and more responsive, effective, and corruption-​free governance. These goals have largely carried over into the fifth-​generation presidency of Xi Jinping, though perhaps with a stronger inclination to resort to repressive tactics, and a more personalistic style of rule. For understanding the forms and fates of advocacy campaigns, the salient detail is that by virtue of the disposition of their interests and negotiation posture, Beijing can make some courses of action appear more attractive to transnational activist groups than others. Commonly described as ‘nascent’, ‘state-​led’, and ‘corporatist’, China’s civil society remains characterized by heavy top-​down supervision and control, a fact that has a tendency to incentivize NGO cooperation with authorities, resulting in the tailoring of their missions and messages to match what is feasible or advisable within the interstices of the state (Hildebrandt, 2013; Spires, 2011; Teets, 2014). Under these conditions, the costs of principled behaviour, or ‘sticking to one’s guns’, may become unacceptably high. In the Chinese context,

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma    9 it frequently pays to advocate an issue and frame one’s arguments about it in ways the state welcomes, or at least finds palatable, since the central government is rarely if ever persuaded to follow a course of action it does not already favour. Occasions where foreigners succeed in that endeavour are rarer still. The second crucial aspect determining campaign forms is the way activists respond when confronted with the soft power of the state. For some, altering their core mission in return for access to key state partners is a tradeoff worth making. Others may view these costs as unacceptable. Laying the burden of how best to respond at the feet of individual networks means that each one takes responsibility for the way its campaign transpires. Activists may not be able to control how the Chinese state behaves, but they can decide how to react when faced with less than ideal circumstances. Theoretically, this means paying attention to the complex interrelationships between principles, strategies and tactics of TANs, as several scholars have begun to do in recent years (e.g. Avant et al., 2010; Schmitz and Mitchell, 2014) as well as how internal features of TANs like issue profiles, network structures, resources, and governance –​all of which may in turn be shaped by exogenous factors –​shape decisions about whether or how a campaign is to continue (Wong, 2014). Such a view can also shed light on the subtle but important ways in which TANs can serve their own aims by operating within the bounds of existing state preferences, even when they do not play a role in setting those preferences. Of course, such circumstances are special and limited in China, as one might expect. From a practical standpoint, operating in China usually means recognizing the limits of what is possible, and calibrating one’s expectations accordingly. When and where it happens, electing to compromise and play by the state’s rules is rarely seen as ‘selling out’. Activists tend to view this as making the most out of a tough situation, and a necessary step toward a more desirable if less than perfect result in China, rather than an abandonment of their principles. Most acknowledge the importance of facing honestly the realities of lobbying a government like China’s, even if it means dialing back the rhetoric on issues of central and defining importance. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since in many cases small gains are preferable to none at all, and the world needs doers just as much as it needs martyrs –​maybe more so. Advocacy drift In certain cases, the right combination of state preferences and network incentives produce a slippage of core principles. I call this occurrence ‘advocacy

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10  The advocacy trap drift’. The term bears some resemblance to ‘mission creep’, which generally refers to the gradual expansion or broadening of a project or campaign beyond its original goals. Oftentimes mission creep is linked to institutional dysfunction. The World Bank, for example, has been accused of adding tasks to its mandate to the point that the organization has become unwieldy, and unable to manage its affairs as it would otherwise be able (Einhorn, 2001). Advocacy drift, by contrast, is not about the growth of activists’ agendas or goals. In fact, it can mean just the opposite –​a reversal or abandonment of guiding ideologies, beliefs, or principles such that a TAN may lose the sense of identity that gives structure, meaning, and purpose to a campaign. These circumstances would be extreme, but they are not the only form advocacy drift may take. As I use it here, the term refers to any renegotiation of TAN principles resulting from interaction with the target state. Sometimes advocacy drift results from the co-​optation of activists and their de facto incorporation into the state through partnerships with Chinese agencies at various levels, something that is likely to happen only where there is already significant demand for new policies or programmes connected to TAN agendas. For other TANs, a shift in core principles comes about because of the incommensurability of the campaign’s stated goal with Chinese interests. Incorporation into the state is simply not an option in such cases. Rather, the change in values is a strategic calculation made upon the realization that the campaign’s agenda is certain to fail and compliance with Beijing’s wishes is the best of all possible worlds. Advocacy drift is remarkable not only as the conceptual inverse of the standard activists-​leveraging-​states model of transnational civil society, but because it touches a chord close to the very constitution of advocacy networks. At their most elemental, TANs are idea-​based. They exist in people’s heads and are, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, ‘imagined communities’, sociologically constituted by the shared ethical standards of individuals and groups otherwise separated by enormous geographic, cultural, and experiential divides. Fidelity of purpose rooted in shared values is the presumptive building block of all TANs, operating as a frame that gives meaning and structure to transnational activity and galvanizing a sense of common identity without which campaigns cannot possibly endure let alone effect state behaviour. In this sense, TANs not only promote, monitor, and disseminate norms  –​they are norms. With little more than ideas to link diverse groups of actors at the global level, activists risk losing a sense of identity and purpose. From this standpoint, the moral commitments of TANs are expected to be highly static and resistant to change. Al Gore, former US vice-​president and perhaps the world’s most recognizable climate activist, exemplifies precisely

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma    11 this kind of unwavering devotion to principle. If members of the public are able to recall one detail of his life after public office, it is probably his commitment to the environment. He may or may not succeed in persuading lawmakers to curb carbon emissions, but either way his convictions are clear and he is unlikely to retreat from them. In the same way, the abortion issue has no grey area in the minds of most right-​to-​life advocates. Israel supporters who consider West Bank settlement a matter of holy moral obligation are unlikely to barter that position away. Nelson Mandela did not remain leader and figurehead of the anti-​apartheid movement through a twenty-​seven-​year prison term by being wishy-​washy. The point is that activists are typically defined by their commitment to an idea, and in many cases compromising that idea is unthinkable. Concessions to structuralism are necessary, of course, and successful mobilization always requires the shrewd management of resources. But even the most pragmatic activists typically have a line they refuse to cross, and that serves to remind them of who they are and what they stand for. Advocacy drift therefore cuts to the heart of a pivotal problem in transnational collective action –​the flexibility of moral constitution in response to exogenous shocks. State-​led transnational civil society? The objective of this book is not to criticize the sincerity of activists’ beliefs, but to reassess the agency of non-​state actors in a transnational age, and to highlight the practical limits of what can reasonably be accomplished through issue-​based activism given the profile of certain players on the international scene. For many if not most students of globalization, the end of the Cold War heralded the emergence of a borderless world in which states were increasingly irrelevant and optimism about the universality of global values reigned supreme. Frequently this image of the impotent state came packaged with a view of an ascendant transnational civil society and a focus on how TANs and other non-​state actors shaped the global environment, rather than how that environment changed them. The following chapters cast doubt on the triumphalist tone of so much work on transnational civil society, serving as a reminder that the soft power preferences of states are not to be discounted or trifled with –​soft power which in China’s case is sufficiently strong to get global warming activists to back away from the emissions cap they sought for so long, and the Dalai Lama to cease talk of Tibetan independence. Considering China’s growing influence in the world –​politically, economically, and culturally –​there is a need to shift the conversation back to the way it shapes the rules and mores of global civil society. What does China’s rise portend for the future of international human rights or climate dialogue?

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12  The advocacy trap Contrary to the expectations of many who set out to engage China in the hope of promoting its swift reform, China’s integration in the world community only strengthens its hand in the rule-​making process, placing it in a position to set the terms of global discourse without necessarily compelling it to abide by the rules of others. While the thought of a new superpower untethered from the same logic of appropriateness that guides current global interactions may be disconcerting to some, it is a scenario that deserves careful study. Likewise, the resilience of authoritarianism in China and its patterns of accommodation, co-​optation, incorporation, and repression when dealing with civil society may hold lessons for activists’ elsewhere, as authoritarian regimes appear likely to remain a feature of the global political landscape and because China’s own model of politics is increasingly being emulated by a growing number of China’s partners abroad. For supporters of activists and lobby groups in foreign governments and elsewhere, the central question is no longer whether to engage China, but how to manage expectations. I offer an introductory guide to that end, providing some sense of the tradeoffs and ethical ambiguities that can arise when foreign activists engage China. Considering the difficulties of merely breaking into the domestic policy world as an outsider  –​to say nothing of getting Beijing to change its mind –​would-​be foreign partners should approach China with caution and be prepared to make a few strategic concessions. Activists and their allies around the world need to know who they are dealing with, understand what’s possible, and make a clear-​eyed assessment of the risks. No less important, however, is the reflexive need to understand one’s own bargaining position, and, crucially, the point at which strategic behaviour undermines principle. Grasping this latter point is especially significant because failing to do so can end up posing a conflict of interest for TANs, in some cases even inducing a crisis of collective identity by undermining the very purpose for an organization’s existence. Of course, decisions about where the line is to be drawn or when it has been crossed belong to the individuals and actors within each issue campaign. Among those considered here, no two have faced exactly the same circumstances or incentives, and thus none holds an absolute monopoly on the ‘right way’ to conduct issue advocacy in China. Indeed, a key lesson of this book is that because the choices of some activists may not be interesting or available to all, there are many paths an advocacy campaign can follow. The book cannot and should not be the final word on the subject, but my hope is that it will open a new line of dialogue on the nature of transnational advocacy, one in which states are taken seriously as makers and not merely takers of norms, and in which China’s role in setting the terms of global debate is accorded due respect.

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma    13 Plan of the book The following chapter first introduces a theoretical framework for investigating TANs in China through a stylised exposition of three hypotheses drawn from three discrete paradigmatic traditions. Taking its inspiration from realist/​statist theory, the first of these posits that the reason some states are more open than others to TAN campaigns is because it is in the interests of some states to be open to them. Put another way, state preferences and their ability to execute these preferences shape activists’ prospects. The second hypothesis derives from liberal international relations theory and argues that domestic social preferences compel state actors to adopt policy positions compliant with popular sentiment. Although this scenario is indeed typical of democracies where elites are presumably concerned with their own electability, I argue that domestic social preferences can and do exercise influence in authoritarian regimes as well, including China. The third and final hypothesis is drawn from social constructivist theory and argues that TAN campaigns become influential politically when states are moved to act as a result of the diffusion of norms and social pressure which encourage their adoption. On this account, states may be socialized to norms of acceptable or unacceptable behaviour, which serve as signifiers of belonging to a community of norm-​ compliant actors. The second half of chapter one then distils from each of these paradigmatic traditions a set of variables which are operationalized throughout the rest of the book. The realist family covers explanatory factors related to stateness and state capacity, including international-​level considerations such as linkage to allied foreign governments and interstate bodies, as well as domestic institutional characteristics overlapping with what social movement theorists refer to as political opportunity structures. Such factors include a state’s degree of decentralization, openness to new social actors and the availability of allies in state offices, and the capacity of a government to repress collective mobilizations. Regime type, held constant within this study by virtue of the empirical focus on China, is part and parcel of the second family of variables, which belong to the liberal or social-​preferences based family of variables. Also included in this category are the internal characteristics of TANs themselves, or what have traditionally been the foremost considerations of ‘resource mobilization’ theorists. These include the size of a TAN and the number of organizations within it, as well as the relative flatness or stratification of internal hierarchies, leadership styles, and professional qualities or skills which enable a TAN to take advantage of the resources at its disposal, whether these are found within or outside of the target state. Variables fitting within the constructivist or norm-​based family of factors include such ideational considerations as the relevance of different issue profiles, a campaign’s

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14  The advocacy trap degree of ‘fit’ with a target’s cultural context, and the ease with which an issue might be grafted onto a pre-​existing and well-​subscribed set of moral standards. This set of explanatory variables provides a structural framework for the analytic narratives that comprise chapters two, three, and four. Chapter two explores a pair of what I call ‘natural cases’ –​the campaigns around justice for Falun Gong and the strengthening of IPRs in China. I call them ‘natural’ cases because despite the stark differences in the reaction to each from Beijing –​or, more properly, the lack of a reaction in the instance of Falun Gong –​both exhibit an approximately similar functional form, and are models of ‘critical causality’. One was welcomed by the Chinese authorities and one was not, but neither case displays evidence of altering its core mission or message, or of sustained collaboration with the Chinese authorities to solve a common problem. The IPR campaign did of course share an objective with Chinese central state, but to date has not become a partner in the development of new or innovative solutions in the manner that other campaign actors explored in the book have. Chapter three traces the campaign around HIV/​AIDS treatment, and the effort to abolish capital punishment in China. As with the cases explored in chapter two, these campaigns met with very different results. During the 1990s, the mounting HIV crisis, particularly in southern China, and the state’s implication in major public health scandals led to a growing realization among Chinese policy-​makers that it would need to abandon its long-​time view that HIV/​AIDS sufferers were victims of their own moral depravity and take action against the disease. These factors, coupled with a change in regime leadership and a shift towards policies based on scientific evidence rather than socialist ideology, created an opportunity for medical experts, scientists, and NGOs operating within and among international organs to shape official policy through provision of reliable, in-​demand information. Thus, the HIV/​AIDS campaign stands as an instance of ‘intervening’ or ‘intercessory’ causality, having learned to work effectively with China’s own government. The inclusion of the campaign to eliminate the death penalty underscores the importance of care in assigning causal attribution to transnational activists when China adopts a new policy seemingly in line with TAN objectives. In this case, the regime undertook a calculated and purposeful reduction in the number of executions. Seeking to balance leniency and severity in criminal punishment, it would apply the death penalty sparingly and less arbitrarily than it had in the past, while retaining the practice for use against society’s worst offenders. This reduction, however, had little to do with transnational human rights advocacy and everything to do with the desires of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders to strengthen legitimacy

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Introduction: the superpower’s dilemma   15 by simultaneously enhancing the rule of law and maintaining order through its tough-​on-​crime stance. Both of the narratives sketched in chapter four provide evidence of a third, reverse causal process at work in which state preferences influenced the inner working of TANs, not the other way around. In the campaign for Tibetan independence, Chinese intransigence on the matter of national sovereignty for Tibet over several decades produced a split within the TAN, with some factions espousing the use of any means necessary to secure Tibetan independence, while others continued to favour a strategy of passive resistance to what they view as the unlawful Chinese occupation of their homeland. With no hope for the achievement of his long-​time objective, the Dalai Lama himself has publicly advocated for greater recognition of Tibetans in a more inclusive, multinational China, rather than self-​governance through sovereign statehood. The process of advocacy drift happened another way in the campaign for climate change mitigation, however. In that instance, environmental advocates recognized China’s reluctance to accept emissions trading and backed away from the objective, seeing an opportunity to have a positive impact on the country’s greenhouse gas emissions via another path. Instead of waging a costly and unwinnable war of ideas against the state, climate scientists, foundations, and NGOs became partners in the state’s own green growth strategy, teaming up with government agencies and think tanks to help offset the ecological impacts of China’s rapid development. Chapter five synthesizes the case studies in order to develop a new theory of transnational advocacy. The chapter consists of two parts. Returning to the families of variables introduced in chapter one, the first part explores some potential strategies for activists in China arising from realist or state-​based factors (including linkages to other states and interstate bodies), liberal or society-​centred factors such as a network’s own mobilizing structures, and ideational or issue characteristics. As expected, an issue’s congruence with national interests is the single most important determinant of TAN effectiveness in China. This section develops the argument that TANs can be effective when a legitimacy-​seeking state deems the adoption of new policy positions in a given issue area to be critical for the preservation of its own moral authority and power monopoly. The key to working more effectively in China, therefore, is to recognize the source of Party legitimacy and the connectedness of an issue to it. The second portion of the chapter is then given over to elaborating the theory of ‘advocacy drift’, and includes explanations for its occurrence and non-​ occurrence. While my analysis is obviously confined to the experience of advocacy campaigns in China, this theory may well be relevant to understandings of TANs more broadly, given the tradeoffs between pragmatism

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16  The advocacy trap and principles that all TANs face, and the apparent resurgence of authoritarian governance in a globally interconnected world. In my conclusion, I  suggest that those wishing to approach China recognize and take seriously the Chinese power to shape global issues and campaigns in support of them. This advice applies both to TANs and to the governments that sometimes participate in campaigns, or seek relationships with China of their own. Of course, the fact that TANs are subject to state interests does not mean that they are entirely ineffectual, nor does it mean that the Chinese state is invulnerable or obtuse. Indeed, the book shows how some TANs work within and for the state in order to maximize their effectiveness, and also how the state is especially receptive to external input when its interests are served. Still, China’s importance on the world stage is now such that it cannot be ignored by activists. With no choice but to engage this rising world power, activists and those that support them should be mindful of the realities and uncertainties of that engagement, and set their expectations accordingly.

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1

Mechanisms of persuasion: when and how are advocacy campaigns effective?

A

t their most elemental, transnational networks are norm-​based. Shared values or principles are the glue that holds them together (Keck and Sikkink, 1998:  3). As Peter Katzenstein explains, ‘norms operate like rules that define the identity of an actor, thus having “constitutive effects” that specify what actions will cause relevant others to recognize a particular identity’ (Katzenstein, 1996: 5). Issue-​based campaigns may serve as mechanisms of persuasion, but it is collective commitment to an idea that makes them what they are, providing the grounding for campaigns to be sustainable and effective (Gamson, 1991: 28). Owing to the fundamentally principled nature of advocacy networks, attempts to understand their role and impact in world politics have unfailingly invoked constructivist theory. For those wishing to explain how norms originate and spread –​to account for the existence of TANs –​this makes a great deal of sense. What else besides common values compels strangers from different backgrounds and points of origin to mobilize on behalf of others? Constructivism gets us to the bottom of why people care about those whom they have never met far better than any of its rivals. Even the most rationalist treatments of transnational civil society emphasize the currency of their moral message as the utility TANs most want to maximize. The theoretical discussion that takes place in this chapter begins from this assumption, and regards the explanation of activism that unfolds throughout the remainder of this book as ‘constructivist’ in so far as it is concerned with understanding how and when norms matter, and more importantly whose norms exercise causal influence in the conduct and results of transnational advocacy. Yet scholarly inquiries into the behaviour and effectiveness of TANs under an exclusively constructivist banner poses inherent challenges too. For one thing, constructivism as an approach to questions in international

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18  The advocacy trap politics covers a huge amount of ground, and scholarly opinion varies on how and how much structural variables matter in the dissemination of norms and states’ compliance with them (Adler, 1997; Price and Reus-​Smit, 1998). Moreover, the common framing of the question of how TANs influence states sets up the former as the primary causal agent and protagonist in our story, while the latter is relegated to the status of passive resistor without a significant role in the crafting or execution of advocacy campaigns. Indeed, approaches emphasizing the constituent role of other actors in the advocacy process, especially states, have taken a perennial backseat, leaving the question of whose norms are most influential unasked and unanswered. To correct for this problem and take a full account of the broad range of factors affecting TAN campaigns in China, this chapter adopts a wide-​angle lens, culling factors pertinent to the results and processes of issue advocacy from among three paradigmatic families  –​state preference-​oriented, social preference-​oriented, and norms-​based. Readers having an international relations background will recognize these as realism, liberalism, and constructivism respectively, albeit stylized forms of each that draw from and make connections with comparative politics, reflecting the multidisciplinary approach of the book as a whole. The first half of the chapter is devoted to an exploration of each one, and articulates from the perspective of each a generalized hypothesis about when and why TAN campaigns are likely to be influential. For instance, the state-​preference oriented paradigm understands the effectiveness of TAN campaigns primarily as a function of state capacity –​or the ability to convert preferences to authoritative actions –​while the social-​preference oriented hypothesis views the results of activism as mediated heavily by institutional types and configurations. By contrast, the third, norms-​based paradigm posits that TAN effectiveness (or the lack of it) stems from shifting identities brought on by socialization to the mores and practices of a larger whole, or a sense of belonging to a community defined by common adherence to certain values. My discussion of each of these paradigms in turn is accompanied by remarks on how each might be expected to play out in the Chinese context, given what we know about its level of capacity, its authoritarian structure, and its posture in relation to norms of the international community. The second half of the chapter distils from each of the three paradigms clusters of causal factors from across the fields of political science, international relations, and sociology. This is done in order to reflect the fact that each paradigm is itself a synthesized approach containing many distinct but related variables at play in the unfolding of transnational advocacy campaigns in China. One of the challenges of weaving together an explanatory framework from different intellectual traditions is that it invites disagreement about which paradigm or category of causal factors a given variable properly

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Mechanisms of persuasion   19 belongs to, and the relative importance of different variables or categories in the final analysis. My position here stems from a belief that all of the causal factors explicated throughout this chapter are potentially relevant (at least in principle), and that the need for a fully specified causal model trumps strict adherence to disciplinary boundaries. Much is done for convenience in my sorting and categorization of variables from across a breadth of salient literatures. For example, my discussion of realist/​state-​centred factors includes not only characteristics of the target state environment related to capacity –​such as its degree of centralization, openness to new actors, the absence or availability of domestic allies and supporters, and the target state’s ability to repress or accommodate collective mobilization –​but also international-​level considerations such as the linkage of a TAN to powerful foreign governments –​financially, rhetorically, or otherwise  –​and support for a TAN within interstate organizations and treaties. Similarly, my discussion of liberal/​society-​centred causal factors takes account not only of institutional type, which introduces a range of enabling or constraining conditions for TANs and to some degree intersects with target state capacities, but also characteristics of the transnational political environment and the internal attributes of TANs themselves. So conceived, the liberal/​society-​centred category of explanation fuses elements of the political opportunity structures and resource mobilization theories of social movement behaviour. The final category of explanations derives from identity-​based theories of collective mobilization and considers the role of ideational or cultural factors in TAN effectiveness. Such factors include the characteristics of issues themselves, such as their relative malleability or nebulousness, the ability of some issues to resonate within a given cultural context while others do not (also known as the ‘cultural match’ hypothesis), and the ease with which an issue can be grafted onto an existing norm or moral standard with some pre-​established level of support. To reiterate, it is expected that each of the factors explored in this chapter are relevant for understanding TAN campaigns in China, though they probably do not matter equally in all cases or all of the time. The main question is therefore whether some are more consistently important than others across different campaigns in China, and the effects they exert on how different campaigns unfold.

Thinking about TAN effectiveness: three hypotheses The realist/​state-​centred hypothesis State power has seldom been taken as seriously as is warranted in discussions about transnational civil society. This is largely because of the view of some observers that the gains of transnational actors have come at the expense of

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20  The advocacy trap states and state-​based approaches. Many see the rise of transnational civil society as a direct result of the declining significance of states in a global age (Strange, 1996). This sentiment applied to states in general, which seemed less and less consequential after the Cold War, and increasingly shared the international stage with multinational corporations and other types of non-​state actors. Consequently, successful interventions by transnational forces into domestic politics have most often been posed as a rebuttal to the state-​centric realist and, to a lesser degree, state-​oriented institutionalist approaches in international relations (Katzenstein et al., 1998; Keohane, 1989; Waltz, 1979). If, on this understanding, state retrenchment explains the rise of transnational activism, then relative capabilities are central to problematizing its domestic impacts. The leverage exerted by transnational civil society over states is indeed a marvel considering the material advantages the latter have at their disposal and their ability to deploy these in the form of coercive force. By definition, TANs are disinclined towards the use of hard power tactics, and even the most resourceful should, in theory, be no match for state power when it is defined in these terms. Indeed, from a realist or state-​centred perspective, the material advantages of states should mean that activist campaigns are successful when and where states want them to be. The reason some states might be more open to TANs is because it is in the interests of such states to be open to them. Beyond the question of whether it is in the interest of a state to acquiesce to or appease activists, there is an equally important issue of state capacity. Is the target state sufficiently strong to resist the entreaties of activists? Does it possess the means to convert its preferences, whatever these might be, to authoritative actions (or, in some instances, inaction). Preferences form the core of the realist/​statist explanation, but capacity is needed to back these interests up, and obviously, not all states are equal on this account. Some are more capable than others of directing influences from within and without and converting their preferences to authoritative actions. In general, the stronger the state, the more autonomous and insular it is, and the more it is able to execute its preferences relatively free from external interference. Weak states, on the other hand, are usually more permeable but not necessarily more likely to yield the kinds of results activists hope for. As Jeffrey Haynes explains, ‘easy access for external actors does not necessarily translate into significant leverage on state policies. This is because while [foreign activists] may readily penetrate countries with fragile political institutions, they may find that when they gain access there is little institutionally to work with and hence help achieve their goals’ (Haynes, 2005: 97). Now more open than ever before to external actors but with seemingly limitless capacity to repress civil society actors, China represents perhaps the hardest of all possible tests for foreign activists. According to figures tabled at

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Mechanisms of persuasion   21 the 2011 session of the National People’s Congress, China spends 624.4 billion RMB (about 95 billion USD) annually on domestic security and surveillance, even more than it allocates for military expenditures. A major portion of these funds is devoted to developing some of the world’s most advanced internet filtering technology, according to Reporters Sans Frontières (2006). The capabilities of the central government have scarcely ever been in dispute. Many argue that the decentralization of political authority in the post-​Mao era has strengthened, not weakened, the local state and improved governance capacity at the sub-​provincial level (Huang, 1996; Tsai, 2007). Even in situations where the impulse for repression is not high, Chinese authorities show remarkable skill in co-​opting social forces and redeploying them in the state’s service, a strategy that has served the CCP well in its endeavour to strengthen its capacity to govern (Dickson, 2000–​2001; Wright, 2010). The liberal/​society-​oriented hypothesis A second explanation for effective advocacy grants primacy to the constraining effects of social preferences on state decision-​making. Unlike the realist perspective, which emphasizes the relative capabilities of state and social forces, this approach stresses how competition among subnational actors mitigates the formation and execution of national preferences (Moravcsik, 1997). Institutional types, not merely their strength, are the salient factor affecting campaign outcomes within this framework, since different institutional types present differing incentives for elites, individuals, or groups to engage in rent-​seeking, and provide important clues about whose preferences get voiced, when, and why. In general, the more representative and contestable those institutions are, the stronger the possibilities for advocates to penetrate and influence the target state. Where they succeed in doing so, it is because states are compelled by social interests exercised through enabling structural and legal channels to adopt new policy positions. In principle, such institutions as legislatures can serve this function, as can the empowerment of grassroots organizations through legal frameworks that enable civil society or encourage local policy experimentation, for example through a measure of decentralization or administrative autonomy. The tricky part is that the presence or absence of enabling institutional features or arrangements does not always overlap perfectly with regime type (Boix and Svolik, 2013; Gandhi, 2008; Wright, 2010). This is a point worth remembering when exploring what activists can expect to encounter in the Chinese context, a subject to which I will return momentarily. For the moment, however, there are some general patterns in the way in which distinct regime types shape TAN campaigns and their outcomes.

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22  The advocacy trap By and large, democratic states make for easier targets of advocacy campaigns. This should not be surprising –​democracies are supposed to be more open and accessible, providing citizens with genuine opportunities to form opinions and participate in political decision-​making by means of routinized institutional points of entry (Dahl, 1972; Diamond, 1999; Schmitter and Karl, 1996). Strong democracies are fully capable of deflecting those attempts at advocacy they perceive as being at odds with their own interests, but the presence of an institutional and legal framework that makes participation possible and protects civil society groups against overt state supervision and control makes these regimes more permeable than those lacking this feature. Non-​democracies typically display the inverse characteristic, operating with a greater degree of autonomy from social actors. As a result, authoritarian regimes are relatively insular and invulnerable, capable of isolating themselves from external influences, both foreign and domestic. Self-​segregation from popular mobilization is a common feature of virtually all non-​democracies, regardless of their institutional or regional sub-​type. However, non-​democracies do vary in their degree of closure, just as democracies do in their openness. In the most extreme cases autocrats exercise such complete control and authority over society and are so little concerned with popular opinion that they treat the public, in Max Weber’s famous words, as ‘any ordinary object of possession’ (Weber, 1947: 347). As the most frequently occurring and widely dispersed of all authoritarianisms, communist regimes historically comprise a notable sub-​variant of this category. Leninist party-​states in almost every corner of the world combined a total absence of rival political parties with extreme forms of state-​mandated mobilization to stoke revolutionary fervour and enforce ideological conformity. Their goal was not merely to control social organizations, but to eliminate their autonomy altogether by remaking society in the state’s image. By reconstituting all of society as an instrument of state policy, proletarian dictatorships were able to maintain the highest levels of control over their citizens. Further, the export of Lenin’s particular emphasis on the imperialistic nature of capitalism promoted a deep hostility and mistrust towards foreign powers and led to the adoption of self-​reliance in many socialist countries, effectively shutting them off from threats of encroachment by transnational forces. Explanations of effective advocacy based on political legitimacy comprise an alternate version of the liberal/​society-​oriented hypothesis. The central premise of this explanation is that the political preferences of state leaders derive from their responsiveness to social expectations and demands when these are filtered through representative institutions. Legitimacy refers to the rightful exercise of power (Gilley, 2009). It affects norm uptake when it operates as part of a feedback loop where institutions generate performance

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Mechanisms of persuasion   23 outputs which are then subject to popular assessment, resulting either in continuation of the status quo or the modification of outputs to popular satisfaction. The wider the gap between expectations and outputs, the stronger public pressure for norm compliance is likely to be. Because lack of legitimacy has on occasion proved to be a source of political instability and a cause of regime collapse, authoritarian regimes may be just as sensitive to changing social preferences as democracies, and in some cases more so. Whereas democratic governments win or lose the consent of citizens by regularly putting themselves to the test at the ballot box, legitimacy-​seeking authoritarian regimes tend to view experimentation with representative institutions as good policy –​a sound strategic choice made for their long-​term political benefit. By initiating new forms of public consultation, authoritarian states retain a measure of control over their own destiny and provide a release valve for the venting of pressure for rapid reform from below. So how can we expect institutions to shape TAN campaigns in China? The National People’s Congress, and legislatures in China more broadly, retain their rubber-​stamp character (Saich, 2015). However, China also has a record of experimentation with alternate forms of popular participation, including not just elections at the sub-​county level, but more innovative governance tools such as deliberative polling (Fishkin et  al., 2010). Civil society groups are likewise a well-​established feature of China’s political system. In 2004, the World Bank estimated that there were some 133,000 officially registered domestic Chinese NGOs (fei zhengfu zuzhi) nationwide (World Bank, 2004). Less than a decade later, China’s own Ministry of Civil Affairs (MOCA) put the figure at more than 500,000 (China Daily, 2012a). There is a strong temptation to believe this increase reflects genuine development of the legal-​institutional space for NGOs in China, and a shift in the classic state–​society power imbalance. Such a view would be mistaken. Old-​time Leninist attitudes towards autonomous social organizations have proven extremely difficult to shake, and state penetration of NGOs remains high. There is even an unofficial preference for the term ‘non-​profit organization’ (NPO, fei yingli zuzhi) over NGO, as the latter translates roughly to ‘anti-​government organization’ in the Chinese context. Since 1989, official policy –​as set by the Bureau of Management of NGOs (minjian zuzhi guanliju), which is housed within MOCA –​has required the registration of all NGOs in China, a process that must be repeated periodically and requires sponsorship from a state body that will oversee the group’s political, social, economic, or cultural activities. NGOs having more than three CCP members on their membership lists must also establish a ‘Party branch’ to ensure its work is properly supervised, in accordance with a document issued jointly by MOCA and the CCP’s

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24  The advocacy trap Central Bureau in 1998. One mainland study found that a majority of NGOs were in fact government-​owned by the late 1990s (Li, 1998: 264–​267). Occasional amendments to this management system have been made over the years, making it easier than it used to be for foreign NGOs to register and make contact with local organizations. In April 2013 oversight of the registration process passed from MOCA to provincial Civil Affairs Bureaus, meaning that international NGOs wishing to work in China no longer needed to make contact directly with MOCA. The announcement was part of a package of new regulations meant to make the day-​to-​day operations of NGOs easier, and included increased government funding for the set-​up of local partner organizations and special tax status for foreign and domestic groups. In some cases, local Civil Affairs Bureaus have trialled the registration of some of the smaller NGOs without a state sponsor. Additionally, international and domestic NGOs can now place recruitment ads on television and radio, something that was previously impossible. In the past, such changes came from an expressed desire to promote efficiency and rein-​in destructive competition among groups but are ultimately state-​serving. More than twelve million people are now employed in China’s third sector, according to Civil Affairs Minister Li Liguo. In Yunnan alone, partnerships of foreign and domestic NGOs run some 267 charitable programmes (China Daily, 2013). Thus while NGOs are reliant on the state for institutional support, the state has come to depend on civil society groups for the delivery of social services previously handled by government agencies, effectively making NGOs in China an arm of the state itself responsible for policy execution. For this reason, co-​dependence and corporatism remain accurate descriptors of China’s civil society (Spires, 2011; Teets, 2013). To put it simply, the institutional space for NGOs in China is unpredictable and its future uncertain. As of this writing, China is currently undergoing sweeping changes to the way it deals with NGOs, with seemingly contradictory implications. A  new Charity Law was enacted early in 2016 that is designed to encourage a culture of philanthropic giving that could make Chinese foundations and social organizations less dependent on foreign resources and more self-​sufficient. On the other hand, the new Overseas NGO Law, passed almost concurrently with the Charity Law, imposes fresh restrictions on fundraising and enables the state to cancel the registration of organizations found to be disseminating ‘harmful information that endangers state security or damages the national interest’. What is especially curious about all of this is that activities that appear to international spectators to be closing the space for free association and expression have done little to damage the CCP in the minds of Chinese people. Indeed, a range of studies suggest that Party legitimacy is quite

25

Mechanisms of persuasion   25 healthy, at least for the moment (Gilley, 2009; Gilley and Holbig, 2009). This is not to say that the CCP rule in the post-​Tiananmen era has been entirely rosy  –​far from it. But as has been well documented, the Party has been hard at work reinventing itself and its policies in order to shore up popular legitimacy and keep public discontent from bubbling over in another Tiananmen-​style challenge to authority (Dickson, 2016; Gries and Rosen, 2004). A  record of economic growth and the creation of a new entrepreneurial class, appeals to nationalism, and a more general effort to effect good public relations through a retooling of ideology all figure prominently in the CCP’s relegitimation strategy. At present, there is every indication that this strategy is working. Theoretically, this should mean that there is at least some scope for popular sentiment to find its way into state decision-​making. The social constructivist/​identification hypothesis Both the realist and liberal brands of explanation understand state and social preferences as given objectively, and thus as relatively fixed and suited to predicting the outcome of TAN campaigns to influence domestic policy. By contrast, constructivism provides insight into the origins of those preferences and their propensity to change through interactive processes of norm diffusion and socialization. Because the preferences and identities of relevant actors are prone to shift over time, this type of explanation makes no ex ante predictions about whose preferences are likely to prevail. Instead, it posits that TANs become politically influential when state preferences are altered via the diffusion of norms and values about acceptable behaviour. At its core, this hypothesis treats state preferences as a product of their own self-​reflection –​how they behave is a function of the way they perceive and position themselves in relation to others (Wendt, 1992). Behaviours are altered when states are incentivized to change the way they think about themselves and who they consider themselves to be. Norms are identity signifiers in this process, their observance being a kind of ‘shibboleth’ that provides benchmark criteria for belonging. For adherents of this type of explanation, it is the threat of exclusion, of existing outside the boundaries of acceptability and respectability, that offers the most powerful way to socialize outsiders to broadly subscribed moral codes. When the outsiders in question are states, the mores of international society play a crucial role in helping states to determine what they want (Finnemore, 1996). As Hedley Bull once put it: A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form

26

26  The advocacy trap a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the workings of common institutions. (1977: 13) The process of shaping national interests normally happens in two ways. States may either adapt their behaviour to the norms of their environment when the costs or benefits associated with norm compliance have changed, or they may learn about the benefits of compliance from those who have already adopted such norms through participation in international society (Elkins and Simmons, 2005; Simmons and Elkins, 2004). Either way, the crystallization of shared sentiments into institutions and rules is vital since norms alone are seldom enough to effect change on their own but become empowered politically only when they attach themselves to structures of conveyance and compulsion (Risse-​Kappen, 1994). This perspective closely mirrors that of the World Polity School in international sociology, which emphasizes the importance of cultural or institutional frames beyond the state, constituted initially by shared beliefs but which become embedded in social organization and crystallize as rule systems applying a variety of carrots and sticks for norm-​resistant states to adopt new forms of behaviour.1 However, as a fundamentally interactive and subjective process, socialization allows for agents to shape the structures of global government, not just the other way around. Norm creation is a two-​way street, one that permits new and powerful hegemonic actors to steer or skew the tone of international discourse and shape advocacy agendas. Much debate has taken place over the question of China as either a status quo or revisionist power, and the extent to which it is a taker or maker of norms in international politics (Chan, 2006; Johnston, 2008). For instance, it is sometimes argued that because it was a relative latecomer to global governance negotiations, and was therefore not really a party to creating the rules of the game, its acceptance of those rules and of international norms is relatively weak (Saich, 2007: 307). Yet China’s geopolitical and economic influence ensures that it is increasingly in a position to set the terms of global debate and chart the course of development within global institutions. Indeed, the key question, as Daniel Lynch has asked, is ‘whether global culture is actually powerful enough to overcome the commitment of an authoritarian super state such as China to “world plurality” ’ (Lynch, 2006:  9). The point is not simply that China is strong and resistant to the values established and touted by international and transnational civil society, but that, increasingly, China’s norms are constitutive global norms. To allege that China will soon ‘rule the world’ is to engage in hyperbole, but its leverage in diplomatic and commercial affairs endows it with a number of bargaining chips unprecedented in its history (Shambaugh,

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Mechanisms of persuasion   27 2013). Talk of China as a model for emulation by other countries, rare a generation ago, has become a mainstay in several fields of scholarly discourse (Naughton, 2010; Zhao, 2017). At the very least, China’s norms may reach a point closer to parity with Western norms in global discourse as its geopolitical influence grows, opening up the potential for China to remake the moral fibre underpinning TAN campaigns. Variable clusters in TAN effectiveness Realist/​state-​centred factors As principled yet goal-​driven actors, TANs seek allegiances with resourceful partners in order to gain leverage over their targets. Agencies of allied national or subnational governments often appear to be some of the best friends a campaign can have, providing the exposure and added material benefits necessary to survival in an increasingly crowded global marketplace of ideas and causes. Such support may be financial, organizational, legal, technological, or rhetorical, none of which are necessarily less costly in the long run than the others. Historically, states capable of exerting the most influence globally have been the biggest supporters of international prohibition regimes, since they are in the strongest position to create and enforce value systems congruent with their interests worldwide (Smith and Wiest, 2005: 622–​623). In practice, this notion of ‘might makes right’ (or rather ‘might for right’) has meant that the United States and western European powers made the most attractive allies for TANs. In theory at least, their added clout makes these states in particular especially valuable as consciousness raisers who assist in placing issues before the global public, empower and mobilize domestic and transnational constituents, and create pressure for norm compliance from both above and below through enhanced monitoring practices. Yet when it comes to influencing the policies of a particular government, linkages to foreign governments –​even powerful hegemons –​have a way of constraining effective advocacy just as easily as they enable it. The resources of superpowers may be useful for understanding how campaigns that enjoy their support originate, endure, and gain traction around the world, but do not always translate into enforceable changes on the ground. This challenge arises in part from the perception that transnational activism is a form of cultural imperialism reflecting the values of the powerful, and that these values are at odds with local cultural norms (Bell and Carens, 2004; Hafner-​Burton, 2008). Indeed, state–​TAN relationships that prove a boon in some contexts are a bane in others. US backing is apt to bring accusations that activists are little more than mouthpieces for the wealthy West rather than concrete policy

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28  The advocacy trap changers in many developing world situations. Opportunities for TANs to gain influence domestically are affected by the status, reputation, and perceived motivations of partnering governments, just as target states may themselves be concerned with issues of image, prestige, and perception. China has its biases in this regard, just like any other state. For example, whatever other advantages it may bring, the sheer symbolism of support from the Taiwanese government imposes major barriers for NGOs and activists looking to make inroads on the Chinese mainland where that backing is considered an affront on the basis of Taiwan’s constitutional status under Chinese law (Chen, 2001: 613–​614). A similar logic applies to influence drawn from the support of international institutions. Created by states for the assertion and pursuit of their interests, these institutions can limit or enable opportunities for advocacy campaigns. As with third-​party state linkages, the support given by intergovernmental bodies may be material or strictly semantic, and is most often useful for raising issue profiles, enhancing visibility, and lending credibility to causes that might otherwise receive little notice. Where issues are credible and persistent enough to become institutionalized, however, connections within international organizations can encourage domestic-​level policy shifts and their enforcement by condemning or imposing sanction on the non-​ compliant, often by pointing out their obligations as members and signatories to international agreements. For example, Chinese ratification of both the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has helped to strengthen and legitimize independent human rights work in China, allowing NGOs to maintain pressure on the government to improve its human rights record, and occasionally persuade Beijing to accept international monitoring (He, 1997: 88). A related grouping of variables deals with characteristics of the target environment. Based on relational capabilities in the domestic rather than systemic sense, students of contentious politics will recognize it as the political opportunity structures framework, which affects the timing and result of transnational advocacy by altering incentives for social actors who lack resources on their own (Tarrow, 2011: 33). Here, I use the term to describe four aspects of domestic institutional strength, or infrastructural capacity, which facilitate mobilization in some cases and constrain it in others. First, more centralization usually means less access for TANs. The greater the degree of control over the periphery by the centre, the more restricted opportunities for external influence are likely to be. In contrast, relatively decentralized political systems are composed of semi-​independent power centres. This more fragmentary picture of the state brings the many venues of state–​society interaction into sharper relief, multiplying the number of

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Mechanisms of persuasion   29 enclaves and access points in which foreign activists may gain a foothold. The more autonomous and numerous subnational or local power bases are, and the more widely distributed they are across various levels of state authority, the stronger the opportunities for successful interventions by transnational activists, since the formation of local interests may lead portions of a state to respond quite differently than others to the claims of foreign groups, generating uneven opportunities for activism in different places and at different times. In the Chinese context, the manner in which this mechanism is supposed to function is open to debate. The prevailing wisdom is that China represents a model of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’, having been greatly decentralized by a succession of political leaders since Mao. The most recent iteration of this idea points to a growing number of policy entrepreneurs within the political system, a feature that ought to imply new initiatives could come from any number of potential sources and that sub-​cabinet policy wonks are free to engage in constructive debate without approval from the centre (Mertha, 2009). A similar claim is made by the ‘policy diffusion’ literature of recent years, which highlights the incidence of local-​level policy experimentation, entrepreneurship and the ‘scaling-​up’ or transplantation of good ideas to levels and localities beyond the point of their inception (Heilmann and Perry, 2011; Teets and Hurst, 2014). Second, effective advocacy depends upon a target’s openness to new actors, which tends to ebb and flow with the timing of large-​scale political events. When Deng Xiaoping launched China’s programme of reform and opening up in 1978, a fresh wave of foreign NGOs were suddenly able to navigate state bureaucracies in ways they never had before. Eleven years later, faced with mounting pressure for democratization, the collapse of communism around the world, and the possibility of their own imminent demise, members of the same administration slammed the door on foreign political activists, leaving it shut until the crisis passed. This pattern has repeated itself time and again in the twenty-​five years that have elapsed since the Tiananmen massacre, with special events and dates providing the impetus for closures and tightened security. The lead-​up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics gained international attention for the clampdown on NGO and social movement activity, and the difficulties faced by foreign journalists investigating the story. On 3 June 2014, the day before the silver anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, the candle emoticon used to mark important dates mysteriously disappeared from Weibo, the Chinese version of Facebook, in a subtle reminder of the regime’s sensitivity to the memorializing of events it would rather were forgotten. Even under the best of circumstances, gaining access for the first time is a significant hurdle for newcomers who lack the credibility and know-​how

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30  The advocacy trap that comes from prior engagement. A third characteristic, the availability of allies or supporters within the target state able to assist activists in accessing the appropriate channels and political players, can provide a leg up. Direct links to governmental power are especially useful. Remarking on his proposals for local deliberative democracy experiments in China, one Australia-​based scholar-​activist attributed their acceptance as the product of ‘trusting personal relationships, built over many years’ with CCP officials at various levels (Confidential Interview, 2009a). One former representative of a US-​based think tank supporting anti-​corruption work in rural village governments admitted that his organization’s access was a direct result of his having been a college roommate of someone at the supervising government agency, the CCP’s Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (Confidential Interview, 2009b). All the guanxi in the world is useless unless those within the state are actually in a position to provide the necessary help and both they and their superiors are sufficiently motivated. This explains why eager-​ to-​ please connections sometimes materialize out of nowhere, especially in cases where key target officials become concerned for their reputation or that of their unit, agency, or country, and view engagement with foreign groups as a means to an end. Fourth, the results of advocacy are dependent upon the extent to which a state is able to repress or accommodate collective claim-​making. All regimes sometimes seek to silence social groups viewed as potentially embarrassing to the political leadership or at odds with their interests, though their methods of doing so are subject to wide systematic variation. Normally, opportunities for mobilization wax and wane with perceived threats of state repression, its nature, and its scale. As the threat level goes up, windows of opportunity close. When threats recede, claims against the state tend to rise.2 For activists in China, the difficulty lies in knowing when threats are most likely to arise. Getting this right is trickier than it sounds in a state where information is tightly controlled and often inaccessible, and where the capriciousness of official preferences makes mobilization risky. And of course, few are willing to tempt fate by encouraging a show of state strength. Liberal/​society-​based factors A further aspect of the target environment, institutional type, cuts across state capacities to influence domestic permeability and resistance to transnational civil society. States in general may be democratic and insular (Japan), democratic and open (Australia), authoritarian and insular (Iran) or authoritarian and open (Cambodia) (Tilly, 2006: 27; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007: 54–​56). Types of domestic institutions matter because they affect the repertoires of mobilization

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Mechanisms of persuasion   31 available to activists during the cycle of a campaign, including the nature of political representation and competition among groups and interests. Regime types are an especially important signifier of the ability of TANs to mobilize grassroots constituencies. This ability is generally more limited in authoritarian settings, where state penetration of domestic groups is higher and the line separating the two is fuzzier. In their seminal book, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink describe the ‘boomerang’ pattern of transnational activism, in which civil society actors within the target state reach out to sympathetic allies abroad, calling attention to their issue and bringing the resources of transnational civil society to bear on their struggles at home (Keck and Sikkink, 1998:  12–​13). While domestic social actors can be and often are an invaluable source of knowledge and connections for foreign activists, they are neither a prerequisite for the formation of a campaign nor a reliable indicator of its influence. True to the overarching aim of this book, the boomerang pattern is just one of many possible forms of transnational mobilization and is not a basic property of all advocacy networks. Beyond domestic structures, elements of the transnational environment may endow resources or confer opportunities beneficial to TAN campaigns. For example, some social movement theorists talk of a ‘transnational public sphere’ from which material benefits may be drawn and applied to organizational challenges or political struggles almost anywhere in the world (Guidry et al., 2000: 7). Seen this way, globalization itself is a political opportunity structure that can amplify the claims of even very isolated national social movements and activists, giving them wider visibility than would otherwise be possible, and generating new prospects for them to connect with like-​ minded transnational allies and challenge nation-​state authorities. The internet has been an invaluable tool for making these connections. Participants in the Occupy movement have an easy advantage, moving into crowded urban spaces in the developed world with no shortage of TV cameras. But chances are the Zapatista rebels, being impoverished farmers from rural Mexico, many of them illiterate, could never have captured the world’s attention without an online presence. For all the talk of digital revolution, access to the requisite communications technology remains a problem for many would-​be transnational advocates around the world. It is no accident that the vast majority of global advocates come from developed Western democracies, which can not only bear the financial burden of a modern communications infrastructure, but offer the freedom for activists to transmit what they like (Milner, 2006). The same is not always true of authoritarian states, including China, where internet penetration in much of the countryside is sparse and where the central government systematically restricts the free flow of information using sophisticated surveillance software.

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32  The advocacy trap A separate but related variety of explanation that falls within the liberal/​ society category examines the internal attributes of transnational networks and what they can do to capitalize on resources of the external environment when and where they find them. Derived from the resource mobilization school of social movement theory, this framework includes a special emphasis on the organizational configurations and professional skill-​sets needed to sustain advocacy in the face of target state resistance and to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded transnational space.3 These challenges are compounded by the twin problems of audience fragmentation and fatigue. Sociologist Dieter Rucht points out that ‘public attention toward the plethora of groups is limited … if too many concerns and actors compete with each other the audience becomes highly selective or even bored’ (Rucht, 1999:  217). In response, transnational NGOs and activists are forced to think like firms when vying for public attention and competing for limited space in the resource pool (Bloodgood, 2011; Cooley and Ron, 2002; Lecy et al., 2010). None of this is easy. TANs also face their own problems of communication and coordination. Managing the flow of information across organizations as diverse as international and domestic NGOs, academics, scientific experts, charitable foundations, media outlets, religious communities, trade unions, consumer groups, and fragments of intergovernmental and national government bodies poses logistical challenges of staggering proportions. The communication problems inherent in organizations of transnational scope and scale are only compounded by the fragmentary and informal nature of TANs, which collective adherence to a moral code tends to belie. Composed of actors from various points of origin, each with their own opinions, motivations, and cultural frames, TANs face the daunting task of navigating potentially conflicting interests and ideas to present a single coherent message—​a job made more difficult by decision-​making processes that can be messy, ad hoc, and subject to shifting coalitions or power imbalances (Kahler, 2009: 3).4 Just what can activist networks do to combat these difficulties? Two characteristics thought to be especially efficacious are strength and density (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 209). These refer to the total number and size of organization within a TAN, and the frequency of their interactions. Stronger, denser networks are expected to disseminate their message more widely, to generate greater awareness of their issues among the global public, to administer and gather larger financial sums through direct mail or internet campaigns, and to catch the attention of powerful and resourceful allied governments and international bodies. The larger the constituent parts and the greater their numbers, the larger is the stock of resources a network can marshal against its target. Networks having a greater density of linkages between the actors

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Mechanisms of persuasion   33 within them also have more numerous information streams. The strongest, densest networks typically include grassroots organizations in the target country that can provide partners abroad with up-​to-​the-​minute knowledge about situations developing on the ground. These types of local connections are especially valuable but usually scarce in authoritarian contexts where freedom of information is institutionally restricted and access tends to be idiosyncratic. Because it leads to better information flows, greater density also suggests more internal cohesion and unity of purpose within advocacy networks. One study of issue acceptance within the World Trade Organization (WTO) found a strong link between consensus among NGOs on campaign objectives and the ability to present a singular coherent message that wins public support (He and Murphy, 2007). Understood this way, dense information exchanges are both a cause and a consequence of the social capital that develops within networks, binding actors together in a common cause even when their divergent motivations and backgrounds mean they have little else in common. This is not to say that networks are always egalitarian or that the power and information flows within them necessarily adhere to a horizontal structure. Some are virtual pyramids, with a single head directing information downward through rigidly defined hierarchies, while others are relatively flat and fluid. Both set-​ups have their advantages, though much research suggests that activist campaigns benefit enormously from norm entrepreneurship, or the involvement of persuasive, altruistic figureheads who raise the profile of an issue through strong leadership or the iconic embodiment of shared principles. The history of global activism is replete with examples of how the moral vision and proselytism of just such a person proved indispensable for bringing it to prominence on the international stage (Nadelmann, 1990: 481). In his brilliant study of the international aid regime, David Lumsdaine described the role of influence of principled individuals: The programs which led up to aid—​colonial development programs, technical assistance to Latin America, the World Bank, the Marshall Plan, the UN—​were the work of liberals like Bevin, Keynes, Marshall, Rockefeller and White, and were opposed by those, like Robert A. Taft, who later opposed aid. Early advocates for world economic planning tended to be those concerned with domestic poverty and humanitarian causes as well. (1993: 65) Groups can be effective moral entrepreneurs too. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Doctors Without Borders have all been standard-bearers in various arenas of human rights

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34  The advocacy trap advocacy, as Oxfam and Heifer International have done in the field of food security, and Greenpeace in environmentalism. Ideational/​cultural factors Together, the factors spelled out under the preceding headings comprise the structural, ‘supply-​side’ conditions critical to effective advocacy campaigns. No less important, however, are the ‘demand-​side’ factors that tell us when the preferences and cognitive frames of target state elites are likely to be in flux. Both sides undoubtedly matter in the Chinese context, and indeed most authoritarian contexts, where state preferences formed relatively independently from exogenous factors. In such cases, resourceful TANs with all the makings of a high-​impact campaign are likely to come to little if key domestic actors are not receptive to their ideas. Conversely, resource-​rich campaigns that tick all the ‘supply-​side’ boxes for potential effectiveness may produce false positives where ‘demand-​side’ conditions lead to adoption of new policies convergent with but unrelated to TAN aims. Unpacking both supply and demand for TAN campaigns is thus crucial to understanding their effectiveness, but does not itself hold evidence of causal relationships. Descended from the cultural turn in social movement theory that focused on the symbolic roots of collective identity,5 a third group of variables examines how the characteristics of specific issues and the way they are presented affect norm socialization at the domestic level. The first of these asks whether certain types of issues are simply more conducive to effective advocacy than others. Existing work on transnational activism makes much of issue profiles as the key to effective policy interventions. For example, we might expect that campaigns focusing on environmental issues are likelier to have domestic impacts than those with national security implications, since states will be more reluctant to compromise on matters related to their own survival and the safety of their citizens. On the other hand, tales of injustice and human suffering might make for more compelling campaigns, appealing to the global public in ways that issues lacking the same tearjerker properties do not. Campaigns built around issues involving harm to vulnerable populations are similarly thought to appeal to a universal (or nearly universal) belief in the sanctity and dignity of human life, and thus could be expected to be relatively effective. However, this perspective fails to account for why some human security matters capture the attention of the activist community while others fail to do so (Carpenter, 2007). Another explanation concerns how easily an issue can be tweaked to fit the historical and cultural profile of the target, and its related level of support within the target society. For example, the better an idea resonates with

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Mechanisms of persuasion   35 existing attitudes and ideologies, the higher its chance of influencing state behaviour. Effective advocacy often requires advocates to frame issues in ways that mesh with existing cultural sensibilities, and appeal to specific national experiences, myths, stories, and belief systems. This kind of explanation bears a resemblance to the more structuralist and instrumentalist versions of framing theory developed by social movement theorists (Klandermans, 1992). Although perhaps excessively static, such a rendering of the ‘cultural/​ideological match’ hypothesis is useful for highlighting the pitfalls of attempting to introduce new norms without sufficient regard for context –​a source of inhibition for more than a few non-​Western targets. In Russia, where the goals of foreign development networks failed to resonate with entrenched attitudes towards the social function of NGOs, the result was the patchwork success of international efforts to promote civil society organizations (McIntosh-​Sundstrom, 2006). Japan exhibited strong resistance to international whaling prohibitions until very recently, justifying its continued consumption on grounds of cultural traditionalism and entitlement (Flowers, 2008). Yet when viewed less statically, mismatched values appear surmountable by cross-​cultural civility, and the ability of activists to find the common ground and focus on points of agreement rather than difference. One study of Christian charities in mainland China found that volunteers and staff from overseas acted as ‘cross-​cultural brokers’, allowing ‘religious ties [to] supply the bonding and bridging of social capital’ to further their humanitarian and ecumenical work (Chan, 2008). One further twist on the contextual fit explanations suggests that issues may be more likely to succeed when they are seen as politically expedient and prioritized by key decision-​makers. In order for an issue to succeed, political leaders have to be properly motivated.6 Shifting economic, political, or military circumstances may all play a role in the formation of political will, but so do opportunity costs. Even the strongest targets are seldom able to do everything and anything they want all of the time, and understanding the relative importance of competing motivations and interests is crucial to explaining why some ideas become salient politically and others do not. In other words, it is not always enough for TANs’ goals to mesh with state preferences. More important is where their missions fit into the preference hierarchy at a given time. A final aspect of issue characteristics of potential relevance is the ease with which they can be grafted onto a pre-​existing set of moral standards. Successful linkage to other norms, values, or ideas which already have broad acceptance often provide emergent issues cover by making them appear more credible or legitimate and less extreme or radical. Issues that would otherwise be more objectionable or controversial often seem easier to swallow when hitched to

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36  The advocacy trap those that have already been accepted and for which similar measures have been adopted previously. Taboos against chemical weapons, for instance, were more effective and enforceable because they were cast as part of a genealogy of arms control prohibitions extending back several decades (Price and Tannenwald, 1996). An ability to cite precedent, and to frame new issues as though they are covered by the umbrella of prior commitments, is an invaluable commodity for TANs and can tie the hands of would-​be resistors of new norms. Whether and when China’s hands can be tied remains to be seen. Conclusion This chapter has traversed and condensed an immense amount of theoretical territory. Sociologists, political scientists, students and scholars of international relations, and organizational behaviour specialists all could lay credible claim to having influenced the hypotheses and explanations laid out above. No doubt, they all are correct to some degree. None of the variables contained within the state-​oriented, society-​oriented, and identity-​oriented paradigms are exclusive or uniquely capable of accounting for differences in TAN campaigns, and any rich, full exploration of TAN activity across issue areas will probably uncover volumes of evidence to validate all three. However, some may well be more consistently important than others. The empirical chapters of this book serve as a test to tease out any patterns or peculiarities that might exist among TANs active in China. The foregoing chapter serves the analysis that follows in two main ways. First, the predictive hypotheses accompanying the discussion of each paradigm in the first half of this chapter give one something to look for when evaluating the impact of individual campaigns, as well as some basis for comparison among them. Which hypothesis, in specific cases and in general, exerted the most causal force on the results and functional forms taken by TAN campaigns  –​state preferences and the capacity to enforce them, resourceful social actors operating through the available institutional channels, or ideas that became politically salient at a crucial point in time? Second, the factors elaborated and sorted into categories in the second half of this chapter give a systematic framework to my discussion of advocacy campaigns in chapters two, three, and four. In this way, the analysis is grounded in and structured by theory, which facilitates a clinical handling of the cases and their outcomes, and provides a check against overly politicized, even biased, case histories. Put differently, the campaigns explored in the subsequent chapters are more than stories. They offer a sound basis for making general conclusions about the prospects and perils of activism in China.

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Mechanisms of persuasion   37 Notes 1 For a characteristic example of this framework, see Boli and Thomas (1997: 172). 2 For an insightful discussion of the complex relationship between opportunity and threat, see Goldstone and Tilly (2001). 3 For example, see McCarthy and Zald (1977). 4 On the larger issue of how organizations structure themselves, see Wong (2014). 5 See, for example, Melucci (1989). 6 This multi-​phase process of norm diffusion is described as the ‘spiral model’ of international relations (see Risse and Sikkink, 1999: 17).

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2

The power of state preferences: the ‘natural cases’ of the campaigns for Falun Gong and IPR protection

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ifferent advocacy campaigns achieve different results and take different functional forms. Those explored in this chapter were chosen precisely because they differ radically in terms of the reception each has met from the Chinese government, and the results they produced –​one was embraced by the state while the other was wholly rejected. In the case of the campaign mounted by Falun Gong and its supporters against the state for its own campaign to exterminate the group on the Chinese mainland, nothing even remotely resembling access, much less sympathy or a reversal of Beijing’s long-​time stance on the group has ever been forthcoming. On the other hand, in the case of IPRs, China cannot adopt anti-​piracy protections fast enough, though enforcement of those provisions already on the books is proving to be a challenge in the Chinese context, where counterfeiting runs wild. Despite these apparently disparate results, the grouping together of these two cases is justified by a single salient detail: both campaigns, irrespective of their effectiveness, adhere to a linear type of causal process in which campaigns press their concerns to their target using the resources available to them. State support is a critical, make-​or-​break factor in the unfolding of this process that shapes not only the impact of each campaign, but also their functional form. Together, these cases show that results can vary widely even among campaigns displaying approximately similar trajectories, and it is for this reason that I refer to them jointly as ‘natural cases’. Not only did they turn out precisely the way one would expect given the nature of the issues at stake and the known proclivities of China’s political leadership, they also unfolded in an entirely familiar fashion. The Falun Gong campaign exemplifies the boomerang pattern first elaborated by Keck and Sikkink in their classic work. Branded as enemies of

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The power of state preferences   39 the state in 1999, adherents of the movement on the Chinese mainland were forced underground or out of China entirely, and thereafter transformed themselves from Chinese folk religion into a full-​fledged political advocacy group, harnessing the support of Western governments, human rights NGOs, and ordinary practitioners of the faith in a broad range of countries in pursuit of their common value and goal –​freedom of religious observance, and the bringing to justice of former president Jiang Zemin and other prominent figures in the domestic security establishment, whom they accuse of murder, torture, and persecution of the faithful in China. The case of the campaign for IPR protection is not an instance of the ‘boomerang’ at work, but nevertheless reflects a familiar pattern of TAN mobilization. In this instance, a group of like-​minded business people and industry representatives  –​the loosest-​ knit of any TAN covered in this book  –​pressed China’s government to toughen legal protection of IPRs, a norm already well-​institutionalized in international treaty and law, but which China has had difficulty controlling within its borders. Indeed, the persistence of this problem as a feature of the Chinese economic landscape has led some within the TAN to question China’s commitment to anti-​piracy, and, at times, even the complicity of government officials in the ongoing piracy problem. Nevertheless, the notion that strengthening IPR protection is important for maintaining China’s attractiveness as a safe place to do business has produced a huge range of policies and institutional mechanisms intended to do as the TAN desires. It is not at all clear that transnational advocacy has been the cause of these, but the long list of IPR protections currently in force in China nonetheless signals that the idea motivating transnational activity around IPRs has a lot more support within Chinese halls of power than does activity on behalf of Falun Gong. As one might expect, state preferences loom large in the results of both campaigns, and in the calculus of both TANs to hold fast to their central mission and purpose. Legally banned in China since 1999, efforts on behalf of Falun Gong have never garnered anything remotely close to the response they seek from the authorities, nor are they likely to. While there is some evidence that a rump contingent of Falun Gong practitioners continues to exist on the mainland, they do not operate in the light of day, making on-​ the-​ground domestic mobilization for the campaign impossible. As with many other human rights campaigns, the one around justice for Falun Gong has simply been ignored in China. In terms of functional forms, this state of affairs leaves the campaign with a very clear set of choices. Either fight on, clinging to their core principle in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to be heard by those in a position to do as the TAN requests, or soften their rhetoric and pursue more modest objectives. Judging the price of

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40  The advocacy trap betraying the central objective to be too high with too little hope of reward, the principled stance prevails in the Falun Gong campaign. On the other hand, adoption of more stringent anti-​piracy mechanisms is something Beijing has been eager to do. Here, the problem is not one of stubborn state preferences, but of institutional capability to implement solutions to China’s piracy problem at several levels. Under such circumstances, the alliance of lobbyists, firms, and professional associations comprising the campaign around IPRs has no reason to renegotiate their core premise. If anything, they are all the more motivated to continue to press Beijing to get tougher. Justice for Falun Gong On the morning of 25 April 1999, some 10,000 members of the spiritual sect known as Falun Gong [also called Falun Dafa] converged on Fuyou Street outside the Zhongnanhai complex in central Beijing to petition the country’s top lawmakers for redress after a rising tide of critical press and official censure that had wounded the group’s public image. Though it was by all accounts non-​ violent and lawful, the brazenness and scale of the demonstration nonetheless sounded alarms at the very highest levels of government. Then-​president Jiang Zemin told the Politburo it was ‘the most serious political incident since June 4 [1989]’ (Zong, 2002: 66), and in the weeks and months that followed launched a nation-​wide blitz to destroy the group that resulted in charges of harassment, detention, torture, and murder that linger to the present day. In the years since, Falun Gong has morphed from a spiritual movement with roots in Chinese folk religion into a transnational political organization incorporating NGOs, lawyers, politicians, and human rights activists in a global network advocating freedom of religious beliefs and the prosecution of Jiang for crimes against humanity. Yet of all the campaigns considered here, Falun Gong’s has been the least effective in terms of obtaining policy concessions. Nothing so much as an open door or even a hint of contrition has ever come from the CCP, which continues to quietly prosecute a ‘dirty war’ against the group. In spite of these circumstances, the campaign on behalf of the persecuted has shown remarkable staying power, matching and even besting the CCP’s propaganda skills and resource deployment while maintaining absolute and unwavering faith in its version of history and claim to the moral high ground. (Inter)governmental support The campaign for Falun Gong counts elected representatives of several Western governments among its chief allies, but the bulk of its support

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The power of state preferences   41 comes from Washington. The US Congress has passed no less than four concurrent resolutions backing Falun Gong’s claims of persecution in China. All were adopted unanimously, save for the most recent, House Resolution 605, on which Ron Paul (R-​Tex.) was the lone dissenter. Authored by Ileana Ros-​Lehtinen (R-​Fla.), Chair emeritus of the House Committee on Foreign Relations and herself a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba, the bill calls on China ‘to immediately cease and desist from its campaign to persecute, intimidate, imprison, and torture Falun Gong practitioners, and to immediately abolish the 6–​10 Office, an extrajudicial security apparatus given the mandate to “eradicate Falun Gong” ’. Representatives Diane Watson (D-​ CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-​CA), Chris Smith (R-​NJ), Gus Bilirakis (R-​Fla.), Rush Holt (D-​NJ), Frank Wolf (R-​VA), and Ros-​Lehtinen all gave statements during the floor debate, showing strong backing for the issue on both sides of the aisle. Indeed, the persecution of Falun Gong has a lengthy history of bipartisan support. Perhaps the earliest evidence to this effect is a September 2000 letter to then-​Secretary of State Madeleine Albright signed by forty House Members from both parties. The situation of Falun Gong in China has also been the subject of numerous reports by federal research bodies in the United States, which collectively have helped to shape official responses and sustain the attention and shape the responses of US officials over time. Framing of the issue as a clear human rights violation has been central to this role. For example, a report of the Congressional Research Service tabled in September 1999 raises the possibility of trade sanctions as one method of signaling American displeasure over the ‘heavy handed tactics’ of the Chinese government (Lum, 2000: 200–​201). A  February 2000 report of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor drew specific parallels between the crackdown on Falun Gong and suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protestors (US State Department, 2000: 204). More recently, the Annual Reports of the US Congressional-​Executive Committee on China have been instrumental in calling to light China’s extensive use of Re-​education-​Through-​Labor facilities in continuing to prosecute its war on Falun Gong. Current and former members of the Canadian House of Commons have also been active on behalf of Falun Gong. In 2009, an all-​party organization calling itself Parliamentary Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG) was formed, the first of its kind from any Western government. According to founding chair Bill Siksay, who represented Burnaby-​Douglas in the House from 2004 to 2011, the organization’s primary goal is ‘to make sure Parliamentarians are better-​informed about issues related to Falun Gong’ and to ‘encourage respect for fundamental human rights in China’ (Friends of Falun Gong, 2009). In March 2006, a Washington-​based advocacy group known as the Coalition

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42  The advocacy trap to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong contacted ex-​parliamentarian David Kilgour and fellow lawyer and human rights activist David Mattas with a request that they probe allegations of trafficking in human organs harvested from Falun Gong practitioners incarcerated in China. Their report, released on 31 January 2007, concluded that ‘the Chinese government and its agencies in certain parts of the country … since 1999 have put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience’, and that ‘there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners’ (Kilgour and Mattas, 2007). Canadian politicians have also publicly expressed appreciation for Falun Gong as a spiritual practice. In a letter dated 13 May 2011, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney thanked the Falun Dafa Association of Canada for ‘sharing with all of us the principled philosophy of Falun Dafa’. Peter Kent, Member of Parliament for Thornhill, Ontario, wrote that ‘Canadian pluralism only benefits from sharing the teachings of [Falun Dafa founder] Mr. Li Hongzhi’ (Minghui.org, 2011). Major intergovernmental bodies have likewise condemned the persecution of Falun Gong as an attack on practitioners’ human rights. EU officials had raised the issue in negotiations with Chinese as far back as 2001, calling the situation ‘unacceptable’ regardless of the true numbers of those detained, harassed, or tortured (American Foreign Press, 2011). China has also been an object of scrutiny by UN Special Rapporteurs who have verified as credible the allegations of torture and other forms of persecution against Falun Gong in annual reports extending as far back as 2000. A 2007 report by Asma Jahangir, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief, stated: The Special Rapporteur continues to be very concerned by the continued violations of freedom of religion or belief suffered by members of the Falun Gong. In her previous reports to the Commission on Human Rights, she explicitly mentioned members of the Falun Gong as targets of various human rights violations because of their beliefs and she strongly condemns the continued lack of freedom of belief of members of Falun Gong. (2007: 25) Despite such misgivings, the response from international organizations has generally been more muted than that of Western governments, principally because of China’s diplomatic leverage. On one occasion, a US-​ sponsored resolution was tabled at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva specifically citing the suppression of Falun Gong among a litany of other human rights abuses, but was scuttled at the eleventh hour by a procedural motion that no action be taken, introduced at China’s urging. When

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The power of state preferences    43 the subject of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners was raised before the Council in September 2012 it was abruptly dropped, again due to Chinese objections. ‘We are aware that the Council as a whole will not address any issue in China due to political considerations’, commented the spokesperson (Tang, 2012). The domestic situation A complete legal ban on Falun Gong has effectively prevented the movement or any of its supporters from bringing their case to the Chinese government since the summer of 1999. Following the 25 April demonstration, there was a strong sentiment within the Politburo that Falun Gong represented an enormous threat to social stability and to the Party itself, and that its elimination was therefore a matter of immediate necessity. The danger was twofold. First, it was felt that Falun Gong had grown too large to be properly contained. Some estimates during this period peg the total number of practitioners at seventy million nationwide, enough to rival the Party in terms of membership (Palmer, 2007:  6). Second, Falun Gong had demonstrated its capacity to mobilize outside the auspices of the state. The incident at Zhongnanhai was only the latest and largest in a string of protests staged over the preceding weeks and months. These protests were in turn part of a bigger storm that had been brewing since 1996 when Falun Gong bowed out of the government-​run Qigong Research Society, losing its official status and endorsement. Outside Party supervision and growing by the day, what was once accepted as mainstream had come to be seen as a potentially seismic political challenge. Even more insidious from the standpoint of the Party was the fact that Falun Gong had emerged as a counter-​hegemonic ideology at precisely the moment when communism appeared to be in crisis. Amid the search for a renewed legitimacy of its own, the CCP viewed the ‘theism’ of Falun Gong as an alternative and potentially toxic moral code that was, according to the People’s Daily, ‘absolutely contradictory to the fundamental principles of Marxism’. ‘If Li Hongzhi’s heretical theories spread, the Party’s foundation will be shaken, and the great cause will be undermined’, the paper warned (Xinhua News Agency, 1999a). To Jiang Zemin, Falun Gong’s appeal over the atheism and materialism embodied by the Party was taken as evidence of the weak state of political and ideological work by local governments and departments (Jiang, 2001). Most embarrassing of all, the teachings of Falun Gong had apparently begun to infiltrate the CCP itself. Zhu Rongji was reportedly shocked to find a number of high-​ranking cadres among the petitioners on 25 April (Hilton, 1999: 16).

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44  The advocacy trap In the late spring of 1999, the Party leadership was resolute and of one mind regarding the need to deal with Falun Gong, and quietly pressed ahead with plans to destroy the group. According to one source, ‘no questions would be asked about how this was achieved; success was all that mattered’ (Chang, 2004:  9). Their first step was the creation of the so-​called ‘6–​10 Office’ on 6 June, headed by security czar Luo Gan. An extra-​legal, Party-​ based organization answerable solely to the Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, it was given sweeping authority to coordinate and oversee the campaign against Falun Gong, to ensure the full cooperation of state agents in enforcing a complete ban on the movement, and to supervise the activities of suspected practitioners and their families. Described as being ‘several administrative strata’ above such bodies as the Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television, it maintains a complex organizational structure, with offices at the provincial and municipal levels staffed by personnel mostly seconded from local law enforcement bureaus (Tong, 2009: 99). Creation of the new state organization was merely a prelude to the events that followed. At a Politburo meeting on 7 July, Jiang Zemin articulated the need to ‘disintegrate’ Falun Gong. Beginning at dawn on 20 July, practitioners were removed from their homes and placed under the supervision of state security agents. Two days later, MOCA formally banned the Falun Dafa Research Association, and the Ministry of Public Security criminalized the sale or possession of Falun Gong materials including books, recordings, and iconography. Party members were also formally prohibited from practising Falun Gong, and an estimated 300,000 renounced their beliefs (Ownby, 2008: 175). Then came the media campaign. State radio and television aired anti-​Falun Gong messages on an endless loop. Newspapers and magazines overflowed with scores of defamatory editorials positing, as one observer recalls, ‘a binary opposition between materialism and idealism, Marxism/​ Maoism and Falun Gong, atheism and theism’ (Chen, 2005: 24). One such publication proclaimed, ‘The so-​called “truth, kindness and tolerance” principle preached by Li Hongzhi has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve’ (Xinhua News Agency, 1999b). Countless others painted the movement’s founder as nothing but a quack who preyed on the most vulnerable and hoodwinked the unsuspecting public out of their hard-​earned money.1 By the time the dust settled, tens of thousands of reports of beatings, unlawful detention, interrogation, and torture stemming from the July crackdown were verified as credible by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (Amnesty International, 2000; Human Rights Watch, 2002). As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the number of those suspected to have died as a result of torture reached as high as 3,000 (Ownby, 2008: 162).

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The power of state preferences   45 Some saw the overwrought rhetoric of the campaign and the draconian punishments meted out as evidence not of state power, but fragility. Clearly Falun Gong had gotten under the Party’s skin, and in doing so had magnified social ills that were the result of the CCP’s own modernization programme and internal contradictions. The demonstrations it staged in the run-​up to the crackdown and continued to stage sporadically from late 1999 to 2001 were suggestive of an upward swing in social disturbances more generally, one that threatened the very survival of Chinese communism (Shue, 2004). But by late 2001, the tides were turning. The Party began sanctioning more severe, systematic violence against Falun Gong, and escalated the propaganda campaign against the group. Once common, its open displays of defiance all but disappeared by 2002, creating the impression that the state had scored a decisive victory. Despite official attempts to downplay the issue and redirect public attention, both Falun Gong and Chinese government sources indicate that the movement remains a source of deep concern for the Party, which continues to initiate regular, top-​down campaigns aimed at its destruction. In 2010 details emerged of a new three-​year plan to be helmed by 6–​10 chief Zhou Yongkang, which set quotas for the ratio of Falun Gong practitioners in a given locale to be ‘transformed’ in transformation-​ through-​ reeducation (jiaoyu zhuanhua) sessions run by the 6–​10 Office. For example, in Xinglong Town, Deyang City, Sichuan, authorities were required to ensure that the number of non-​transformed practitioners diminished by 30 per cent by the end of 2011, and another 10 per cent in 2012. According to a report of the Deyang city government, the average cost to transform a practitioner was 45,000 RMB, or just over 7,000 USD (Xinglong Town, 2010). Transformation sessions typically last days or weeks, often taking place in civilian settings such as schools, hotels, or hospitals and with the full cooperation of local officials. Documents outlining the campaign appeared on local Party and government websites in almost every province.2 There have also been numerous attempts to stem the proliferation of Falun Gong literature in recent years. In a move that echoed the directives of local governments across the country, the Fujian Provincial Transport Administration Department emphasized in April 2009 the need to strike hard against publications that ‘incited ethnic splittism’ and that ‘slandered the country’s political system, distorted the history of the Party, the country’s history, the military’s history, slandered the Party and the country’s leaders, [and] publicized “Falun Gong” ’ (Fujian Province Department of Administration for Transportation, 2009). During the first half of 2012, a comprehensive, nation-​wide effort to ‘clean up’ Falun Gong literature was initiated by the 6–​10 Office, the objective of which, according to Party

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46  The advocacy trap spokespeople in Laiyang, Shandong, is to render Falun Gong ‘like rats running across the street that everyone shouts out to smash; don’t leave them any space’ (Laiyang City, 2012). The Falun Gong campaign today The considerable energy expended by the Party to rid China of a movement it supposedly crushed fifteen years ago strongly suggests that Falun Gong maintains an active mainland presence. Of course, precise estimates of those living and practising underground are impossible to obtain, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence from inside and outside the Party indicates that the initial impact of the state’s eradication work has been overstated and that, at the very least, a substantial rump contingent remains. In 2009, Falun Gong’s own Chinese website, Minghui.org, arrived at a figure of around 200,000 by counting the number of unique Chinese IP addresses used to regularly access and download material from the site. However, because accessing Minghui requires the use of a personal computer and a secure proxy server, a single connection is often used by dozens or even hundreds of people (Confidential Interview, 2013a). According to the site’s calculations, this would support an estimate of close to forty million domestic followers (Minghui.org, 2009). There is also some evidence that Falun Gong continues to attract new converts, as well as reclaim former adepts forced to renounce the practice under duress. Minghui publishes personal conversion stories and anecdotal accounts of how the practice improves the physical health and relationships of adherents on a near-​daily basis. As of August 2012, it had compiled more than 480,000 ‘solemn statements’ of practitioners retracting their earlier renunciations of the faith made while in state custody.3 6–​10 Office and government literature also contain implicit acknowledgements of Falun Gong’s growth, outlining measures for how to handle the new adherents. For instance, one April 2012 document from Guizhou required that ‘newly discovered’ Falun Gong practitioners should be re-educated and ‘transformed’ within 2–​3  months (‘Organization Department of the CCP Guizhou Provincial Committee’, 2012). Other state sources similarly indicate that the transformation efforts have proven exceedingly difficult, as evinced in the following statement from the 6–​10 Office in Laodian Township: There are still a considerable number of stubborn and obsessed [Falun Gong] members … the stubborn and obsessed members are more and more difficult to transform, and relapse after transformation is increasingly prevalent … [Falun Gong] is fighting with us to win the masses,

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The power of state preferences    47 and the struggle to win people’s hearts is still very intense. (Chinese Communist Party Laodian Committee, 2010) According to the China Anti-​Cult Association, a national 6–​10-​affiliated organization, the challenges of containing Falun Gong have proven severe enough that some local 6–​10 branches are ready to give up on it altogether and close down their transformation centres for good (China Anti-​Cult Association, 2010). All told, these things suggest the population of Falun Gong in China is on the rise, at least compared to a decade ago. As Beijing human rights lawyer Han Zhiguang told the Daily Telegraph in 2009, ‘We do not know the exact number, but one thing is certain:  It is expanding’ (Moore, 2009). Whatever the true figure is, it is clear that Falun Gong in China maintains active linkages to practitioners abroad. Indeed, perhaps the most important long-​term consequence of the government crackdown has been Falun Gong’s spread throughout North America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Suppressed within China, the group gained popularity among Chinese expatriates abroad after 2000, and has since made inroads with many non-​Chinese adherents as well. Ethnographic studies of Falun Gong outside China, dubbed ‘advocacy anthropology’ (Porter, 2003: 17), indicate that sizable practitioner communities can be found in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Fieldwork by David Ownby has shown that members of Chinese diasporas account for approximately 90 per cent of practitioners in North America, and that they tend to be both wealthier and better educated than the average American or Canadian (Ownby, 2008: 160). Falun Gong websites such as clearwisdom.net provide contacts for local practitioner associations in most medium-​to-​large cities in the United States and Canada, giving an indication of the group’s geographical breadth within North America where the bulk of practitioners now reside. Because local branches do not maintain any official registration or membership lists, precise estimates of the total number of practitioners internationally are impossible to obtain, though Minghui pegged the worldwide following at some 70 million individuals as of 1999 (Minghui.org, 1999: 4). However, followers of the faith comprise only a part of the larger Falun Gong network. In addition to Chinese and Western adherents of the practice, the campaign also includes large numbers of advocates in NGOs whose concern for the group derives from its political situation in China, not its religious message. The Falun Dafa Information Centre, which serves the network as major information and framing hub, ‘advocates for the rights of Falun Gong adherents inside China, particularly under the current circumstance in which

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48  The advocacy trap they are denied legal representation or fair trials’. On its website, the organization stresses that it ‘does not seek to promote the teachings or practice of Falun Gong’ but rather concentrates on documenting abuses and disseminating information to ‘all relevant entities who seek to learn more about the plight of Falun Gong in China’ (Falun Dafa Information Centre, 2008). Other NGOs similarly devote themselves to research, reporting abuses, and reporting these to the human rights community and the general public. The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), a global network of lawyers and activists headquartered in New York, makes it its mission To investigate the criminal conduct of all institutions, organizations, and individuals involved in the persecution of Falun Gong; to bring such investigations, no matter how long it takes, no matter how far and deep we have to search, to full closure; to exercise fundamental principles of humanity; and to restore and uphold justice in society. (World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, 2004) FoFG, a US-​based advocacy group formed in 2000, is focused on ‘preventing and ending violations of the right to practice Falun Gong openly, freely, and with dignity, worldwide’ by supporting legal action and ‘piercing through the lies the Chinese Communist Party has been disseminating about Falun Gong and replacing that propaganda with facts about the CCP’s campaign of terror’ (Friends of Falun Gong, 2013). The organization has chapters in more than a dozen countries. Additionally, the network claims among its adherents many Western human rights NGOs not spawned by or devoted to the Falun Gong issue exclusively, but who nevertheless have been vocal in their condemnation of China’s government for its abuses towards the group. Among the most prominent are Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, the National Organization for Women, Freedom House, and Physicians for Human Rights. Steady flows of up-​to-​the minute information about the plight of Falun Gong in China, made possible by the network’s skilful use of technology, enable the coordination of its advocacy and ongoing resistance activities across international borders. Indeed, cyberspace has long been important for Falun Gong, both as a means to recruit new members and to evade Chinese authorities.4 Beginning in 2001, the group went underground, establishing covert ‘material sites’ producing literature and DVDs aimed at ‘clarifying the truth’ (jiang zhenxiang) about the practice and its treatment by the law to the Chinese public. These materials routinely contained reports on human rights abuses and the torture of practitioners in custody, updates of Falun

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The power of state preferences    49 Gong’s status abroad, commendations from elected officials overseas, studies and first-​hand accounts of the health and other benefits obtained through the practice, and analysis discrediting the state’s propaganda against the group (Confidential Interview, 2013b). These efforts ultimately proved limited in their reach, as they lacked the technical expertise needed to bypass the state’s increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance and censorship tools. As a result, primary responsibility for ‘truth clarification’ activities passed to diaspora practitioners, who proved an invaluable resource and allowed the campaign to speak with a much louder voice. Ethnographic studies indicate that practitioners outside China are a generally well-​educated lot, and that many in North America hold advanced degrees, having emigrated as graduate students after 1989. Among this crowd are computer scientists and engineers who since 2000 have been developing censorship-​circumvention software to allow practitioners in China to escape persecution and relay reports of official abuse out of the country. These are then verified, edited, and translated into a variety of languages before being posted online. Two independent investigations claim that the censorship-​circumvention software developed by practitioners in the United States is now some of the most widely used in the world, with millions of subscribers in mainland China (Beiser, 2010; Lake, 2009). Digital media continues to be the primary way in which practitioners from around the world interface with one another. In addition to websites like Minghui.org, clearwisdom.net, falundafa.org, and faluninfo.net, all of which circulate information concerning the practice and its claims against the Chinese state, the Epoch Times newspaper serves as a key mouthpiece for the group internationally.5 Published in ten languages and distributed in over thirty countries, it operates as a legitimate news outlet featuring national and local coverage, but with features devoted to publicizing Falun Gong’s political message. It’s ‘Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party’ (Jiuping Gongchandang), which appears in every edition, declares that ‘the history of the Communist Party is written with blood and lies’ and that ‘the demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time’.6 Moreover, by framing the group’s struggle in terms of CCP brutality versus the ‘benevolence, compassion, and forbearance’ of Falun Gong, the publication has a direct influence on the nature and orchestration of sit-​ins by local practitioner communities around the world. Demonstrators can be found cross-​ legged with their heads bowed in silent protest outside Chinese embassies in many cities, under banners lettered with political slogans such as ‘Bring Jiang Zemin to Justice’. In some cases, the methods of torture are re-​enacted to show the general public the extent and severity of Falun Gong’s treatment by the Chinese state. One such display at the intersection of Granville

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50  The advocacy trap Street and King Edward Avenue in Vancouver continued daily for more than twelve years. The campaign’s ability to orchestrate and sustain mobilization is all the more impressive given Falun Gong’s lack of any formal organizational hierarchy and loose, informal membership structure. There are no specific registration requirements or criteria for enrolment. No official records are maintained. One does not ‘join’ the faith in the conventional sense, nor are they confirmed or initiated into Falun Gong as one is baptized into Christianity. For the most part, believers meet in practitioners’ houses, at open-​air gatherings in public spaces such as parks, or periodically at outdoor protests and demonstrations. Certain individuals may serve as ‘guidance counselors’ (fudaoyuan) for teaching the practice, or as designated contacts for practitioners in a given local area, but are simply conduits for information, not leaders as such. Unlike most religious organizations, Falun Gong has no ordained clergy, maintains no offices or staff, and has been essentially ‘headless’ since its founder, Li Hongzhi, left China for the United States in 1995 before the sect was repressed. As one Ottawa-​based practitioner explains, this arrangement is good for maintaining the anonymity of adherents, but ‘terrible for a social movement’, since it does not provide any overarching authority in matters of political advocacy (Confidential Interview, 2013c). Now a permanent resident in the United States, Li and his family live a relatively quiet life off the radar at an undisclosed location somewhere in the New York City area, though he maintains contact with practitioners by appearing at retreats and training weekends, and by posting periodically to message boards online. Those who have met him report that he travels with a security detail, and that he continues to inspire reverence in the flock of the faithful. Sitting down to dinner with a group of practitioners, one of them describes feeling ‘silly and immature’ when she spoke to him, like a child to an omniscient parent. Another says, ‘When I shook his hand, I felt …’, his voice quivers and trails off, his eyes welling with tears, as though recalling a brief but intensely meaningful encounter with a divine presence. Despite his more muted role in the network today, it is difficult to overstate the impact of Li’s entrepreneurship on Falun Gong’s rise, and its metamorphosis into a transnational political group in the late 1990s. At the time Falun Gong appeared on the national scene at a convention in Changchun, Jilin, in May 1992, China was in the grip of a nation-​wide boom in the popularity of qigong practices (gongfa), schools of therapeutic exercise with links to indigenous Buddhist and Daoist thought. Owing to its purported physical benefits and curative properties, qigong had officially been sanctioned by the Party in the 1950s, when it was stripped of its ‘superstitious’ and ‘feudal’ properties and drafted into the service of

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The power of state preferences    51 a modern socialist health-​care system. However, when the relaxation of Maoist controls after 1978 facilitated a reconnection with the practice’s roots in Chinese folk religion, and after more than thirty years of suppression, the country suddenly became engulfed in a popular search for meaning.7 David Ownby argues that the qigong movement therefore ‘claimed the mantle of modern science and that of ancient Chinese civilization’ and was ‘equal parts new religion and cultural revitalization movement’ (Ownby, 2008:  23). ‘In some sense’, he writes, ‘qigong was what China wanted to be: ancient and cutting edge; elitist and populist; happy, healthy, and whole’ (2008:  13). By one estimate, as many as 100  million people, roughly one-​fifth of China’s total urban population at the time, was caught up in this so-​called ‘Qigong Fever’ (Palmer, 2007: 6). A gifted and charismatic speaker, Li Hongzhi capitalized on the surging public interest in qigong, differentiating his simple exercise regimen by synthesizing it with a message of salvation, transcendence, and mystical aspects of multiple Chinese religious traditions (Lu, 2005: 177). In doing so, he was able to cover a large amount of ground, reaching those who were attracted to the physical benefits of his exercises, as well as those on a personal spiritual quest. Thus, Li’s meteoric rise to fame as a figure in the qigong movement was a blend of serendipity and shrewdness. It helped that he happened along just when a mass trend emerged with coattails to be ridden, but his teachings were expertly packaged for a society eager to receive them. As his own brother would later recount, ‘Master Li was the right man in the right place at the right time, but more than that, he had the right stuff’ (Adams et al., 2000: 11). It was not until well after his departure from China, however, that Li’s statements took on a more inflammatory political tone. Falun Gong was not an explicitly political movement at its inception, but it became one after the crackdown, and although there is no evidence that Li ever deliberately put his followers in harm’s way, he was certainly active in encouraging resistance activities in China and abroad. On 4 March 2001, he issued a statement on falundafa.org titled ‘Coercion Cannot Change the People’s Heart’, in which he seemingly urged his followers to keep up their struggle, even on pain of torture and death: The evil [Communist Party] has utilized the power in bad people’s hands to create turmoil for nearly two years, using the most base actions ever in human history—​whether ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign—​and employing all the most malicious means to persecute Dafa and its cultivators. Its aim is to use coercive measures to change Dafa cultivators’ hearts and have them give up their cultivation practice.

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52  The advocacy trap This is futile. Never in history has someone who persecuted those with upright faiths ever succeeded. (Li, 2001) More than a decade later, Li’s rhetoric remained as fiery as ever, as though locked in an apocalyptic battle to the death with China’s rulers: The CCP’s wicked propaganda has instilled the world’s people with lies that slander and defame Falun Gong, and this is meant to incite hatred against the Buddha Fa and Dafa disciples, who are on the path to divinity … The emergence of the Communist Party and the CCP’s real goal is to have people hate Gods and Buddhas, to propagate atheism, to instill a philosophy of ‘struggle,’ and to thereby destroy humankind. And this is the reason Dafa disciples are to clarify the truth. The goal is to get rid of the evil’s lies, to enable people to see the CCP’s true face, to clear away the sins committed by people against Gods and Buddhas, and to thereby save the world’s people. (Li, 2012) Framing Falun Gong The extraordinary staying power of the Falun Gong issue through the years can in many ways be attributed to the campaign’s ability to link its struggle to broader human rights and international legal discourses. Among the more recent and innovative uses of this ‘grafting’ technique is the argument that China’s treatment of Falun Gong practitioners is contrary to the rule of law, and therefore violates international legal standards and undermines China’s own progress in the field of judicial reform. One recent brief premises this argument on the claim that ‘Falun Gong was never legally banned in China, that the CCP has developed various tactics for carrying out the persecution absent of a legal basis, [and] that these tactics are now being applied against a broader set of targets, further impacting human rights conditions in China’ (Xia, 2011). More commonly, however, Falun Gong supporters have latched onto and expanded anti-​communist sentiment, a tactic that has captivated some of the more hawkish ideologues in governments around the world as well as ordinary Chinese people fed up with Party abuses of power. The Epoch Times has been a driving force behind the so-​called ‘Tuidang’ movement, which it claims has solicited tens of millions of statements from citizens renouncing their membership in the Party, Communist Youth League, or Young Pioneers (Epoch Times, 2004: 312).8 Yet for all its skill with information technology and transnational bridge-​ building, there remains a fundamental dissonance between the version of events presented by the campaign, and official contentions in China. In the

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The power of state preferences   53 first instance, there are contradictory accounts of Falun Gong’s organizational capacity. While the network has long promoted an image of Falun Gong as organizationally flat and socially benign, China’s government has begged to differ, insisting that prior to the 1999 crackdown Falun Gong had a clear hierarchical structure that mirrored the administrative apparatus of the Party-​state, with several subordinate levels working under the supervision of a centralized authority. Probably the most accurate and reliable interpretation of the official view from this period is the one pieced together by James Tong. According to this account, Falun Gong was both wide and deep, forming a national, multilayered organizational pyramid. At the top was the Beijing Falun Dafa Research Society, which at Li’s direction issued commands to ancillary units known (in descending order of authority) as main stations, branch stations, tracts (pian), and local practice sites (liangongdian). The Beijing Falun Dafa Research Society was responsible for overseeing all of the activities of main stations nation-​wide, including their structure, staffing requirements, and the establishment of new branches and practice sites under their purview. It issued directives on the proper methods of Falun Gong instruction and evangelism, and most critically, is thought to have orchestrated more than 300 mass protests against official depictions of Falun Gong in state media (Tong, 2002: 637–​638). This characterization did, however, serve an instrumental purpose for the CCP leadership. As Tong writes, ‘The more organized the Falun Gong could be shown to be, then the more justified the regime’s repression in the name of social order was’ (2002: 638). The state’s propaganda campaign continues to the present day and extends well beyond China’s borders. One of the most persistent controversies surrounds Li’s date of birth, which has been continuously exploited as part of a larger effort by Falun Gong’s critics to portray him as a charlatan. In 1994, Li changed his birthdate to 13 May 1951, supposedly to correct a decades-​old bureaucratic snafu, which had listed it incorrectly as 7 July 1952. Chinese authorities later alleged that Li had intentionally altered the date to coincide with the birthdate of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni, thus making himself appear as a divine reincarnation. Li refuted these allegations in a 1999 interview with Time magazine, stating, ‘I have never said that I am Sakyamuni. I am just a very ordinary man’. Other, more recent efforts have gone beyond attempts at merely discrediting Li, casting him instead as China’s doom. A  statement of China’s embassy in the United States declared:  ‘Facts have demonstrated that Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, is in fact an evil figure who, by deceiving [sic], has been seriously disrupting social order and sabotaging the hard-​earned social stability of China’ (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, 2010). Reports of Chinese espionage abroad also tell of the considerable lengths the central government

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54  The advocacy trap has gone to ascertain the status of Falun Gong around the world, to infiltrate practitioner communities in friendly nations, and to incite public hatred of the group.9 The Confucius Institutes, set up at universities across North America ostensibly to facilitate cultural exchange and language learning, are dogged by persistent claims that they exist to collect information on Falun Gong and its sympathizers, advocates of Chinese democracy, supporters of the Dalai Lama and others involved in anti-​China activities (The Economist, 2011).10 Official references to Falun Gong as a ‘cult’ (xiejiao) too numerous to count, have likewise had an undeniable impact on the ability of the campaign to gain political traction by creating links in the global popular consciousness to groups such as Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, which perpetrated a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, and the Branch Davidians in the United States. A further consequence of the government smear campaign has been to severely limit support for Falun Gong among the Chinese public. Indeed, the state seems to have won the domestic propaganda war, the ‘cult’ label apparently sticking in the minds of many. Ordinary citizens have proven largely unresponsive to the ‘truth clarification’ efforts of practitioners, and are found to cleave instinctively to the Party line, deeming any criticism of Party policies to be an indictment against China itself, facts Li Hongzhi himself has openly acknowledged (2012). Within Chinese higher education, where correct views on Falun Gong are required for admission, there is a wealth of literature reinforcing popular perceptions of Falun Gong as harmful to society, and the state as justified in taking action to preserve stability.11 Not everyone actively opposes Falun Gong, of course, but neither do they support the mending of fences. Eighteen years after the ban was imposed, apathy towards Falun Gong is the most common emotional response. Official references to Falun Gong in popular media have been drastically scaled back since 2005, its challenge to the Party long since crowded out by the more pressing issues of economic, social, and environmental change, all of which are far more consequential and relevant to the average citizen. Indeed, popular antipathy towards the movement is a product of latent structures created by the state.12 Explaining why those with no strong feelings of their own towards Falun Gong nevertheless adopt anti-​Falun Gong opinions, one public servant gave the following illustration: There is to be a campaign to eliminate rats in order to make society ‘more hygienic’. All are given a quota of rats to catch, and severe punishment will be given to those who fail to meet their quota, or worse, are suspected of helping the rats escape. If you are one of those responsible for doing the trapping, the last thing you want is no rats to catch.

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The power of state preferences    55 So we are under pressure to keep on finding new enemies. (Confidential Interview, 2009c) Conclusion If there is a silver lining to the continuing Falun Gong saga, it is the catharsis that comes from the campaign remaining resolute in its position despite such little hope of success. Practitioners and their supporters in global civil society may never obtain satisfaction from Beijing, but they know what they stand for, and have been unwilling to bend or retreat from their version of what transpired in the summer of 1999 or in the years since. Of course, this was not really a difficult choice. Even if Falun Gong and its allies were more flexible than they are, it is not at all clear what could be gained by compromising the campaign’s core objective. To do so would be to surrender what little moral high ground exists in an environment where the basic facts of the persecution are uncertain or in dispute, and where Falun Gong’s claims are already coloured by the widespread perception that the group is a dangerous cult. Nor is it clear what an alternative tack for the campaign would actually look like, or whether it would matter even if one were available. If tomorrow Li Hongzhi gave instructions to his followers to stop talking about the lies and bloodshed perpetrated by the Party, and if they and human rights NGOs speaking out on their behalf suddenly changed their stance on the historical record and treatment of Falun Gong in China, it would still be extremely unlikely that CCP leaders would alter theirs. With nearly two decades’ worth of resources having gone into fighting Falun Gong, the Party cannot simply retreat from its position. The nature and scale of the anti-​ Falun Gong campaign in China makes this sort of back-​pedalling by the Party  –​and with it, improved access for Falun Gong advocates  –​all but impossible. In the end, it comes as little surprise that Falun Gong’s campaign for justice turned out as it did. While a strong base of external support combined with internal network capacity and attachment to principle has allowed the campaign to sustain itself for eighteen years, the same unwavering mobilization has fuelled, not weakened, China’s resolve on the issue. Still, Falun Gong fights on. Strengthening China’s anti-​piracy regime Compared to Falun Gong, the campaign to improve IPRs in China has been a roaring success. Now a virtual fixture of China’s commercial landscape,

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56  The advocacy trap the foreign governments, free trade advocates, and business associations that comprise the network have not merely been privy to discussions about intellectual property protections, but partners in the development of a comprehensive national framework that commits China to fighting piracy within and beyond its borders. Two factors underlie this occurrence. The first is the convergence of transnational and Chinese economic aspirations. For the many firms IPR lobbyists represent, China’s domestic market is the proverbial golden goose. Unlocking the potential of more than a billion new customers is paramount, and necessitates that freer, fairer competition be doggedly pursued. Beijing has an equal interest in this agenda, and is primarily concerned with promoting competition through IPR protections in order to keep China attractive as a place for foreigners to do business and thus support its primarily export-​led model of economic development. The second reason for the emergence of China’s IPR regime is more path-​ dependent. Specific laws regarding trademark, patent, and copyright protection have been on the books since 1979, and were adopted ‘with a view to protecting consumer interests, and promoting development of the socialist commodity economy’ (State Administration for Industry and Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, 2001). Embedded deep within the institutions and ethos of reform-​era China, the addition of new provisions in areas such as advertising and technology transfers reflects the natural evolution of Chinese capitalism. They also rest comfortably alongside the more general reform of civil litigation procedures designed by post-​Deng CCP leaders to lubricate the machinery of commerce. Ranking Party members touted the 2008 Beijing Games as a special opportunity to expand the rule of law and the Chinese economy with more robust IPR protection measures (Wang, 2005: 293). However, the successful creation of China’s IPR protection regime should not be confused with the actual state of IPR protection in China, which remains spotty. A considerable gap exists between the commitments expressed in Beijing’s anti-​piracy legislation and the impact of these laws on bringing the problem under control, something that has sparked further transitional advocacy for the strengthening of China’s IPR regime. As one observer remarks, ‘critics have argued that China’s current system of intellectual property protection is more of a wish list for foreign investors than a realistic and effective system of enforceable rules to protect actual rights’ (Palmer, 2000–​2001: 450). At the same time, the methods for making and selling counterfeit goods have grown increasingly sophisticated, leading to the problem of piracy becoming more widespread across multiple sectors of the Chinese economy. Manufacturers of electronics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, computer

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The power of state preferences    57 software, cigarettes, and liquor have all been the victims of brand name rip-​ offs or intellectual property theft of one sort or another, as have the digital music, motion picture, and auto parts industries. Knock-​off CDs and DVDs can be purchased from vendors manning ramshackle carts on the street corners of virtually every major Chinese city. A 2004 lawsuit by General Motors against Chinese automaker Chery over the latter’s apparent piracy of a mini-​ car developed by Daewoo, a Korea-​based affiliate of General Motors, made international headlines. Even the retail outlets that sell legitimate goods to the public are vulnerable to counterfeit. In July 2011, operators of a fake Apple computer store in Kunming fooled their own employees into thinking they actually represented the company and that the products they were selling were authentic. China and the international IPR regime Development of China’s IPR framework was given a considerable nudge by anti-​piracy agreements at the international level and Beijing’s eagerness to be more integrated and compliant with them. A major foreign policy goal of the world’s leading economies, the last thirty years have witnessed a proliferation of treaties removing the barriers to trade imposed by weak IPR legislation at the domestic level. China has signed nearly all of them, including the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1984, the Madrid Protocol Concerning the International Protection of Marks, the Washington Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits in 1989, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992, the Geneva Phonograms Convention in 1993, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 1994. As with other areas of international cooperation, China was a relative latecomer to the modern intellectual property regime, which has its antecedents in much older institutions. Both the Berne and Paris Conventions date from 1893, as does the United International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property (translated from the French Bureaux Internationaux Réunis pour la Protection de la Propriété Intellectuelle, BIRPI), which was established that year for their administration. BIRPI’s successor was the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), created in 1967 with a mandate to ‘encourage creative activity, and to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world’ (Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization, 1967). Converted to a specialized agency of the UN in 1974, its main function is to supply information to other organs in the UN system –​including the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the United Nations

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58  The advocacy trap Conference on Trade and Development, and others –​through publication of the annual World Intellectual Property Report, the Global Innovation Index, and, more recently, the creation of WIPOnet, an online service linking the IPR protection bodies of WIPO’s 185 member states with the aim of ‘developing a balanced and accessible international intellectual property system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest’ (World Intellectual Property Organization, n.d.). One of the early problems with the UN framework, however, was the lack of formal mechanisms to ensure the compliance of national policies with international treaty commitments. Despite the general agreement that something should be done to make IPR protections more stringent, states faced few incentives to toughen their own and took fundamentally divergent approaches to IPR regulations at the interstate level, with developed countries viewing them as a means to protect their industries from piracy and the developing ones as a path to economic development (Nie, 2007: 110). Thus the expansion of the international policy framework under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and WTO emphasized the need for greater enforcement standards. Ratified as part of the WTO system in 1994, the Agreement on Trade-​ Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights –​commonly known as the TRIPS Agreement –​gave some teeth to the global IPR regime by going beyond the harmonization of national policies to require the adoption of civil and administrative remedies (such as provisions for the confiscation or destruction of pirated goods, or the withholding of their release from border crossings), as well as criminal penalties for the sale, manufacture, and traffic of pirated goods, provided that their imposition is not unreasonably slow, complicated, or costly (International Intellectual Property Alliance, 2004: 2–​3). Beneath the web of international laws and regulations, IPR issues loom large in bilateral negotiations, their importance in the foreign policies of the world’s economic powers undeniably giving them a sense of urgency in China. Yet uneven enforcement standards remain a persistent barrier in deepening economic cooperation between China and its trade partners, especially the United States. Since 1992, Sino-​US relations on IPRs have principally been governed by a Memorandum of Understanding committing China to extending its copyright protection to foreign owners of software, books, firms, digital recordings, and other previously unprotected media. The document gave the Office of the US Trade Representative some political cover with the stateside IPR lobby, but did not result in more effective Chinese enforcement standards. In fact, the production of counterfeit merchandise is thought to have actually expanded after the agreement was

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The power of state preferences    59 signed, prompting the Americans to push for two further rounds of negotiation in 1995 and 1996 (Mertha and Pahre, 2005: 702). The combination of US frustration over the need for repeated talks, which stressed the slow pace of improvement, and Chinese annoyance at being humiliated into returning to the bargaining table, has proven troublesome for commercial dealings and a significant quagmire in Sino-​US relations more broadly, with American opinion divided over the best way forward. As Cornell University political scientist Andy Mertha explains, ‘Many in the US IPR community argue that the best way to get China to act is by exerting pressure to compel Beijing through the use (or threat) of sanctions and blandishments to improve IPR enforcement’ (Mertha, 2005:  2). Believing that ‘the best protection is prevention’, the embassy in Beijing advises US firms and patent-​seekers to educate themselves on China’s regulatory environment (Embassy of the United States Beijing, n.d.). Other countries also prefer the strategy of ensuring that their businesses are kept aware and equipped to deal with the potential risks imposed by China’s IPR situation. A guide for British companies produced by the UK Intellectual Property Office is explicitly intended ‘to explain, rather than play down, the current level of IPR abuse’ in China (Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom, 2008: 14). Citing the vagaries of the Chinese market and fears of industrial espionage, Canadian officials counsel their constituents to seek professional, legal and consular assistance before pursuing business deals in China, according to one representative of the Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (Confidential Interview, 2009d). China’s IPR system: a work in progress Construction of China’s IPR regime has mirrored the opening and reform of its domestic institutions more broadly since 1978. Adopted in December of that year, the Communiqué of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee examined the question of a ‘socialist legal system’ to give structural support to the new economic policy and serve as a source of renewed legitimacy for the CCP (Lubman, 1999; Potter, 1994). To that end, IPR protection was viewed by the leadership as an essential component of China’s overall modernization plan that would at once encourage China’s science and technology sectors while providing assurances to foreign firms parting with their own technology and investments (Palmer, 2000–​2001: 457). The earliest and most consequential sign of this new thinking in action was the Agreement on Trade Relations of 1979, which aimed to normalize economic ties between the United States and China by introducing basic standards of trademark protection beneficial to the interests of both countries.

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60  The advocacy trap Over the following decade, a more comprehensive system of IPR protection began to take shape that included China’s joining WIPO in 1980, adoption of the first Trademark Law in 1982, the Patent Law in 1984, and the Copyright Law in 1990. The 1990s witnessed the most aggressive expansion of the system up to that point, with special protections for computer software enacted in 1991, the Law Against Unfair Competition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1993, the Advertising Law in 1994, and the Regulations on Customs Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in 1995. With its accession to the WTO in November 2001, China found itself under heightened pressure and international scrutiny to strengthen its own IPR laws and institutions. Although it had put in place several of the required measures prior to WTO accession under the terms of the GATT, the need for more TRIPS-​compliant domestic restructuring was a key factor motivating revisions to China’s Patent, Trademark and Copyright Laws in 2002, and the emergence of new bureaucratic bodies in the years since.13 Established in 1980 as the Chinese Patent Office, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) is charged with ‘organizing and coordinating IPR nationwide and improving the construction of IPR protection system [sic]’. It also conducts preliminary examinations of patent applications and has the power to investigate cases of patent infringement (State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2009). Trademark issues are the purview of the Trademark Office, a part of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, while the National Copyright Administration handles all matters related to copyright protection and the administration of sanctions against violators. In some cases, bureaucratic bodies have been created to combat trademark or patent violations in specific industries. For example, the State Drug Administration, which reports directly to the State Council, houses the Office for Administrative Protection of Pharmaceuticals, which takes an interest in intellectual property issues relating to prescription medication. A  Software Title Verification Office is responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of Chinese-​made CD-​ROM applications by cross-​checking their contents with US-​based software companies. The administrative apparatus is not only wide but deep, with sub-​ provincial offices to oversee and investigate IPR matters in local jurisdictions. For example, the Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, formerly the local patent office, is ‘the competent governmental authority in charge of patent affairs and the coordinating authority for foreign-​related intellectual property issues in Shanghai Municipality’ (Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, n.d.). Parallel agencies can be found in each of China’s fastest growing commercial centres, as well as in smaller and relatively far-​flung places such as Lanzhou and Urumqi.

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The power of state preferences   61 At the heart of this increasingly complex web of agencies, ministries, and commissions is a larger effort to gather the information necessary for better IPR protection standards. Issued by the State Council in 2008, the National Intellectual Protection Strategy calls for creation of high-​quality databases to address specific IPR challenges in different industries and geographic regions (State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2008). Special IPR courts have been set up in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian, and Hainan to handle individual disputes, resulting in a growing body of case law to guide and standardize judicial decision-​making.14 These exist within the Higher People’s Courts in each jurisdiction, though separate bodies have also been established at the level of the Intermediate People’s Courts in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. The Supreme People’s Court has also had its own intellectual property division since 1992. All told, it has settled some 62,997 administrative cases and 8,717 judicial cases since 2005, with 90 per cent of the latter being civil actions (Thomas, 2007: 88). Additionally, a series of training programmes have been established at Beijing, Wuhan, and Renmin universities to educate lawyers, judges, and other officials on the need for stronger IPR protection measures and how these may be implemented. With so many legal and administrative resources dedicated to IPR protection, why has enforcement remained so uneven? Prime suspects include cascading capacity levels across the Chinese political system leading to weak implementation of central government policies at lower tiers, the prioritization of protections for certain industries over others, or some combination of the two.15 Another possibility is that IPR norms enforced globally and implemented nationally take time to trickle down, and the fact that diffusion is bound to be slower in some places than others. ‘China has long been arguing that because of its vast area and population, there is a gap between the understanding of the norms of IPR and using the norms as rules of behaviors’, as Gordon Cheung explains (Cheung, 2009: 4). But Chinese policy-​makers also have good economic reasons for keeping things the way they are. Weaker IPR protections allow China to produce low-​cost imitations of the goods it imports, but they also discourage domestic innovation. In effect, more stringent policies raise the cost of technology transfer, making the enforcement of anti-​piracy measures beneficial, but only up to a point.16 Counterfeiting is also big business in its own right, with some of the largest operations having vertically integrated networks that handle material sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and retailing all under the same command structure. All things considered, Chinese officials at a variety of levels have incentives to protect the status quo, promising their international partners tougher enforcement while adopting an attitude of wilful negligence towards IPR theft occurring on their watch.

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62  The advocacy trap Some have gone even further to suggest that counterfeiters and officials are, quite literally, partners in crime. Mertha recalls one incident of a large-​ scale piracy operation being run from a building that also housed government offices (Mertha, 2005:  2). Referring to the ability to placate foreign critics while continuing to reap the rewards of piracy, one foreign official in Shanghai remarked, ‘They [the Chinese Government] have absolutely zero incentive to fix this [IPR violations] … promising better enforcement without ever delivering lets them have their cake and eat it too’ (Confidential Interview, 2011a). Organized individualism: the transnational network for IPRs The transnational network of anti-​piracy campaigners is unique among the cases considered in this book insofar as it represents the private interests of for-​profit firms, rather than the public interests of voluntary civic activist groups. While the former exist ostensibly to serve the greater good, the business magnates, industry associations, trade guilds, and government officials working in China for better IPR protection have somewhat different goals in mind. This does not mean that they are motivated solely by the pursuit of profit any more than do-​gooders elsewhere are driven purely by principle, but it does have implications for the way the network operates, and in particular for its structure and modes of communication. Composed of corporate players that could easily be competitors in any other context, the network is less cohesive than most others examined here. Information sharing has also been slow to develop, and understandably so. It is difficult to build a sense of community and purpose where partners are reluctant to trust one another, and even more so when their cooperation is motivated by a fear of stolen ideas. Thus, while members of the IPR network work towards a common goal rooted in shared values about the nature of capitalism and fair competition, they do not always pursue it together, at least not knowingly. With advocacy in China tied much more closely to the needs of specific industries in specific countries than the instructions of a transnational body, interaction among constituent groups tends to be more ad hoc than in other networks. Consequently, the campaign resembles a federation of allies whose modus operandi is more akin to conventional industry lobbying than the guerilla-​ style activism of Falun Gong. Participation is skewed heavily in favour of organizations from places that not only have IPR interests in China to protect and further, but the means to accomplish that end. Even those purporting to have international membership are dominated by US companies in practice, and represent the industries most deeply affected by piracy. For example, the International

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The power of state preferences    63 Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is a private sector coalition composed of seven member associations representing more than 3,200 US companies in nearly every industry covered by international copyright agreements. Based in Washington, the group submits an annual report to the US Trade Representative on behalf of its members outlining problems and making recommendations for tackling IPR infringement in over forty countries, including China (International Intellectual Property Protection Alliance, 2013). Also headquartered in Washington, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) ‘is a trade association for owners of patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets’, and the only one in the United States serving all intellectual property owners in all industries and all fields of technology (Intellectual Property Owners Association, n.d.). TechAmerica, which calls itself ‘the largest and strongest voice and resource for technology in the United States’, is a merger of the American Electronic Association (AeA), the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, the Information Technology Association of America, and the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association. A recent report by the organization makes the focus of its advocacy plain: ‘China must pursue fair and responsible trade policies to avoid straining the US-​China relationship. This includes fair exchange rate policies, respect for intellectual property rights (IPR), complete WTO compliance and acceptance of international standards’ (TechAmerica, 2008). A swath of Chinese organizations complements the network’s multi-​ industry transnational contingent. Many are state-​based and blur the lines between non-​profit, government, and private interests. For example, the Shanghai-​ based Quality Brands Protection Committee aims ‘to work cooperatively with the Chinese central and local governments, local industry and other organizations to make positive contributions to intellectual property rights in the People’s Republic of China’, and is just one of dozens of groups across the country to do so (Quality Brands Protection Committee of China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, 2005). Its parent organization, the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, reports to the Ministry of Commerce of the PRC and counts among its board members of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, four provincial governors, the Mayors of Beijing and Shanghai, Vice-​Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Tianjin People’s Congress, and executives from the Chinese branches of Coca-​Cola, Siemens, Sony, Wal-​Mart, Johnson and Johnson, Motorola, and British Petroleum (China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, 2005). Collaboration is also common between semi-​official industry lobbyists in China and their foreign counterparts. From its regional headquarters in Singapore, the Motion Picture Association of America –​which represents six major US studios including

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64  The advocacy trap Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Walt Disney Studios, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLLP, and Warner Bros. Entertainment Incorporated –​partners with domestic groups such as the Motion Picture Association of China in the fight against illegal video distribution. The relationship between the two organizations, like those of countless others, is functional, if occasionally fraught, and offers US companies an opportunity to raise their concerns directly with those responsible for overseeing the production of rival content. Even if it does not produce immediate results in terms of cracking down on piracy, keeping the lines of communication open can help forge links to customs inspectors, police, and other domestic agencies who may be of assistance in combatting the problem in the longer term (Lagerqvist and Riley, 1997: 10). ‘Talking is better than not talking’, says one US movie industry spokesperson. ‘You never know who knows who.’ Selling IPRs in China Lacking an indigenous legal tradition of IPR protection, the concept of intellectual property traces its origins in China to the early twentieth century when it was introduced by colonial powers. Drawn up in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, the 1902 Mackay Treaty with Great Britain and 1903 Treaty with the United States both provided for the protection of foreign trademarks. China’s first copyright law was adopted by the Qing government in 1910 to protect ‘works of literature and art, pamphlets, calligraphy, photographs, sculptures and models’ (Song, 1991: 43). The law was revised twice  –​once in 1915, and again under the Guomindang in 1928, the latter measure remaining in effect until the 1949 communist takeover. As in most other areas of law and policy, copyright laws in the early years of the PRC borrowed extensively from the Soviet model. In his exhaustive history of IPRs in China, William P. Alford recounts that in August 1950, the new communist regime instituted its Provisional Regulations on the Protection of Inventions Rights and Patent Rights, which guaranteed inventors recognition for their achievements by awarding a ‘certificate of inventions’, but gave the state unlimited rights to appropriate the invention. New procedures for registering trademarks were enacted the same year, but few marks were ever registered. To combat this problem, registration was made compulsory under a 1963 amendment ostensibly undertaken to improve product quality. Regulation in the field of publishing made allowances for rewards to be paid to authors, though this remuneration was contingent upon the nature and quality of the work as defined by the authorities (Alford, 1995). With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1965 to 1966, however,

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The power of state preferences   65 the Soviet-​inspired system of the post-​revolutionary era was dismantled, and the activities of copyright seekers, especially those in creative industries, were severely curtailed. It was not until after Mao’s death that IPRs gained credence with regime leaders as a way to promote and build the socialist commodity economy. China’s opening to foreign firms in the late 1970s spurred concerns within the CCP leadership that in order to attract foreign investors, assurances had to be made that China had indeed changed and that it was a safe place for entrepreneurs to do business. In this way, the initiation of IPR protections in the early Deng years was tied to administrative law reforms and the development of the rule of law during this period more generally (Oksenberg et al., 1996; Peerenboom, 2003: 46). Thus they came to be viewed by the second and subsequent generations of Party leadership as central to the success of their economic strategy, and therefore as essential for the continued legitimacy and rule of the CCP itself. Released in 2005, a State Council White Paper linked IPR protections to core state interests as defined under Hu’s leadership vision, calling them ‘a basic legal system that promotes mankind’s economic development, social progress, scientific and technological innovation, and cultural prosperity’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2005). Recognition of IPRs as vital to the strengthening of the Party and health of the economy has yet to trickle down to the grassroots, however. In part, this may be because of the hasty manner in which many of the current mechanisms for combatting piracy have been set up (D. Yang, 2003: 1). Or it may have to do with the weak rights consciousness of the Chinese public described in surveys.17 Whatever the reason, the Chinese public does not have strong convictions regarding the need for IPRs, if they have any at all. This is especially true in rural areas, where, unsurprisingly, ‘many Chinese … do not know, or do not care about IPRs’, as one study records (Nie, 2007: 266–​267). The problem is not confined to the countryside, however. A similar lack of awareness or respect for IPRs has also been observed among Chinese enterprises (Wang, 2004). To shore up awareness of the importance of IPR protection for the economy, the central government has undertaken a campaign to educate the public. The aim, according to the 2005 White Paper, is to ‘create a social atmosphere in which labor, knowledge, talent and creation are respected, and heighten awareness of the general public regarding IPR’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2005). Beginning in 2004, the week starting 20 April was to be designated the ‘week for publicizing the importance of IPR protection’, through the aggressive use of various print and broadcast media, and was to overlap with World Intellectual Property

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66  The advocacy trap Day on 26 April. Thirteen years later, it is unclear whether the general population is sold on IPRs. The available data suggests that the public relations campaign has produced modest improvements in IPR awareness. A joint effort of SIPO and the Tsinghua University Media Survey Laboratory, the inaugural Survey on Public Intellectual Property Awareness released in 2009 found that the overall level of IPR awareness was low compared to countries at similar levels of economic development, though there were significant regional differences throughout China. Respondents in Beijing and Guangdong exhibited among the highest awareness of any population nationally. Putting the best face possible on these results, SIPO Commissioner Tian Lipu called the public relations campaigns An important step to improve the public knowledge on intellectual property rights and to encourage innovative efforts. We are happy to find an increasing number of people are getting involved in this campaign and we hope to help more people understand the importance of intellectual property rights. Through this campaign, we also hope to boost people’s awareness of the invalidity of piracy and to improve the country’s edge on innovation and creation. (Yang, 2009) Conclusion In the end, the issue of TAN effectiveness is murky, not because of the ambiguity of China’s good-​faith efforts to adopt stronger IPR protections, but because it is not at all clear that this had much to do with transnational advocacy. IPRs may not be a Chinese idea, but their prioritization by China’s post-​Mao leadership and their linkage to economic development led to the creation of a two-​way protection system of complex administrative and judicial mechanisms. This is broadly in line with the lobbying efforts of transnational actors hoping to see China get tough with the pirates that seem to operate with impunity within its borders. The effectiveness of these measures is a whole other ballgame. Infringement of copyrights, patents, and other protected material remains pervasive, and can be seen first-​hand on virtually any street corner in any city across the country. This in turn raises the question of whether China is as serious about upholding IPRs as it claims, and why a state so motivated to fix the problem continues to experience it. One possibility is that the persistent problem of piracy is not as economically counter-​productive as many suggest, and that an ideas economy can co-​exist with underground markets. Such an arrangement might be the best-​case scenario for China, which could at once appease international investor economies by ‘doing

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The power of state preferences    67 their best’ to fight piracy while at the same time allowing an increasingly well-​to-​do entrepreneurial class to flourish and the poorest of China’s poor to eke out a living they might otherwise be without by selling counterfeit DVDs on the street. Still, one cannot pretend there aren’t consequences for failing to uphold IPRs in the long run. If strengthening IPR protections is as important for the economy and the Party as is claimed, the short-​sightedness of not weeding out IP theft could in time become politically salient as well, stunting the growth of China’s high-​tech sector. For a government so preoccupied with its own stability and longevity, there is an inherent danger in sending the message that crime  –​even white-​collar crime  –​pays. Failure to effectively deal with the problem could have international consequences too. In particular, it could be taken as a signal by the global community that China overpromised on its ability to deliver IPR reform, leading in the long term to a decline in prestige and the worth of China’s word, ultimately undermining investor confidence instead of building bridges. State power and the ‘natural cases’ of Falun Gong and IPR protection At first glance, the exploration of two such seemingly contradictory cases in a single chapter might appear perplexing. After all, the Falun Gong and IPR campaigns achieved wildly disparate results, and vary along a number of other dimensions as well, most notably issue profile and internal cohesion. However, consideration of these cases together comes with a major theoretical boon –​it demonstrates that TAN impacts can vary even within and among campaigns of like functional form. Returning to the paradigmatic families introduced in chapter one, state power and preference was a determinative factor in the results and process of each campaign. By comparison, there is very little to confirm the liberal/​ society-​oriented hypothesis that domestic social preferences exerted significant effect in either case. In the case of the Falun Gong campaign, there is compelling evidence of social antipathy towards the group in China. At the very least, the social and political importance of the group has been pushed off the national agenda by many more pressing concerns. The IPR protection case is more ambiguous on this account. There are certainly those who wish to strengthen perceptions of the integrity of Chinese brands and the reputation of China in general as a secure place to do business, but a far larger contingent continues to benefit from lax enforcement of IPR protection standards, and it is not at all obvious that many IPR violators in China are even cognizant of their own offending.

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68  The advocacy trap Nor is it clear that the third type of hypothesis, which premises the success of a TAN on a dissemination of norms and values and an accompanying shift in identity brought on by mechanisms of socialization, held much water in the case of either campaign. It cannot be said that Falun Gong’s strategy of binding its claims to existing human rights norms or treaties have brought many victories to the campaign on its behalf. Likewise, if international trade norms are so powerful, why is China such a laggard on effective IPR enforcement? The answer is partly that China lacks an indigenous tradition of IPR awareness, one which has not yet shifted into line with the norms and policies of emergent Chinese institutions in the field of IPRs, even though ‘demand’ for change from within the central state for stronger IPR protection is high. However, this is a problem of governance in China not directly related to TAN activity. State preferences for better IPR protection may be sufficiently strong to encourage cooperation with transnational actors on the issue, yet not always strong enough to enforce compliance within Chinese borders. Notes 1 For one such book-​length account, see Shi (1999). 2 For a collection and analysis of some of these documents, see Congressional-​ Executive Commission on China (2011). 3 For a representative sample of statements see Minghui.org (2012). 4 One study refers to Falun Gong as ‘the largest religious movement born existence to the internet’ (see Bell and Boas, 2003: 277). On the use of the internet to elude the Chinese law enforcement, see Leung (2002: 784). 5 In Canada alone, it operates six regional offices, with print editions available weekly in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. 6 See ‘Nine commentaries on the Communist Party of China’ (2011). 7 Several scholars point to the ‘spiritual vacuum’ and ‘moral disturbance’ left behind by Maoism as a key contributor to the qigong phenomenon  (see Chan, 2004; Wong, 1999: 12). 8 For a more in-​depth study of the movement and its impacts, see Ford (2011). 9 See, for example, Bourrie (2012). 10 See also de Pierrebourg and Juneau-​Katsuya (2009: 160–​162). 11 See, for example, Chu and Han (1999), Feng (2000: 18–​25), and Songqiu et al. (1999). 12 In order to ensure the compliance of officials in various public bureaus and at various levels of government, the 6–​10 mandates a system of financial rewards and punishments.

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The power of state preferences   69 13 On TRIPS compliance as a factor motivating creation of the Chinese IPR system, see Zheng (1996) and Guo and Zuo (2007). 14 For in-​depth discussions of the relevant case law and its implications, see Kolton (1996) and Xue and Zheng (2002). 15 On the relationship between state-​capacity and policy variance in different areas of IPR, see Dimitrov (2009). 16 For a more detailed and technical discussion of these conflicting incentives, see La Croix and Konan (2002). 17 See, for example, Han and Wang (2002: 106–​119), Zheng (2000), and Xia (1995).

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3

Reading the ‘lay of the land’: intercessory advocacy and causal process in the HIV/​AIDS treatment and death penalty abolitionist campaigns

T

he ‘critical’ causal pattern demonstrated by the IPR and Falun Gong campaigns is only one of many functional forms taken by TAN campaigns in China. This chapter explores another pathway, that of intercessory advocacy for qualitative changes in the content or implementation of policies already decided upon. The campaigns explored here are those concerning the development of China’s HIV/​AIDS treatment regime and abolition of its death penalty. They are presented as a pair since they both adhere to a second type of form in which advocates operate as intervening variables that may or may not shape the content of particular policy results, yet cannot be viewed as a primary impetus behind the choice to adopt new policy in the first place. To put it more simply, these ‘activist interventions’ were not changers of minds in the sense that they persuaded the state to act, though they can and sometimes do nudge the state in a certain direction once it has decided to take action. As such, these ‘activist interventions’ underscore the importance of thinking carefully about sequencing and causal attribution when assessing TAN campaigns. Just because a campaign exists on an issue around which new policies are enacted does not mean that the TAN was the primary engine of change. Indeed, as the campaign for abolition of the death penalty shows, the adoption of policies roughly congruent to TAN objectives may be largely epiphenomenal and unrelated to TAN activity. Like the cases explored in the previous chapter, those examined here reflect stark differences in results. The campaign around HIV/​AIDS treatment did succeed in pushing the state towards evidence-​based treatment

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   71 and prevention measures, while the death penalty persists in China despite the efforts of the abolitionist campaign, and coincident reduction in the raw numbers of executions carried out in recent years. However, in cases like the HIV/​AIDS campaign where intercessions do result in the nudging of policy in particular direction, they reflect the astuteness of advocates at recognizing the appropriate moment for approaching Chinese officials, choosing their tone, and making compromises where they have to. Such was the case when a transnational alliance of doctors and scientists intervened in China’s policy process to help build a comprehensive HIV treatment and prevention system compliant with international medical guidelines. Central to the story is the fact that activists sensed an opening when official attitudes changed and became more conscious of the need for a national strategy to prevent major public health crises, and the political consequences of failing to act to address AIDS. In other situations the adoption of new procedural reforms broadly congruent with TAN goals may be a matter of coincidence, dumb luck, or tokenism on the part of the target state –​something small done to placate its international critics while it pursues its own agenda for its own reasons, largely unrelated to transnational pressures. These circumstances are rare but deceptive, since they give the impression that the campaign is having a greater impact on domestic policy than it actually is. The campaign to abolish the practice of capital punishment in China, which is the focus of the second half of this chapter, is one such example of this sort of muddled causal relationship. In that instance, moves by China’s central government to deliberately scale back its use of executions gives an impression that normative pressure from transnational human rights activists is driving the country towards eventual abolition –​a claim further bolstered by strong support for an eventual phase-​out of the practice within the mainland legal community. But a closer look at the causes of the so-​called ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ legislation of 2006 and 2007 suggests that domestic politics are the root of recent changes in policy. The stated objective of the new laws is to balance retention of the death penalty with greater restraint in its use. This allows the central government to maintain capital punishment as a deterrent for serious crimes in accordance with the overwhelming balance of public opinion, but also to demonstrate greater accountability and progress in developing the rule of law through more rational, restrained, and standardized judicial decision-​making. That fewer executions are being held each year may be serendipity and grace, but it does not mean transnational advocacy had much (or anything) to do with that result. Rather, it was independently formed state preferences that had the most significant hand in the alteration of death

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72  The advocacy trap penalty policy, just as it was in the decision to change official positions on China’s HIV/​AIDS epidemic. Treatment of persons with HIV/​AIDS Since discovery of its first case in 1984, China’s rate of HIV infection has developed from a relatively localized epidemic in the border region with Myanmar to a full-​blown national health emergency. The crisis is thought to have begun sometime in early 1985, spreading to population centres across southwestern Yunnan and parts of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi via communities of intravenous drug users throughout the mid-​to-​late 1980s (Kaufman and Jing, 2002). By 1994, it had mushroomed to some thirty-​one provinces and municipalities nation-​wide, and every indication is that the situation grew increasingly dire over the subsequent ten years. Several studies reported that the overall number of sexually transmitted infections in China doubled between 1996 and 2000, with HIV chief among them (Jiang et al., 2006: 118–​123; Parish et al., 2003). Others show infection rates jumping from increases of 30 per cent per year in 1999 to 44 per cent by 2003 (Kaufman et  al., 2006:  3; Wu et  al., 2004:  7–​17). In 2002, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) warned that the total number of cases would reach twenty million by 2010 unless drastic action was taken to combat the spread of the disease (Gill et al., 2002: 97). Yet the response of China’s government remained muted for many years, even as the crisis continued to worsen. Such inaction may be explained in part by the way in which data on the rates of infection have conventionally been presented, which depict infection rates as minuscule compared to the size of the general population. For example, recent estimates indicate that less than 0.1 per cent of China’s population currently lives with HIV/​AIDS, a seemingly small number when compared to many sub-​Saharan African countries, where infection rates routinely top 30 per cent. However, this works out to more than 740,000 individual patients  –​roughly as many as in Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho combined, which have the three highest HIV infection rates in the world. Beyond the numbers are several ideological reasons for the state’s long-​ time dismissiveness towards AIDS sufferers. At the time of the initial outbreak and for much of the 1980s, HIV was heavily politicized as symptomatic of decadent foreign societies. Thus the policies put in place up to that point were designed to keep the ‘alien’ disease out of China. As late as 1995, the official Opinions on Strengthening HIV/​AIDS Prevention and Control stated that ‘HIV/​AIDS prevention is tightly related to prohibiting drug use

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   73 and prostitution, purifying socialist atmosphere, and developing socialist culture and ethics’ (Xia, 2006: 46). As this statement suggests, respectable, defensible positions on HIV in China also contained a belief that because many if not most of the infected were addicts, sex workers, or gay, they therefore had no one but themselves to blame for their failing health. Unwilling to reward such depravity, the government’s stance was rooted in an attempt to shame and stigmatize those whom it felt deserved to die (Xia, 2002:  37). Infected citizens of several Yunnan counties were denied the chance to work or attend school for similarly prejudicial reasons. By 2003, official attitudes and policies had undergone a radical change. That year, provincial and local governments spent a combined total of 22.2  million USD on HIV/​AIDS prevention and care (Gu and Renwick, 2008: 100). Central government funding reached approximately forty-​eight million, up from twelve million in 2001 and virtually no appropriations the year before that (Wu et al., 2007: 684). The year 2003 also marked the adoption of Beijing’s China CARES programme in fifty-​one of the most affected counties nation-​wide, and the landmark ‘Four Frees and One Care’ policy. The goal of the latter initiative was to provide: (a) free antiretroviral drugs to patients living in rural areas and without medical insurance; (b) free voluntary counselling and testing; (c) free drugs to all pregnant women infected with HIV to reduce risk of mother-​to-​child transmission, as well as HIV testing of newborns; (d) free education to AIDS orphans; and (e) care and economic assistance to households of those living with HIV/​AIDS. This was then followed in 2006 by two additional pieces of legislation, the State Council’s AIDS Prevention and Control Regulations, and the Five-Year Action Plan to Control HIV/​AIDS (2006–​2010). Together, these measures now form the basis of a comprehensive national treatment and prevention regime resulting from careful communication and coordination between officials from various agencies at all levels of government, foreign aid providers, intergovernmental bodies and NGOs, expert scientists, and domestic pressure groups. What explains this about-​face? Why did it occur when it did, and not sooner? The rise of Hu Jintao as head of both the Party and state in 2002–​ 2003 brought with it a more pronounced emphasis on the use of scientific evidence over ideology in formulating official responses to HIV in China. This in turn opened the door to the international development community, giving doctors, private donors, intergovernmental organizations, and non-​ governmental advocacy groups an opportunity to play a much larger role in collecting and disseminating information than had been the case previously. Particularly influential was the assistance of the transnational community

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74  The advocacy trap in HIV/​AIDS testing, which helped to provide a clearer picture of China’s AIDS crisis and thus stress the urgency of a stronger response. Armed with a better sense of the problem, China was ultimately in a better position to manage its own AIDS fight, and to more carefully target its responses where they are likely to do the most good. Identifying and communicating the needs of at-​risk populations remains a core function of foreign advocates, who are viewed as supportive partners in a challenge that is essentially China’s to overcome. According to one report, infection rates in some areas, including parts of Yunnan, Henan, and Xinjiang, exceed more than 1 per cent among pregnant women, numbers sufficient to meet UN criteria of a ‘generalized epidemic’ (Gill et al., 2007:  vi). While homosexuals remain an at-​risk group, much recent data indicates that the disease is increasingly spread through heterosexual contact in a booming commercial sex trade fed by China’s growing number of migrant workers, placing women at disproportionate risk (Kaufman et al., 2006: 3–​4). While there is no doubt that a global community of experts and activists has been a crucial support in China’s AIDS fight, it remains to be seen whether their role will be decisive in reversing the crisis. According to a February 2009 report issued jointly by the UN and Chinese central government, AIDS ranked as the leading cause of death among all infectious diseases in China for the first time in 2008 (McGivering, 2009). More recently, a joint report of China’s Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS reported that while pharmaceutical treatment coverage was available to 73.5 per cent of the infected population in 2011, an increase of more than eleven points from 2009, rates of infection continue to grow. In 2011, 28,000 people died of AIDS in China and another 48,000 were found to be newly infected (China Daily, 2012b). This suggests that ample room remains both for the scaling-​up of state-​coordinated treatment initiatives and an expanded role for foreign and domestic NGOs in their implementation. International intervention As home to the largest number of HIV-​positive individuals in the world, China has been a prime focus of the specialist international regime for treatment of the disease, one of the most extensive in any area of global advocacy. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, and sharing facilities with the WHO, UNAIDS is the world’s largest advocate for a comprehensive and coordinated global effort to stem the HIV epidemic. The organization is an invaluable source of information and inspiration across the broader UN system, incorporating more than a dozen high-​profile co-​sponsoring agencies, including the UN

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   75 High Commission for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Population Fund, UN Women, and the World Bank, and has produced countless reports outlining prevention strategies and country-​ specific recommendations to the Secretary-​General, General Assembly, and Security Council. In 2011 alone, it spearheaded both the Political Declaration on HIV/​AIDS (the second since 2006), Security Council Resolution 1983, which recognized the importance and special challenges of fighting AIDS in conflict zones, and began implementation of its ‘Getting to Zero’ strategy, a comprehensive set of targets aimed at halving infection rates and ending AIDS-​based discrimination by 2015, in concert with the Millennium Development agenda. Each of these achievements marked a significant milestone on the path to the organization’s ultimate vision of ‘Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-​related deaths’ (United Nations AIDs Strategy, 2011–​2015, n.d.). More than an information hub, UNAIDS supplies leadership and connective tissue to a larger global network of activists, mustering support from governments for HIV-​afflicted nations. Outreach activities are a major part of the strategy, and the organization regularly employs famous faces as Goodwill Ambassadors to stir public opinion and strengthen the demand for political action in states around the world. Goodwill Ambassadors are usually athletes, illustrious stars of stage and screen, and others more likely to grab attention than the standard-​issue civil society advocate. The idea is to use their celebrity to forge society-​to-​society links that can then be converted to intergovernmental action and collaboration. Australian-​born Oscar nominee Naomi Watts, singer Annie Lennox, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, footballers Michael Ballack and Myung-​Bo Hong, Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-​Marit, Malinese musician Toumani Diabaté, and Bollywood icon Aishwarya Rai Bachchan have all served as representatives of UNAIDS, their cosmopolitan profile appealing to a breadth of countries and cultures. A  similar logic guides the selection of the UN Special Envoys for HIV/​AIDS, who are chosen by the Secretary-​General for their knowledge of specific countries or regions, for their honorifics and technical expertise, and for their visibility in the international policy community, rather than their celebrity cache. An integral part of the UNAIDS mission is to work with individual governments, and to assist in the coordination of resources for the AIDS fight at the grassroots. This is the primary function of the organization in China, where it first opened up shop in 1996. However, it was not until after the Chinese government demonstrated its commitment with the tabling of two strategic policy documents in 2006, the ‘HIV/​AIDS Prevention

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76  The advocacy trap and Care Regulation’ and ‘China’s Action Plan for Reducing and Preventing the Spread of HIV/​AIDS (2006–​2010)’, that Chinese and UN objectives were finally harmonized. Announced in early 2007, the Joint Programme on HIV/​AIDS (2007–​2010) involved participation by all ten co-​sponsoring UN agencies in some aspect of advocacy or resource mobilization in China’s AIDS fight, while leaving primary responsibility and final authority to the central government. ‘While UNAIDS supports and strengthens national coordination in China, it does not substitute for it’, reads the organization’s website. ‘On the contrary, the Chinese authorities are responsible for the overall coordination of AIDS activities at all levels and also for external assistance, including that from the UN and UNAIDS itself’ (United Nations Aids in China, n.d.). The state looms large in other UN-​sponsored initiatives as well. Creation of the UN ‘Theme Group’ on HIV/​AIDS under the aegis of the UN Resident Coordinator was intended to encourage Chinese and international NGOs to join in the dialogue on HIV in China alongside government and international partners, and to provide practical advice, monitoring, training, and other on-​the-​ground technical support where appropriate. The stated aim is to strengthen China’s overall national capacity to tackle HIV/​AIDS and to ensure a sustainable long-​term response, though cynics say the group is just a way for the government to supervise NGOs it does not entirely trust while allowing them to pay for programmes it does not want to fund (Confidential Interviews, 2011b). Contrary to the experience of many NGOs in China, the Theme Group’s website concedes that its establishment ‘has been an easy task’, presumably because it is meant to assist with the implementation of an agenda that has already been agreed upon, rather than to shape the agenda primarily (United Nations Aids in China, n.d.). That job belongs instead to the Chinese Ministry of Health, which serves as the designated focal point for the disbursement of all international aid for HIV/​AIDS programming. Tasked with the coordination of multisectoral support, a special coordinating group made up of representatives from the Ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade, Public Security and the All China Women’s Federation decide who receives funding for what type of programme, when they get it, and in what amount. Though the panel operates as a counterpart to UNAIDS co-​sponsoring agencies under the auspices of the Theme Group, it reports solely and directly to the State Council, thereby leaving foreign entities who donate resources for the struggle against HIV in China little say over precisely how their money is used, though they may, through proper channels, make recommendations. The foot in the door afforded activists by the UNAIDS Theme Group has also benefitted a host of bilateral donors in the fight against AIDS in

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   77 China. Recognizing the utter futility and self-​defeating logic of attaching conditionalities to Official Development Assistance for HIV programming, most choose to focus instead on building relationships with Chinese officials in the hope of nudging them towards the development of best practices, and prioritizing at-​risk populations. The US government, for example, stresses development of what it calls ‘health systems’ or ‘models’ that can be replicated by provincial governments in China and adapted to suit their particular needs. Exposing officials to the latest research and monitoring techniques lies at the core of the plan (Congressional Research Service, 2013: 9). In the same vein, the China Australia Health and HIV/​AIDS Facility was designed and funded by AusAID to allow China to strengthen the capacity of its own health services though better HIV/​AIDS prevention and care. The UK–​China AIDS Prevention Programme offered safer-​sex training and needle exchange services to sex workers and drug users in eighty-​three counties across Sichuan and Yunnan. According to one estimate, the initiative succeeded in preventing some 130,000 possible infections and cost the British government 19.9 million GBP from 2000 to 2006 (Xinhua News Agency, 2006a). The evolution of China’s response to HIV/​AIDS Opportunities for outside intervention in China’s AIDS crisis result from a range of institutional factors, including some related to the administrative organization of state health agencies in China, their varying capacities, and understandings of the epidemic. It is no secret that the health-​care system of reform-​era China is highly disjointed, with coverage ladled out in tiers to patients in different geographic areas, leaving cash-​strapped clinics in some areas reliant on user fees to make up financial shortfalls (Blumenthal and Hsiao, 2005: 1165–​1170; Liu et al., 1999: 1349–​1356). As a result, there are huge disparities in the quality and availability of care nation-​wide. Those living in relatively poor, rural parts of the country are the most negatively affected, and often have to make do with less than adequate health services. It is not a surprise that the parts of the country hardest hit by HIV/​AIDS are also the least developed. These include some of the most impoverished areas of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Henan. In the absence of standardized, modern care procedures, many espouse traditional remedies as a more cost-​effective form of treatment. The Chinese government has worked feverishly in recent years to address the problem, investing more than 125 billion USD from 2009 to 2012, but the inequalities in the system appear as persistent as they are vast (Wall Street Journal, 2012).

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78  The advocacy trap In practice, the unevenness in China’s health-​care coverage has meant that authorities in some parts of the country were better equipped to respond than others when faced with sudden, unforeseen challenges. A  lack of modern facilities, and at times dereliction of duty by health officials, has greatly exacerbated the AIDS epidemic. Prior to the ban on imported blood products imposed by the central government in 1996, collection stations were established in many poor rural areas offering 50 RMB for plasma and 200 RMB for blood donations in order to make up the shortfall in supply. Composed mainly of subsistence farmers, local populations jumped at the chance to pocket the extra money. In one well-​publicized incident in 1994, residents of Shangcai county, Henan –​later dubbed ‘AIDS County’ –​contracted HIV after selling their plasma at these makeshift clinics. Reportedly, blood taken from them was pooled with that of other donors in unsanitary containers and the plasma removed before being re-​injected back into their bodies. One estimate claims that over 60 per cent of the population of Wenlou village became infected in this way (Zheng, 2009: 3). The Shangcai story is more than a mere anecdote. A  joint report of the State Council AIDS Working Committee and the UNAIDS Theme Group estimates that of the 85,000 Chinese living with full-​blown AIDS as of 2008, about 35,000 first contracted it through commercial blood donation and transfusion (State Council AIDS Working Committee Office and UN Theme Group on AIDS, 2008: 5). For years afterwards, the Chinese government remained in denial of the escalating crisis, and refused to acknowledge the culpability of state health services in what had happened in places like Shangcai. Between 1999 and 2002, coverage of the Henan blood sales scandal in state media outlets downplayed or whitewashed the extent of government involvement, fearful this would expose the woeful inadequacies of public health policies throughout much of rural China. Allegations of more hostile state responses were also made, including the jailing of several prominent HIV/​ AIDS activists. Wan Yanhai, probably China’s most high-​profile crusader for the rights of the HIV-​positive, was arrested and held for almost a month after distributing a report of the Henan Health Bureau that allegedly covered up that office’s extensive involvement in the Shangcai county disaster. Noted HIV/​AIDS activist Hu Jia alleges that state officials worked to impede access and withhold information from WHO experts visiting China during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) for fear they would be implicated in the earlier blood sale debacle. Taking his critique a step further, Hu has done much to expose the punitive attitudes underlying government complacence, noting that on several occasions, residents of Shangcai were denied medical care on the grounds that

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   79 they were, in the words of one county secretariat official, ‘not people, but demons’ (Hu, 2007: 27). Slowly, however, government attitudes began to change in ways that opened up new possibilities for transnational involvement. Large-​scale public health scares like the one in Shangcai led to a growing realization that government action on such matters would have to be more decisive and much more empathetic if the Party was to avoid political retribution. Anticipating the consequences of failing to keep the public safe, a series of workshops were held beginning in 1997 to explore new policy options for dealing with China’s growing AIDS problem. One of these in particular, orchestrated by the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine (renamed the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in 2002), and the University of California Los Angeles, brought together international experts in the fields of public health, sociology, education, and ethics, as well as representatives of international agencies such as the World Bank, WHO, and various other UN bodies to present hard scientific evidence on the nature and extent of the crisis to officials from a variety of Chinese government departments. Specifically, testimony was heard from scientists and scholars that the number of those infected in China continued to grow, that HIV had had devastating effects on the population in other countries and regions, notably in sub-​Saharan Africa, and that the increasing rate of HIV in China could be halted or reversed with targeted interventions. It was the first recorded incident of rigorous, evidence-​based research ever having been raised in a discussion of China’s AIDS policy that had for so long been dominated by moralistic arguments. While it proved contentious for some of the more conservative Chinese officials, the conference is credited with helping to chart the course of China’s response from that point forward, especially its attitude towards marginalized and high-​risk groups. Indeed, many of those who presented evidence played key roles in the subsequent writing of strategic policy documents, including the Chinese National Medium and Long-​term Strategic Plan for HIV/​AIDS (1998–​2010), made public in late 1998, and China’s Action Plan on HIV/​ AIDS Prevention and Containment (2001–​ 2005), released three years later. The increased reliance on scientific evidence provided inspiration for improving data-​collection methods, in turn allowing Chinese and partnering agencies to arrive at more reliable estimates of infection rates and better evaluate the effectiveness of prevention and control strategies. By using more scientifically defensible and up-​to-​date sampling techniques, the 2005 Update on the HIV/​AIDS Epidemic and Response in China revised earlier estimates of the total number of the infected from 840,000 to 650,000, giving policy-​makers the impetus to ramp up prevention strategies and meet target goals (Parry, 2006).

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80  The advocacy trap A further factor in the turnaround of official attitudes was the change in state leadership itself. The 2003 transfer of state leadership marked a definitive turning point in the development of China’s AIDS regime, bringing to Beijing a new cohort of policy entrepreneurs for whom fighting the disease was a top priority. Vice-​Premier and Minster of Health Wu Yi, lauded as the ‘Goddess of Transparency’ for her handling of the SARS crisis, was also made visible, and publicly declared AIDS to be her primary focus while in office. On 1 December 2003, World AIDS Day, Wu and Premier Wen Jiabao visited a Beijing hospital and shook hands with AIDS patients before a bank of cameras, a symbolic gesture that signalled the new leadership’s intent to take the epidemic seriously, develop new measures for prevention and treatment, and, importantly, destigmatize AIDS as an affliction of addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals. For many of the Party brass, the experience of SARS in Hong Kong and neighbouring parts of the mainland softened up the ground for a more compassionate, non-​moralistic stance on HIV. Meeting with a group of reporters at Bangkok hotel in October 2003, newly installed president Hu Jintao was clear and careful in announcing that he ‘felt like his heart was on fire’ when he heard of the SARS outbreak and its cost in human lives (China Daily, 2003). Moreover, the outbreak was a pivotal turning point in the realization of the need for China’s leaders to never again appear as callous or inept as they had in the face of previous public health crises. Instead of treating patients like degenerates who deserved their fate, as they had done previously with HIV cases, the SARS scare gave the Party leadership a chance to show both its human face and its ability to navigate China safely through times of severe crisis –​a political win-​win. This stance dovetailed neatly with the spirit and ideology of the new administration. Linked to the principle of harm reduction and protection for the most vulnerable and marginalized in Chinese society, funding for health programmes, particularly AIDS prevention, was viewed as essential to the achievement of social harmony and became some of the key features of the ‘Scientific Outlook on Development’. Importantly, the new official ideology also signalled a pronounced shift in the demand for scientific evidence as the basis of policy-​making, in contrast to the moralistic stances that had predominated through the 1990s. As evidence of the shift in state thinking accompanying the leadership transition, a 2004 directive of the State Council declared that HIV/​AIDS prevention and control is linked to economic development, social stability, and national security and prosperity. Long-​term

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   81 commitment to respond to HIV/​AIDS is hence necessary. In order to respond to and contain HIV/​AIDS in China, local governments must: realize the importance and urgent need for prevention and control; integrate HIV/​AIDS into the routine government agenda as an important item; strengthen the leadership, streamline and coordinate efforts; and, urgently and effectively respond to and contain HIV/​ AIDS, which is a priority linked to the interest and benefit of China and its people. (State Council, 2004) Increased funding and a focus on scientific data collection are hallmarks of Xi’s policy as well, and greater emphasis than ever before has been placed on destigmatizing the illness with a view to preventing a crisis of social stability. In November 2013, Xinhua quoted Xi as saying that ‘the prevention and control of HIV/​AIDS concerns the people’s life and health and social harmony and stability and is the obligatory responsibility of the Party and the government’ (Xinhua News Agency, 2013). Probably no one has been more vocal about changing attitudes towards AIDS sufferers than Peng Liyuan, an HIV/​AIDS goodwill ambassador for the WHO and China’s Ministry of Health, and Xi’s wife. In late 2014, she released a music video calling for an end to discrimination against those who have the disease. In it, she can be heard leading a group of HIV-​positive children –​all students of the Red Ribbon School in Linfen, Shaanxi province –​in song as they play outdoors. Released on 1 December to coincide with World AIDS Day, the video is meant to demonstrate that the president’s spouse was not risking infection by interacting with the children, and that as children they in no way deserved what had happened to them. Such a move, and the ideology it was based on, would have been nearly unthinkable for earlier generations of Chinese First Ladies. In this instance, however, it was part of a larger public relations effort by Party leaders, one that included Premier Li Keqiang greeting patients at Beijing’s You An Hospital, a special facility for HIV/​AIDS sufferers, where he announced an increase in funding in 2015 to fight AIDS among China’s highest-​risk groups (Zhao and Wang, 2014). Mobilizing the knowledge network Incomplete donor lists and a lack of uniform reporting procedures make it nearly impossible to pinpoint the precise number of transnational organizations or dollars spent fighting AIDS in China at any given moment. Financial contributions to combatting HIV are often publicized as part of aid schemes targeting ‘multisectoral development outcomes’, which may or may not

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82  The advocacy trap be limited to public health, or are otherwise listed in non-​specific ways. Nonetheless, private philanthropic organizations play a major role in China’s HIV/​AIDS prevention strategy, with several recognizable names dominating the field. The Global Fund has contributed more than 400 million USD to date, making it the largest foreign contributor to fighting AIDS in China and second overall after the Chinese government itself (Han et al., 2006). Other foreign notables include the Ford Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, Save the Children UK, Avert, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Médecins Sans Frontières, each of which has made China’s AIDS crisis a major focus of their fundraising. As of 2009, the Gates Foundation had pledged over fifty million USD to fund partnerships between government and local NGOs working closely with at risk populations, and another seven million USD to scientists at Peking University working on development of a vaccine (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2009). The Ford Foundation has similarly taken a multi-​pronged approach to grant-​making, approving more than twenty-​one million USD to support NGOs in areas such as the promotion of reproductive rights and health, as well as combatting HIV/​ AIDS-​based discrimination. This funding was distributed across a total of sixty-​six projects in 2014 (Ford Foundation, 2014). While the established research and fundraising contacts of figures like the Clintons and the Gates provides invaluable material support, NGOs and public health experts are the brains behind the campaign. Indeed, the main function of the large foreign NGOs is to collect and distribute money, providing local development workers with the means to provide most of the actual services on the ground. One estimate from 2009 pegged the number of Chinese NGOs, government organized non-​government organizations (GONGOs), think tanks, and grassroots groups engaged in HIV education and prevention at over 200 (Zheng, 2009: 4). In 2012, the China Daily suggested the figure was nearly 1,000 (China Daily, 2012b). Most of these domestic organizations are service-​oriented and committed to prevention and fighting discrimination against those infected with HIV through sexual health education in affected areas. Some are also engaged in condom distribution and, on occasion, provision of antiretroviral medication. Service provision of this sort is not merely tolerated, but welcomed by the authorities, who act as arbiters of international and domestic collaboration around AIDS prevention and treatment. There are several overlapping reasons for this, but the most obvious is that encouraging cooperation among non-​state entities relieves the financial and practical burden of service delivery on the state. Each dollar ponied up by Bill and Melinda Gates is one less the central government is responsible for. The combined efforts of state and non-​state forces will make a serious dent in the problem. Moreover,

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   83 many Chinese NGOs working for AIDS prevention at the grassroots have established ties to the community and are far more familiar with the needs and challenges of the AIDS fights in certain areas than either foreign donors or the government. Among at-​risk populations formerly mistreated by the state, such as sex workers and drug users, or in places where public health authorities are seen as culpable in the initial spread of the virus, NGOs enjoy a level of credibility that government officials likely never will, no matter what their current intentions are. Condoms are oftentimes rejected as symbols of state repression because they are distributed primarily for purposes of family planning in accordance with the one-​child policy. As Tiantian Zheng writes in her fascinating study of mainland China’s sex trade, ‘clients [of sex workers] regard the dissemination of information about AIDS [including condom use] as just another state strategy to scare them and control sexual behavior’ (Zheng, 2009: 2). In this climate, non-​government actors with local ties and a genuine appreciation of what their neighbours have endured cannot help but appear more trustworthy. In still other cases, local NGOs have been founded by HIV carriers themselves, allowing them to tap into pre-​existing social networks of the at-​risk –​for instance, local gay communities –​making the distribution of condoms, medicine, and prevention information more easily available. In short, China is open to NGO mobilization and transnational assistance because these actors are both inexpensive and efficient, providing a necessary service ably and without the taint of past scandals. Still, the state remains central to the building of contacts between foreign funders and local partner NGOs. Indeed, coordinating and consolidating the research activities of so many participating groups have been a core occupation of the central government. When the Clinton Foundation signed an agreement with then-​Vice Minister of Health Wang Longde in late 2003 to finance the purchase of medicine and equipment and train Chinese health officials in the basics of prevention and patient care, the People’s Daily reported that China had ‘hired’ the ex-​president’s charity to assist it with service delivery (China Daily, 2004). With the state so comfortably in command that it speaks of the former US commander-​in-​chief this way, just what sort of impact can activists hope to have? More importantly, how can they have it? Speaking the language of science The efforts of HIV/​AIDS campaigners are proof that how one speaks can matter almost as much as what one says when addressing China. With so many international and domestic organizations participating, the campaign does not suffer from a shortage of information, nor has it ever wanted for

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84  The advocacy trap findings to share with coordinating state actors. However, the methodology underlying collection and presentation of data was undoubtedly a factor in its use by the state in crafting its long-​term HIV strategies. It did not hurt the campaign’s credibility that those engaged in the collection and analysis of data were scientific experts and medical practitioners. In a sense, the HIV/​ AIDS campaign has a natural advantage over activists in other areas  –​the fact that they are able to package their message as ‘data’ means that they did not have to choose their words as carefully as campaigns active in other more highly politicized areas of human rights. This enabled actors in the network who were involved in the collection of medical evidence on the ground to be perceived as credible, neutral, and genuine humanitarians rather than anti-​China saboteurs or adversaries out to expose government oversights. Of course, it helped that the state itself chose to eschew its previous moral stance in favour of scientific evidence, and most if not all of the scientists and doctors working with China to curb the epidemic undoubtedly view the provision of care as a human right without labelling it as such. As one observer has put it, ‘the government adopted many human rights paradigm components without labeling them as “human rights,” but instead calling them “care,” a philanthropic, not political term’ (Knutsen, 2012: 182). Others refer to this tactic as one of ‘strategic engagement’, whereby activists are afforded greater opportunities for involvement in state-​run projects by choosing their words carefully (Wu, 2011: 364–​365). Value-​free, scientific language is the platform that makes collaboration with the state possible, but it also generates challenges of its own. NGOs have learned there are better and worse ways to present their information, but that does not mean that all the kinks have been worked out of the knowledge-​sharing process. As the number of partners working with China on its treatment regime have multiplied, the importance of unifying data collection processes for devising an effective response has become clearer. Prior to 2006, the UN, Global Fund, and WHO all used different indicators to measure programme effectiveness. The Second Five-​Year Plan was to help address this issue in part, and the creation of new platforms for standardized data collection, including a national network of more than 8,000 laboratories to do screening work, has helped to more clearly identify at-​risk groups and treatment strategies. However, uniform data collection and reporting procedures have also encountered a number of problems, not least the additional commitment of time and other resources needed to create a reporting regime that could have been used elsewhere (Wu et al., 2011). Most significantly, it is not clear that improvements in the quality of available data have translated into greater public knowledge of AIDS and its prevention. Despite the obviously increased demand of the state for scientific

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   85 data and reliable partners in programme delivery, there remains a great deal of ignorance and confusion within the Chinese public over the basic facts of AIDS, raising doubts over the goodness of fit between the campaign and the ideas or values of those it aims to help. A plethora of surveys have been conducted indicating that Chinese society is undergoing a sexual revolution and adopting more liberal, informed attitudes about sex (Hyde, 2003; Pan, 1993; Rosenberg and Merson, 2003: 14). However, some of these stretch back more than twenty years, leaving it unclear just how or how much information about the disease has trickled down to the grassroots in the interim. Decades on, many in rural and remote parts of China are still ignorant of the disease and what can be done to prevent it. One recent study revealed that 77 per cent of those surveyed were unaware that condom use could cut the risk of transmission, while nearly 17 per cent had never even heard of HIV/​AIDS (Hunter, 2005). Moreover, there are large pockets of Chinese society where many of the old moralistic attitudes towards at-​risk groups, and extreme forms of stigmatization, persist. This includes not just China’s large and growing mass of free-​floating migrant labourers who patronize the commercial sex trade, but also sex workers themselves, and homosexual men (Zhang, 2001). Conclusion Transnational HIV/​AIDS activists have clearly had an influence on the development of China’s treatment regime, and, undoubtedly, have contributed to improvements in the lives of China’s HIV sufferers. Their primary function has been one of information dissemination, providing eager officials with reliable scientific data on the nature and scale of the AIDS crisis in China and what could be done about it. Perhaps the most notable cumulative impact of their involvement has been the identification and destigmatization of high-​risk demographics, something that has allowed officials to target their programmes more effectively and, in all probability, to improve their responsiveness over time. However, none of this would have happened were it not for two crucial factors. First, the opening for transnational activism was made possible by an official change of heart. The complicity of government in earlier blood taint scandals, combined with a lack of accountability and perceptions of official callousness and indifference fed a growing realization that authorities needed to be more proactive in addressing major public health crises. After Hu Jintao took over as Party leader, this was converted to a more explicit demand for scientifically grounded knowledge about AIDS and what could be done to control its spread –​an input that foreign and domestic groups were willing

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86  The advocacy trap and able to provide. Second, as partners with the state in the battle against AIDS, foreign and domestic activists were careful to frame their contribution in ways that suited the official demand for scientifically grounded information, rather than as a human rights concern. In effect, transnational activists came to play the role they did in combatting China’s AIDS crisis by seizing an opportune moment and watching their tongues. This also means, however, that their involvement was a proximate cause of treatment and prevention strategies, while the more distal and overarching factor was a change in political calculus and state leadership. The abolition of capital punishment Perhaps the most important lesson of intercessory advocacy is that ‘success’ need not always be conceptualized in all-​or-​nothing terms. As the HIV/​ AIDS case demonstrates, some activists in China manage to make an impact even when they are not primarily responsible for about-​faces in state policy. Anticipating the changing needs of the target state, and careful, sensitive framing of an issue can go a long way towards nudging outcomes in the desired direction. Yet such interventions into the political process can also be misleading from a causal perspective. At times, they may even exaggerate the impact activists have on new policy initiatives, making it difficult to parse the effects of their advocacy from other factors motivating state decision-​ making, and creating the impression that they are more influential than they really are. Such is the case in the area of capital punishment reform, where recent changes to Chinese law have little to do with long-​standing efforts of human rights advocates to abolish the practice. Since 2007, China’s death penalty policy has been engineered to balance retention with restraint. Prior to this point, executions were primarily viewed as a necessary means for the Party to sculpt socialist society and enforce its rule by punishing counter-​revolutionaries and criminals (Zhang, 2008). Even the more recent ‘strike hard’ anti-​crime campaigns carried out under Jiang Zemin’s leadership were justified by a need to maintain order by sweeping China clean of potentially destabilizing social forces. By contrast, the so-​ called ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ (shaosha shensha) policy of the Hu leadership represents a significant turn towards a more moderate, restrained death penalty system. Adopted in 2006 and 2007, this new package of measures was designed to curtail the number of executions held in the country each year. The most important and internationally recognized was the decision to reinstate powers of death penalty review to the Supreme People’s Court, a move that reversed a 1983 policy decentralizing appellate review in order

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   87 to encourage executions as a means to deter crime. Subsequent reforms also mandated the institution of new procedural guidelines for convicting and sentencing in death penalty cases, established the use of lethal injection as an alternative to the more conventional method of execution by shooting, and even floated the controversial notion of a cash-​for-​clemency system in which the executions of those able to pay were to be made commutable to a non-​ lethal form of punishment. Further legislation was tabled at the 2011 meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to remove thirteen economic offences from the list of capital crimes, reducing the total number from sixty-​eight to fifty-​five. Estimating the effects of these policies is notoriously difficult, since the true number of yearly executions technically remains a state secret. Due to the culture of obfuscation surrounding the practice of the death penalty in China’s political system, analysts are forced to rely on a variety of third-​hand sources when attempting to pinpoint annual execution rates. Among the most widely cited are Amnesty International’s annual execution reports, British criminologist Roger Hood’s reports to the UN Secretary-​General, and the testimony of myriad Chinese NGOs such as Human Rights in China (HRIC), the Dui Hua Foundation (DHF), Chinese Human Rights Defenders, and the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. Preliminary best-​guesses point towards a marked reduction in the rate of executions since the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws took effect. A 2007 report of the DHF projected that as a consequence of restoring the authority of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) to review death penalty cases, ‘it should be possible to cut the rate of executions in half over the next two to three years, from 7,000 in 2006 to 3,500 in 2009’ (Dui Hua Foundation, 2007a:  1–​2). Another more recent study put the current figure as low as 3,000 per annum (Trevaskes, 2013: 6). These figures are more-​or-​less consistent with jurist testimony and official reports that the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws have resulted in an immediate 30 per cent reduction in executions across the country (Confidential Interview, 2012a).1 There is also general agreement among the available data sources that the raw number of executions has declined since the late 1990s. Estimates resulting from the ‘strike hard’ (yanda) anti-​crime campaigns of the late 1990s and early 2000s have topped 15,000 (Nathan and Gilley, 2003), though more conservative figures peg the death toll at closer to 10,000 (Bakken, 2004; Qi, 2005; Tanner, 2000; Wang, 2007:  175–​182). By contrast, estimates from the period 2005–​2006 place the number of sentences carried out at 7,500–​8,000 (Dui Hua Foundation, 2007b: 3; Yardley, 2007). However, available sources also confirm that the death penalty remains widely practised in China, leading two experts to conclude that ‘for the last two decades, the PRC has carried out thousands of executions each year, accounting for at least 90 percent

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88  The advocacy trap (and probably more) of all the executions in the world. In absolute terms, this makes China the world’s execution leader, and whatever country is in second place is not close’ (Johnson and Zimring, 2009: 232). Such a finding strongly suggests that the abolitionist norm prevalent internationally and touted by human rights activists has been slow on the uptake in China. As recently as March 2007, Chinese officials told a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council that the scope of China’s death penalty laws was under review and that their application would be reduced ‘with the final aim of abolishment’ (Macbean, 2008: 207). Yet no timeline has ever been established for the phase-​out of executions by CCP leaders, who instead have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to keeping it. As former president of the SPC, Xiao Yang, and other legal experts have explained, the intent of the policy is to ‘temper leniency with severity’ (kuanyan xiangji), meting out death sentences more cautiously and humanely than in the past (X. Chen, 2006; Xie, 2008). Viewed in this way, the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws appear to formalize and more deeply entrench the death penalty in Chinese jurisprudence, and moderate its use in ways that contribute to the long-​term viability of its retention  –​precisely the opposite of what the abolitionist campaign hoped eventually to do. If not transnational activism, to what can China’s capital punishment reforms be attributed? The available evidence points to two key factors, both of which strongly implicate the Party’s domestic political considerations. First, the death penalty remains wildly popular with the Chinese public, the prior excesses of totalitarianism notwithstanding, and is a favoured way of handling incidents of violent crime and official corruption. Retention of the practice enables the state to demonstrate to Chinese citizens how seriously it regards both, and is a physical show of its commitment to upholding law and order. Second, and not unrelated to the first point, the more restrained use of the death penalty called for under the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws demonstrates at least a rhetorical commitment to developing the rule of law. New sentencing guidelines, coupled with the devolution of appellate review, improve accountability within the system both vertically and horizontally, limiting the number of sentences carried out explicitly to eliminate political enemies and replacing this once common practice with greater judicial discretion. In short, the new policy adds up to enormous political benefits for the CCP, and is a pragmatic response by a party that has a keen eye trained on likely determinants of its legitimacy. The lure of these incentives compared to those of compliance with the abolitionists are a good clue that the practice will remain in place for the foreseeable future in China, even if the gradual reduction of executions conveys the impression of a positive incremental effect by the TAN.

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   89 The international prohibition regime Worldwide use of the death penalty is much less common than it used to be. According to Amnesty International, more than half of all countries had abolished the death penalty as of 2011 and an overwhelming majority did not use it, in contrast to 1945 when just 20 per cent were death-​penalty-​free.2 There have also been signs of the death penalty becoming less common in many of its former strongholds, including Asia. The year 2009 marked the first time in many years that no executions were scheduled in Afghanistan, Mongolia, Indonesia, or Pakistan. Since 1990, only seven countries –​China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States –​are known to have executed minors (Death Penalty Information Centre, 2011). The rise and spread of abolitionism since the Second World War is due in part to the creation of international legal institutions and treaties that include specific prohibitions on the use of capital punishment. International law expert William A.  Schabas observes that, over time, these sentiments crystallized to form the basis of a global abolitionist movement, which now occupies ‘a central theme in the development of international human rights law’ (Schabas, 1996: 30). The UN has been a primary engine of support for abolition on humanitarian grounds almost since its inception. Two of the earliest and most influential documents in this regard were the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, both of which are consistently invoked by abolitionists who argue that the death penalty violates two basic human rights as spelled out in those documents:  the right to life, and protection against cruel, inhumane, or degrading punishment. In more recent times, the UN has become a venue for more direct advancement of the abolitionist norm, most often through the tabling of specific resolutions in favour of complete prohibition by issue entrepreneurs in national governments. One such document, presented by Austria, Ecuador, Sweden, and West Germany to the Sixth UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders in 1980, urged retentionist states to consider dropping the death penalty, arguing that doing so would make ‘a significant contribution to the strengthening of human rights, in particular the right to life’ (United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Control, 1980: 60). A more recent and high-​profile example is the Moratorium on Capital Punishment introduced by Italy and Chile in 2007, which calls for an immediate general suspension of capital punishment across the world. The resolution passed the UN General Assembly twice, once on 15 November 2007, and again on 15 December, garnering large majorities on both occasions.

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90  The advocacy trap International support for abolitionism at both the interstate and individual country levels has historically been strongest in Europe. The EU now specifically cites ending the death penalty as a core diplomatic objective, making clear its intentions to ‘progressively restrict the number of offenses for which it can be imposed’, and ‘establish a moratorium on executions with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty’ (European Union, 1998). While the European Convention on Human Rights initially protected the right of states to impose capital punishment, a specific protocol requiring abolition of the death penalty among its members has been in force since 1985 (Hodgkinson, 2004). This measure was itself an extension of the landmark Protocol No. 6 adopted two years earlier, which committed member states to relinquishing the death penalty. Enacted in 2002, Protocol No. 13 reaffirmed that commitment by expanding the scope of prohibition further, stipulating that for all nations subject to the Convention, the death penalty shall be abolished ‘in all circumstances’. Additionally, death penalty practices have been an important factor in assessing the human rights situation of states being considered for EU membership, most notably in ex-​Soviet satellites and successors of the former Yugoslavia. Ending capital punishment has also come under discussion at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, though in that case the adoption of official measures has been hampered by objections from prominent retentionist states, like Russia. All told, the requirement of abolitionism as a condition for admittance to the expanding European community by an assortment of interstate organizations has led to the branding of Europe as a ‘death penalty free zone’ –​the only such community extant in the world as of 2013. At the same time, the diffusion of abolitionism alongside the EU’s eastward expansion suggests a more general link between the worldwide decline in incidence of the death penalty and the changing profile of domestic political institutions over the same period. In 1945 only twenty-​one states had formally abolished the death penalty, and the same number were classified as ‘politically free’ according to Amnesty International. By 2012 those figures had risen to 107 and 142 respectively. At least part of the explanation is the almost total disappearance of totalitarian regimes, which tended to view the death penalty as necessary for maintaining control over society. Roger Hood explains that in many such cases, abolition is often seen as ‘an appropriate way to respond to the demise of totalitarian regimes’ and is rooted explicitly in ‘the rejection of cruelties and injustices associated with totalitarianism, of which capital punishment may be regarded as a symbol’ (Hood, 2001: 339).3 For example, Italy has not executed anyone since 1944, when the death penalty was dropped as a symbol of the country’s rejection of fascism after Mussolini’s removal. Romania signified the

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   91 end of the Ceausescu regime in 1989 by immediately abandoning its capital punishment provisions –​the late dictator and his wife were the last to face the firing squad. In May of 1990, the new parliament of the Federal Czech and Slovak Republic voted to permanently abolish the death penalty in recognition of what it called ‘the elimination of the totalitarian regime’. The near-​extinction of totalitarianism is only part of the story. A broader connection exists between abolitionism and the post-​war waves of democratization. It is no accident that both underwent their steepest increases between 1989 and 1991, when the demise of European communism produced a sudden spike in abolitionism. Most of the former Soviet satellites and Yugoslav states dropped the death penalty when those systems collapsed, with some seemingly transitioning overnight. As Hood and Hoyle note, ‘over the eleven years from 1989 to 1999 inclusive, 40 countries became abolitionist: 39 of them for all crimes in all circumstances, in peacetime or wartime, in civil or military law: an average of over three a year’ (2015: 13). Whether it is correlation or causation, the world has at once become both more democratic and death-​penalty-​free. Obviously not all states fit the pattern. Exceptions to the rule are not difficult to come by, but they do serve as a reminder that despite the considerable support for abolition at the international level, application of the death penalty remains fundamentally a matter of domestic criminal policy. Abolition is not and never has been fully recognized as a customary norm of international law, and there exists no stable universal standard in the way the death penalty is applied (Asad, 1997). Consequently, claims about the influence of prohibition norms as propagated in and by international institutions must be qualified by pointing out the obstacles imposed by capital punishment’s staunchest international defenders, including the United States, Japan, Singapore, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China. China’s evolving death penalty institutions The passage of time has seen the gradual expansion of a national death penalty framework to formalize, rein-​in and regulate use of the practice in China. Modelled on the view of capital punishment developed in the Soviet Union, capital punishment during the Maoist years was regarded as necessary to safeguard the revolution against a counter-​revolutionary backslide (Wuhan Daxue Falu Bianzhu, 1986). By most accounts, it was employed liberally for this purpose. Jerome Cohen notes that during the early years of the PRC, criminal procedures in general were ‘a blunt instrument of terror’ used to intimidate opponents into compliance with the new regime (Cohen, 1968: 9; Dikotter, 2002: 81; Dutton, 2005). The elimination of political opponents by executing them had been important well before 1949 and played

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92  The advocacy trap a notable role in the communist rise to power (Oda, 1983). Following the formal establishment of the PRC, however, the more ad hoc application of the death penalty practised during the civil war was replaced with a set of official bureaucratic mechanisms, beginning in 1950 with the General Rules for the Organization of People’s Tribunals, the 1951 Law for the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries, Provisional Law on Guarding State Secrets, and Provisional Law on Penalties for Undermining the State Monetary System, and the 1952 Instructions Relating to the Suppression of Counterrevolutionary Activity and Law on Penalties for Corruption. The chief objective of this legislation was to identify and punish any and all who threatened the stability of the regime by sowing unrest, making as fearful an example of them as possible. No distinctions were to be made between class enemies and criminals. Addressing a gathering of Party faithful in 1957, Mao singled out ‘exploiters, counterrevolutionaries, landlords, bureaucrat-​capitalists, robbers, swindlers, murderers, arsonists, hooligans and other scoundrels who seriously disrupt social order’ as fit for death, and acknowledged that some 800,000 of these individuals had met their end at the hands of the People’s Tribunals by the mid-​1950s, although the numbers of those executed during this period are not known with any precision (Mao, 1989). The passage of time has brought with it noticeable changes in the Chinese leadership’s position on the death penalty, though attitudes towards the practice developed under Mao continue to mark official policy in subtle but meaningful ways. Zhang Ning writes of an ‘instrumental conception of the legal system’ which is ‘subject to ideological and political imperatives’ and evident across multiple generations of post-​Mao leadership (Zhang, 2005). Thus, for Deng Xiaoping and his immediate successors, ‘Law, including in particular the Criminal Law and its provisions on the death penalty, [were] seen as “weapons” (wuqi), by means of which the Chinese Communist administration continues its dominance of the Chinese people’ (Palmer, 1996: 106; see also Clarke and Feinerman, 1995). Although the adoption of the Criminal Law in 1979 was ostensibly a reaction to the radicalization of executions during the Cultural Revolution –​during which time an unknown but undoubtedly huge number of politically motivated extrajudicial killings took place –​the 1983 Yanda anti-​crime campaign signalled a revival of Maoist sensibilities regarding the death penalty, and has been dubbed ‘the bloodiest chapter in post-​Mao Chinese politics’ (Tanner, 2000: 93). The first of the Yanda campaigns, which lasted from September 1983 until January 1987, was a response to growing public fear over certain types of crimes, especially kidnapping and human trafficking, and saw new mandatory death sentences for those specific crimes as well as a major increase in the overall number of capital offences. The central government also restricted judicial oversight,

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   93 granting local courts first authority to try capital cases. Indeed, there was a pervasive sentiment during this period within Party ranks and among mainland legal scholars that ‘the primary function [of the law] … is to suppress “enemies” ’ (Cui, 1983: 14). In a January 1986 address to the Standing Committee, Deng referred to executions as an ‘indispensable means’ of educating the masses about proper conduct, accused the courts of being ‘too soft on criminals’, and called for stiffer use of the death penalty against corrupt regime officials, recidivists, and organizers of ‘secret reactionary societies’, among others (Deng, 1987: 137–​138). Nevertheless, Deng’s introduction of the Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law was a major step forward for procedural reforms. Tabled at the Third Plenary of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party, it represented a first attempt to create a comprehensive national death penalty framework, in keeping with Deng’s famous slogan: ‘There must be laws for people to follow, these laws must be observed, their enforcement must be strict, and law-​breakers must be dealt with accordingly’ (Lo, 1992: 654). This more juristic approach was aimed primarily at decreasing the number of extrajudicial executions that took place between 1966 and 1974, and thus served to distinguish the second-​generation leadership from its predecessor.4 The new laws made provisions for twenty-​eight capital offences, including a host of economic crimes and a brand new category of infractions related to ‘endangering public security’ (weihai gongong anquan zui), while at the same time specifying that the death penalty was only to be applied in such cases ‘when harm to the state and the people is especially serious and the circumstances especially odious’.5 They also envisaged some of the first official prohibitions on the death penalty in China, including the killing of juvenile offenders, and named death by a single gunshot to the back of the head as the only state-​ sanctioned method of execution (Ye, 2006). These reforms were expanded further with the 1996 Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Law, which widened the scope of defendants’ rights. Among the more notable provisions was the mandatory appointment of defence counsel in all capital cases, as well as the strengthening of trial procedures to prevent executions resulting from judicial incompetence (Zhou, 1998). Despite the introduction of reforms, however, there remained a strong official reliance on the death penalty for crime deterrence and order maintenance. This was especially the case after Tiananmen and for most of the 1990s and early 2000s. Jiang Zemin, who famously earned his post as General Secretary and later President through his tough-​on-​crime stance and no-​ nonsense handling of the June 1989 sympathy demonstrations in Shanghai, added more than twenty new capital offences to the criminal code during his time in office, bringing the total to sixty-​eight (Luo, 1998). A 1991

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94  The advocacy trap government White Paper on human rights defended China’s use of the death penalty to protect what was termed ‘national stability’ (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1991). Nor were the strike hard campaigns carried out on Jiang’s watch qualitatively different from the earlier one under Deng. All were motivated by a fear of violent crime and a preoccupation with order, and resulted in considerable increases in the population of death row inmates. In addition to endemic corruption and judicial incompetence, the zealousness of the state in prosecuting certain types of personal crimes, particularly kidnapping and human trafficking, is thought to have drastically increased the number of erroneous executions ordered by local courts, a trend that reached its peak during the 1996 Yanda campaign (Chen, 2002: 544). Despite inheriting its predecessor’s concern with stability and crime prevention, the commitment of the CCP’s fourth-​generation leadership to reducing its reliance on the death penalty to achieve those purposes was made clear relatively early. Unveiled in October 2005, the Second Five-​Year Reform Program for the People’s Courts (2004–​2010) was the first document to map out an aggressive strategy to overhaul China’s death penalty laws. Dubbed ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ (shaosha shensha), its expressed intent was to curtail the number of executions held annually across the country. This was then followed in December by a joint order of the SPC and Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) requiring open trials for second instance courts in cases that may result in a death sentence and for which key facts or evidence were in dispute (Supreme People’s Court, 2005). This latter provision was then expanded in September 2006 to include all death penalty cases in which defendants were subject to immediate execution (sixing liji zhixing) (Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate, 2006). The reforms kicked into high gear in January 2007 with a slate of new measures designed to further standardize criminal justice procedures. Of these, the most important and internationally recognized was the restoration of power to the SPC to review all decisions handed down for immediate execution, a move that reversed a 1983 policy decentralizing appellate review in order to encourage executions as a means to deter crime (Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, 2006). New powers also permitted judges to hand down death sentences with a two-​year reprieve or probationary period (sixing huanqi liangnian zhixing), in which sentences are commuted to life imprisonment provided the accused does not commit another crime within that two-​ year window. Known as ‘sihuan’ in Chinese, these suspended sentences are a de facto means to drop execution rates, with commutation having become the norm in recent years (Confidential Interview, 2012b). Further changes to the appellate process in 2007 include a directive issued jointly by the SPC, SPP, and the Ministries of Justice and Public Security gave instructions to

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   95 provincial courts outlining specific conditions under which seeking the death penalty is appropriate, provided training to government lawyers elaborating new procedures to help reduce wrongful death sentences, mandated witness testimony at trials, and guaranteed that confessions obtained through torture were inadmissible (Supreme People’s Court et al., 2007). This latter measure was adopted in response to claims such as those of SPP Deputy Procurator-​ General Wang Zhenchuan, who publicly admitted that ‘nearly every wrongful verdict in recent years relates to illegal interrogation’, and that more than thirty wrongful convictions per year were attributable to confessions extracted through torture (Savadove, 2006). Additional reforms have subsequently been affected. Financial incentives for local authorities to switch to lethal injection as the primary method of execution were enacted in 2008, ramping up a policy initially floated in 1996. Although ostensibly grounded in a desire to lessen the pain and suffering of the accused, the growing preference for lethal injection is also cheaper and more efficient than the more conventional method of death by shooting, particularly when mobile injection vans are used (Confidential Interview, 2012c). Ex-​SPC Vice-​President Jiang Xingchang told the China Daily in 2008 that the central government would ‘help equip courts with all required facilities’, expand judicial training, and pay for all necessary chemicals in order to popularize the use of legal injections over shooting, particularly in poorer parts of central and western China (BBC News, 2008a). By 2010, a ‘case guidance system’ had come into force which allowed SPC judges unprecedented scope to apply the sihuan mechanism to a broader assortment of offenses, thereby lowering the overall number of executions. The abolitionist force When it comes to speaking out against China’s death penalty, most of the actual talking is done by human rights NGOs as opposed to states. As international support for abolition is not confined to a particular region or culture, the make-​up of the campaign transcends national and cultural boundaries, and draws membership from a range of professional backgrounds. For example, the Hong Kong-​based Anti-​Death Penalty Asia Network is ‘an independent informal network with almost 40 members made up of lawyers, parliamentarians and human rights activists from 21 countries’ (World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, n.d.b). According to its website, the French-​based World Coalition Against the Death Penalty brings together ‘about sixty NGOs, bar associations, local bodies and unions’ in its effort to end the use of execution as a means of seeking justice (World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, n.d.a).

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96  The advocacy trap While transnational support for abolition crosses cultural lines, information exchanges among organizations in the network depend on a relatively small set of large, professionalized international NGOs, the most prominent and well-​known of which is Amnesty International. Despite the culture of obfuscation and secrecy shrouding the true number of executions held in China each year, the data compiled by Amnesty International from government press releases on high-​profile cases are considered among the most accurate and reliable currently available, making Amnesty International the single most trusted source and framer of information for death penalty activists in the world. No other NGO or government working on the issue has compiled so large a body of research or had their work so widely cited. In his impressively detailed account of the organization, Stephen Hopgood explains that the credibility of Amnesty International, and hence its global leadership in matters of human rights and suffering, is grounded in perceptions of its objectivity, both factual and moral (Hopgood, 2006: 205). It is, in effect, a teller of truths, a reputation it has gained by its ability to trace information to its original source and tendency to rely on conservative estimates of the number of executions. Although perhaps less influential overall, two further groups deserve mention as important providers and framers of information for the abolitionist campaign. Although they are often overlooked, medical doctors have been vocal advocates of abolishing the death penalty on grounds that the physical and mental suffering it produces is unduly cruel and inhumane (Ferris and Welsh, 2004). Most concede that the administration of drugs for the sole purpose of ending life is at best ethically sticky. The American Medical Association holds the view that no member of a profession dedicated to preserving life should be a participant in a legally authorized execution. The organization’s definition of ‘participation’ precludes doctors from preparing or administering drugs for purposes of lethal injection, selecting injection sites, testing equipment used in lethal injection procedures, and instructing or otherwise consulting with personnel involved in the administration of lethal injection. Functions such as observing an execution and pronouncement of medical death do not qualify as participation under the current guidelines (American Medical Association, n.d.). Doctors for America takes a more unequivocal stance: ‘There is only one argument in favor of the death penalty: despising life’ (Restrepo, 2011). Second, academics have served as major compilers of credible data on capital punishment. In small ways their work has helped to advance international legal and policy debates on the death penalty. For example, Roger Hood’s figures are widely used alongside Amnesty International’s in scholarly investigations and UN reports estimating execution rates worldwide.

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   97 The domestic story is somewhat different. The same secrecy that complicates estimates of China’s death penalty figures at the international level restricts the spread of information within China, limiting the potential for domestic partners to play a meaningful role in advancing the campaign, politically and otherwise. To be sure, abolition has its advocates on the mainland, though they are few and far between and mostly confined to isolated pockets of the legal profession. Zhang speaks of a ‘new spirit of debate’ within the Chinese legal community on the morality of the death penalty, one that includes significant support for abolition from such prominent scholars as Qiu Xinglong and Chen Xingliang (Zhang, 2005). Others argue on more practical grounds for scrapping the death penalty because it is not a deterrent. One editorial in the China Daily claimed a majority in China’s legal profession believe that ‘depriving an individual of his or her life for a nonviolent offense is near useless in preventing new economic crimes’ (Wei, 2010). Still, the consensus among lawyers is far from total. As Teng Biao, a noted legal scholar and supporter of abolition readily concedes, most legal professionals ‘believe the abolishment should be carried out gradually instead of immediately’, and several actually advocate expanding capital punishment in China (Teng, 2010: 90). Along with journalists and dissidents, lawyers are the chief spokespeople for a small contingent of Chinese NGOs devoted to reducing and eliminating China’s death penalty. These organizations are ostensibly indigenous, staffed by individuals born and educated on the mainland, motivated by personal and professional experiences there, but who now live outside China, usually for political reasons. Almost without exception, those interviewed for this book reported that they maintain close ties with former colleagues, who serve as a key source of information for the campaign as a whole. The details they provide are mostly anecdotal, but are nonetheless essential for putting together the larger picture of how death sentences are carried out, on what scale, and to what extent procedures are compliant with incurrent law. For instance, a recent report of HRIC –​ which bills itself as both international and Chinese and is headquartered in Hong Kong and New  York (Human Rights in China, 2012)  –​ details a lack of procedural guarantees to a fair trial which the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ reforms were supposed to provide. Among the more troubling charges levelled by the report are the persistent lack of any presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the widespread intimidation of criminal defence lawyers. Most damning of all, the report alleges that less than 10 per cent of witnesses scheduled to appear in court actually do so, effectively depriving defendants of the opportunity to face and question their accusers (Human Rights in China, 2007: 31–​33).

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98  The advocacy trap The culture of executions in China One of the more striking aspects of the abolitionist campaign is the gulf separating its aims from public opinion in China, which heavily favours the death penalty as a way to maintain social order and prevent violent crime. Indeed, there is a deeply-​rooted social fear of crime and chaos in the country, one that has been well-​documented over the last twenty years (Kelliher, 1997; Scobell, 1990; Zhang et al., 2009). Recent research confirms that public approval of capital punishment to contain lawlessness has held steady over time and is prevalent even among segments of the Chinese public thought to be relatively liberal, such as college students (Jiang et  al., 2007; Liang et  al., 2006). Several studies also show a wide belief in the deterrent effects of the death penalty, as well as very little gender gap in attitudes towards the practice (Jiang and Wang, 2008; Lambert et al., 2007). Further evidence suggests widespread public endorsement of the death penalty as a form of retributive justice, particularly in headline-​grabbing cases of official corruption. One observer recounts the ‘festival-​like thrill’ and air of general satisfaction at the execution of a former Party head in Jiangxi province convicted of embezzlement (Qiu, 2001). Similar experiences were reported at the killing of other public servants such as the disgraced former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu. This type of public enthusiasm is backed up by a long history of executions in China. The historiography of the death penalty in China highlights a tradition of executions stretching back as far as the Qin dynasty, one that incorporated some extraordinarily gruesome methods of killing such as burning, decapitation, and most famously, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ (Brook et al., 2008). Customary use of the death penalty for deterrent purposes is even captured in traditional Chinese sayings such as ‘killing one to warn a hundred’ (sha yi jing bai) and ‘killing a chicken to warn the monkeys’ (sha ji jing hou). With history and contemporary public opinion on its side, it should come as no shock that the Chinese government has taken steps to preserve the practice of capital punishment. Traditional values give the necessary cover to legitimize not just the retention of executions but also by positioning support for abolitionism as incommensurable with China’s uniqueness and social goals, of which the Party is the sole vanguard (Ho, 2005). In this light, China’s retention of the death penalty brooks no justification to the global community, but is rather a natural characteristic of Chinese governance, one that allows the current regime to dismiss international human rights norms at minimal domestic cost and imbues the abolitionist stance with a whiff of imperialism. In retaining capital punishment, the state not only provides a popular public good, but keeps indigenous morality  –​even Chineseness itself –​safe from alien encroachment.

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   99 Furthermore, balancing retention and restraint allows the state to cater to other public demands, most notably calls for more publicly accountable legal procedures. There is mounting evidence that complying with public demands for more standardized rulings and systemic safeguards against abuses of legal authority are increasingly vital to the Party’s popular approval (Liebman, 2006). ‘Public supervision can help prevent possible cases of twisting the law’, reads a nationally publicized editorial, indicating that while society values capital punishment as an instrument of punitive justice, it increasingly values accountability as well (Global Times, 2011). Pressure in the form of citizen petitions and protests to alter incorrect court decisions have, on some occasions, resulted in reversals or overturning of verdicts in criminal cases (Liebman and Wu, 2007:  630). In a few instances, death row inmates have even become martyrs for the cause of criminal justice reform. Such was the case for Yang Jia, a Beijing man catapulted to folk hero status after stabbing six police officers in retaliation for an unsuccessful lawsuit against those who had reportedly beaten him during an interrogation over an improper bicycle licence. ‘You have done what most people want to do, but do not have the courage to do’ read a message posted to Yang online after his execution (Moore, 2008). The Party has put social accountability front and centre in its legal reform plans. Adopted at the Sixth Plenum in 2006, the Resolution of the CCP Central Committee on Major Issues Concerning the Building of a Socialist Harmonious Society committed the Party to improving legal institutions in accordance with social expectations. ‘The principle that the Party is organized for the people and exercises power on behalf of the people must be adhered to’, warned the state media, referring to the Resolution and its plan for ‘implementation of the fundamental principle of administering the country according to law [and] guaranteeing respect for people’s rights and interests’ (Xinhua News Agency, 2006b). When plans for legal reform were discussed at the Sixteenth Party Congress in October 2006, proponents of greater leniency in capital cases argued that to achieve harmonious society, severe forms of punishment, including the death penalty, should be used against only a small minority of society’s worst criminals, and not against all who are guilty. The 2007  ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws were put into effect amid the general climate of greater legal accountability and have been implemented with accountability improvements in mind. Most notably, the recentralization of review and appellate processes for all capital cases has given exclusive authority to SPC judges to enforce the central government mandate for more leniency, affording them more discretion in determining how sentencing guidelines are to be applied (Zhao and Peng, 2011: 3–​9). The ‘case guidance

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100  The advocacy trap system’, which emerged in 2010 as a way for SPC jurists to shape the interpretation of criminal punishment provisions, has been particularly effective to this end. Indeed, by encouraging lower court judges to prescribe alternatives to the death penalty for a wider assortment of offences, and by broadening parameters for use of the sihuan mechanism, this ‘guidance’ (zhidao) and the larger policy that made it possible have simultaneously lowered the incidence of executions while improving the standardization and rationalization of the judicial process as demanded by the Chinese public (Jiang and Xu, 2009).

Verdict on the role of the TAN While there are those within the legal and judicial establishment who would like to see the death penalty abolished, the reform of China’s capital punishment practices is ultimately the result of domestic political considerations, not pressure from transnational human rights activists. Tempering retention with restraint –​as opposed to the outright abolition of the death penalty –​ allows China’s leaders to at once continue their more general programme of rule of law development while at the same time appearing tough on crime to a populace that prizes law and order above most other things. Retention of the practice is even sweeter in high-​profile cases of corruption, when the Party gets to demonstrate the seriousness with which it regards such offences, and the public can satisfy itself that justice has been done. The campaign to abolish capital punishment stands as an instance of confused causal forces. Because China is now thought to execute less than half the number it did only a few years ago, it is tempting to attribute this change to the slow creep of human rights on the mainland, particularly as it becomes more integrated with the rest of the abolitionist world, economically and diplomatically. Adopting new policies and procedures that reduce China’s reliance on executions creates an impression that Party officials, though not prepared to take drastic action, are at least prepared to meet the global abolitionst movement halfway, and may move incrementally in the direction of abolition. The irony is that this head fake may have the effect of reinforcing the practice, since reduced incidence of executions, combined with the presence of a domestic constituency with transnational links in favour of abolition, creates an impression of public dialogue about reforms that ultimately strengthens retention of the death penalty in the long run, causing it to become more deeply ingrained in Chinese jurisprudence. Indeed, the reform of China’s death penalty has proceeded in a manner that has seen it become more institutionalized over time, not less, despite the efforts of activists worldwide.

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   101 Conclusion As one might expect, both the HIV/​AIDS and anti-​capital punishment cases highlight the strong role of the state in shaping the reception and result of advocacy campaigns in China. As in the earlier cases of the Falun Gong and IPR protection campaigns, it was official preferences that ultimately dictated the final score in terms of both the results and functional form of the campaigns. However, the HIV/​AIDS and capital punishment campaigns highlight the importance of who speaks and how they choose to speak when attempting to influence how political decisions are made  –​the ability to recognize and seize upon opportunities when these presented themselves made all the differences for the HIV activists, while similar options were not available to death penalty abolitionists. Prior to 2002, the state took a highly moralistic stance against those infected with HIV/​AIDS, and was far less inclined to heed the warnings and advice of the global medical community concerning the growing epidemic within its borders. It was not until after a new generation of state leadership valuing more scientific approaches to health and development came to power that China’s government began to fully recognize the gravity of the situation and new policy initiatives began to emerge, giving rise to greater opportunities for foreign and domestic groups to participate in HIV/​AIDS prevention. Unlike the ‘natural’ cases discussed in chapter two, foreign activists came to play a role in policy development after state priorities had been determined but before policies had. The campaign did not configure national interests, but helped the state make decisions about what could or should be done to address those interests after the state chose to listen. Its ability to do so rested in large part on the presence of medical researchers, doctors, and experts who spoke in the apolitical and value-​free language of science. Put another way, the HIV/​AIDS campaign became an intervening or intercessory factor in state policy outcomes, but only because it came bearing a message policy-​makers were ready to hear, and succeeded in packaging their message about the benefits of specific programmes in response to conditions within the target state. Regarding the liberal/​society-​oriented prediction that domestic societal interests ought to have pushed the state towards more aggressively fighting the AIDS epidemic, it is true that the issue took on a different dimension in China following incidents like the well-​publicized Shangcai county disaster. However, it was not the prevalence of the disease itself so much as the inability of the authorities to respond in a competent, humane, and above all accountable manner that pushed the central state towards abandonment of its long-​time ideological stance and towards scientific evidence in combatting HIV. Moreover, there is evidence that large pockets of Chinese society remain ignorant of the basic facts of AIDS, making it less likely that they

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102  The advocacy trap would be a major force behind the state’s new strategy. Similarly, there are reasons to doubt the resonance of mounting international norms as the main reason behind the state’s change of heart, since the long-​time ideological position that AIDS sufferers had signed their own death certificates through degenerate behaviour persisted in China well after the institutionalization of new thinking within the international community on how best to combat the disease. Aside from the apparent vindication of the state-​centred hypothesis tabled in chapter one, the campaign to abolish capital punishment differs in several important ways form the HIV/​AIDS campaign. Instead of waiting for an opportune time to ramp up its rhetoric, the anti-​capital punishment campaign has focused instead on reporting raw data on the nature and extent of executions in China over time, a task made much more difficult by the fact that these figures have always been and technically remain state secrets under the PRC. The campaign has premised its opposition to capital punishment on humane grounds  –​namely that the death penalty constitutes cruel, unusual, or degrading treatment under the terms of a range of international treaty documents –​rather than on scientific claims, such as that the practice does not serve state objectives. It has relied on groups like Amnesty International for its information, which has not been (and probably cannot be) framed in a manner palatable for Chinese society at large, which favours the death penalty’s continued use –​a strong reason not to place faith in the liberal hypothesis that domestic social interests and groups are pushing China towards abolition. Most importantly, it is not clear that China’s leaders intend to discontinue the practice of capital punishment, even if they are incentivized to scale back the number of executions conducted. In essence, the change precipitated by the diffusion of global abolitionist norms is drastically undercut by the determination and incentives of the state to retain the institution it has practised for centuries. It also means that organizations and individuals comprising the anti-​capital punishment network are severely restricted in terms of their options for the future. Short of a compelling or pragmatic reason for changing tack, the campaign stands by its convictions, voicing its largely ineffectual objections to common Chinese practice. Notes 1 See also BBC News (2007). 2 This figure increases to nearly 75 per cent if one includes those countries considered by Amnesty International to be ‘de facto’ abolitionist due to the absence of any executions in recent memory while nonetheless

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Reading the ‘lay of the land’   103 keeping capital punishment laws on the books. It also includes nine states that have abolished the death penalty for ‘all ordinary crimes’ but officially retain it for some non-​ civilian offences (see Amnesty International, 2012). 3 In this sense, abolition of the death penalty may involve the ‘settling of past accounts’ described by Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillipe C.  Schmitter, which is often a part of coming to grips with and burying an especially repressive past (see O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 28–​32). 4 It is thought that the number of erroneous executions resulting from corruption and incompetence in local court systems reached its peak during the ‘strike hard’ campaigns of the 1990s (see Chen, 2002: 544). 5 The full text of Article 43 states, ‘the death penalty is only to be applied to criminal elements who commit the most heinous [zuida eji] crimes’.

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State-​directed advocacy: the ‘drift’ phenomenon in the ‘free Tibet’ and global warming campaigns

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here is yet a third model of advocacy arising from global engagement with China, one in which target state preferences not only shape the results of individual campaigns, but also their ideological core. I  call this metamorphosis of principles ‘advocacy drift’. It is exemplified by the campaigns around global warming and Tibetan independence, their varied ‘results’ notwithstanding. As with the ‘natural cases’ explored in chapter two, these campaigns show that TAN ‘effectiveness’ can vary even within types of functional form. Because the circumstances of each campaign are different, this chapter also shows how the phenomenon of advocacy drift can present itself in two sub-​types, each caused in a different way by the political context in which the campaign operated. In the Tibetan case, the shift in moral principles resulted from repeated failure to achieve the desired results in the face of state intransigence on the Tibet question. Whereas in the global warming campaign, the migration of principles arose from the TAN’s willingness to negotiate and cooperate with the authorities such that the goals of activists were downgraded without undermining their commitment to helping the earth. Access, or official receptiveness to their issue, is the first major point of divergence. In the first case presented below, that of the campaign for Tibetan independence, the Dalai Lama spent nearly fifty years attempting to convince China and the world that his was the rightful government of a sovereign Tibetan state. Unwilling and unable to bend even slightly on the matter, Beijing dug in its heels. Over time, the intractability of this position caused an erosion of the campaign’s commitment to all-​out independence, leading it to instead advocate for greater inclusion in multinational, quasi-​federal China. The second example is more complex, since the push to improve China’s record on global warming has long been state-​led. Subsequently,

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State-directed advocacy   105 environmental activists from within China and around the world were met with open arms by a government eager to harness their research and technical expertise. Sensing an opportunity for influence, foreign and domestic NGOs integrated themselves with various Chinese government agencies, blurring the line separating activists and target. However, it was only by forsaking their advocacy of emissions trading as a possible climate change mitigation strategy for China that these inroads with the state could be maintained. Put another way, green groups swapped advocacy of a principle for the promise of access, an option that was never available to ‘Free Tibet’ activists. The implications of abandoning principle differ just as much. In the Tibetan case, back-​pedalling on more than five decades of pro-​independence rhetoric was enough to induce an identity crisis that struck at the heart of the campaign’s equilibrium. There were organizational implications in this case too, as fractiousness developed over a number of related issues, including the traditional stance of non-​violence versus the attainment of independence through violent means. So strong are these shockwaves that the campaign is now at risk of disintegration, a possibility only enhanced by the Dalai Lama’s announced retirement from public life. But the choices activists face are not always zero-​sum, and renegotiating objectives isn’t an automatic death sentence. Flexibility with regard to how China reduced its carbon emissions earned climate advocates a seat at the table in China’s debate about how best to tackle global warming, one it would otherwise have been unlikely to receive. In that case, tweaks to core goals ensured the survival of the network, not its demise. Far from a liability, adaptability proved to be an asset for the campaign, and a reasonable, acceptable means to an end in which all parties won a little, if somewhat less comfortably than they would have liked. Tibetan independence The classic interpretation of the conflict over Tibet’s constitutional status is one of stalemate, with Beijing unwaveringly asserting that the region is part of China on the one hand, and the campaign arguing that the Dalai Lama is Tibet’s only legitimate head of state on the other. As Melvyn Goldstein concludes, ‘both sides have expended an enormous amount of time and effort to spread their representations of past history and contemporary politics, the result being diametrically opposed constructions of reality’.1 Given this binary framing, it comes as no great shock that more than five decades of campaigning has failed to result in concessions from Beijing on the subject of Tibetan independence. While aspirations of statehood have existed in the territory since well before the Republican period, the calls of ‘free Tibet’ activists for self-​determination since the PRC’s formal takeover in 1959 have

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106  The advocacy trap been repeatedly rebuffed and demonized by the communists as the machinations of foreign anti-​Chinese conspirators. The CCP’s position on the matter, consistent throughout its six decades in power, was summed up unequivocally in a 1992 White Paper: ‘For more than 700 years the central government of China has continually exercised sovereignty over Tibet, and Tibet has never been an independent state.’ It went on to state that ‘so-​called “Tibetan independence,” which the Dalai Clique and anti-​Chinese forces fervently propagate, is nothing but a fiction of the imperialists who committed aggression against China in modern history’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1992). Indeed, mere dialogue with independence advocates is a non-​ starter for the regime, and is seen by the Party as a potential threat to China’s own territorial integrity and the Party’s monopoly on shaping Chinese identity. The primary effect of the campaign has instead been to increase visibility of the Tibet issue on the world stage. Since fleeing his homeland as a young man in 1959, the Dalai Lama has worked tirelessly to put his message of peaceful resistance before the global public, linking the struggle of the Tibetan people to international human rights by positioning Buddhist values as characteristic of a broader sense of human decency. This has given the Dalai himself an amazing mass appeal, transforming him into something of a pop culture icon. ‘My religion is very simple … my religion is kindness’, says a magnet that adorns refrigerators throughout the English-​speaking world. ‘I would rather you were a kind atheist than a mean Buddhist’, says another. At times, these quotes come across as backhanded jabs at the Chinese. ‘Be kind to people. If you cannot be kind, please don’t hurt them’, reads one especially popular bumper sticker. Those who know little else about Tibet and its history are probably at least vaguely familiar with the Dalai Lama’s message of non-​violence and self-​determination for Tibetans. All the more reason then why the Dalai Lama’s very public retreat from his long-​time pro-​independence message is so surprising. Despite the many years of moral leadership, the campaign for a free Tibet now faces an internal crisis of identity, with several leading NGOs and even the Dalai Lama himself capitulating to the Chinese view that Tibet is inescapably, undeniably part of China. With his announced retirement from public life in 2011, the very future of the campaign is uncertain, as independence supporters are now split between those advocating a non-​violent status quo approach in dealing with China, and those willing to pursue independence by any means necessary.

International involvement Given the historic support of foreign powers for Tibetan independence, China’s charges of external interference in what it claims is a domestic dispute

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State-directed advocacy   107 appear understandable, if not outright justified. At the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, Tibet was geographically situated at the confluence of three empires  –​British, Russian, and Chinese  –​each of which was eager to assert influence in the region for their own geostrategic purposes. The notion of a semi-​sovereign Tibet was especially popular with the British during this period, who were eager to shore up their slowly declining influence in Asia and saw Tibet as having importance for the defence of their interests in India (Addy, 1994). Concerned with keeping Chinese influence at bay but unwilling to provoke regional instability, Britain advocated what Goldstein has called ‘a policy based on the idea of autonomy for Tibet within the context of Chinese suzerainty, that is to say, de facto independence for Tibet in the context of token subordination to China’ (Goldstein, 1989:  822). In British legal parlance of the day, ‘suzerainty’ referred to an arrangement whereby one nation exercised control over another’s international affairs while allowing it autonomy over domestic affairs. Tabled at the Simla Convention of 1914, this proposal has served as the authoritative legal basis for Tibet’s independence claims ever since. For their part, the Chinese refused to ratify the document. On 3 July of the same year, China’s chief delegate to the convention acted on official instructions when he wrote that the ‘Government of China refuses to recognize any agreement which His Majesty’s government and Tibet might conclude independently, either now or in the future’. This promise was reiterated in a 1992 White Paper issued by the State Council of the PRC which conjectured that the introduction of ‘suzerainty’ into the terminology of the Convention document was a deliberate attempt of foreign powers to take advantage of China’s unstable political climate in the early years of the First Republic, and that such action was only taken after the military incursions launched in Tibet by British and Russian forces failed to establish the dominance of either power in the territory. The subsequent transformation of Tibet under PRC control provided a pretext for US involvement in the conflict, beginning a period of transnational support for Tibetan independence in the West that has lasted more than fifty years. Numerous appeals by the Tibetan cabinet (known as the Kashag) to the United Nations for help in forestalling the threat of Chinese invasion fell on deaf ears, and the Americans were relatively eager to become involved, anxious to contain the growing communist presence in Asia. Indeed, plans for US action on the Tibet question were falling into place even before the CCP had emerged victorious in the civil war. One narrative recounts that early in 1949 Ruth E.  Bacon of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, Department of State, argued that a communist expropriation of Tibet would grant the region ‘ideological and strategic importance’ so that in the event of a

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108  The advocacy trap communist victory in the civil war, the United States should no longer consider Tibet under Chinese authority. She urged establishing a covert relationship by sending American officials to Lhasa i­mmediately but ‘inconspicuously,’ cautioning against ‘giving rise to speculation’ that the United States ‘might have designs upon Tibet’. (Grunfeld, 2006: 323) Later the same year, an ardent anti-​communist crusader and US ambassador in Delhi named Loy Anderson met secretly with representatives of the Tibetan government pledging money and weapons in support of a guerrilla resistance against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), should the need arise. While it is not clear whether direct military aid ever materialized, American sponsorship of covert operations in east-​central Asia continued as the Cold War intensified. With the situation in Korea adding a sense of urgency to the need for intervention on the Tibetan plateau, the CIA hatched plans in 1952 to airdrop teams of Tibetan counter-​insurgents into the mountains. By 1958, some 170 guerrillas had been trained at Camp Hale in Colorado, the same facility that later trained insurgents for the Bay of Pigs invasion (Conboy and Morrison, 2002).2 Even after the Cold War, the transnational campaign in support of Tibetan statehood has been greeted more warmly in Washington than any other world capital. In the 1980s and 1990s, an effort to raise the profile of the Tibet issue in Congress and the White House was taken up by the prominent DC law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, and was initially registered with the US Department of Justice in 1985 as an agent of the Tibetan government-​in-​exile. Its message found particular resonance with members of the House of Representatives, who, already upset with China over a host of other matters ranging from trade to arms sales, voted in June 1987 to approve an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act specifically denouncing what it called ‘human rights violations’ in Tibet and the ‘illegal occupation’ of the region by the Chinese (Tian, 1995: 103–​107). Tibet’s right to self-​determination has also been a topic of discussion for international bodies, and has been upheld in principle if not always in practice. A  1959 report of the International Commission of Jurists concluded that the actions of the CCP and PLA in Tibet were tantamount to genocide (International Commission of Jurists, 1959). No fewer than seven resolutions in support of Tibetan claims have been tabled at the UN General Assembly since 1959, with the most recent coming in March 1995. Introduced on 12 December 1961, Resolution 1723 (XVI) affirmed the UN’s commitment to ‘the cessation of practices which deprive Tibetan people of their fundamental

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State-directed advocacy   109 human rights and freedom, including their right to self-​determination’. Four years later, Resolution 2079 (XX) referred to freedom and self-​determination as rights Tibetans had ‘always enjoyed’. None of these resolutions have lived up to their intended force and effect. Since joining the UN in 1971, China has repeatedly and effectively quashed dialogue on the Tibet question. Between 1992 and 1994, discussion of all would-​be resolutions was blocked by a procedural manoeuvre known as a ‘motion for no action’, introduced each time by China. According to FreeTibet.org, 1994 marked the fourth year in a row in which the Chinese delegation succeeded in persuading the UN to drop a draft resolution criticizing its human rights record that made specific mention of Tibetans (Free Tibet, 2011). On several occasions, votes ‘not to take a vote’ on the proposed resolutions passed by a significant margin due to large numbers of abstentions. In the case of the 1994 resolution, debate was stifled by the refusal of seventeen countries to participate in the vote. Thus neither the UN nor Tibet’s allies within it have done much to bring the campaign appreciably closer to achieving its goal. No one, not even the Dalai Lama’s staunchest allies, have ever formally recognized Tibet as anything but a part of China. Even the Indians, who have had harsh words for Chinese tactics in Tibet and given refuge to the Dalai Lama’s government have preferred to treat him as a revered spiritual leader rather than a head of state with equivalent constitutional status.3 As a result, the campaign has been limited in its ability to give its claims legitimate grounding in international law and marshal the express support of key intergovernmental bodies for the cause of independence.

The Chinese position The shifting profile of Chinese institutions during the first half of the twentieth century saw opportunities for dialogue on the Tibet question wax and wane. It is clear, however, that certain consistencies in the state’s approach to Tibet were pivotal in the formation of Tibetan nationalist aspirations during this period. While representatives of the Qing government known as Ambans were stationed in Lhasa as a symbol of Chinese authority from 1644 onwards, the fall of the Imperial regime in 1912 and subsequent departure of the Ambans left no significant Chinese presence in the region during the early years of the First Republic. Amid the political chaos of the period, the thirteenth Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso unilaterally declared Tibet’s independence upon his return from exile in India in 1913, proclaiming that the relationship of China to Tibet had always been ‘that of patron and priest and had not been based on the subordination of one to the other’.4

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110  The advocacy trap The Kuomintang (KMT) made reassertion of control over Tibet a key part of its nation-​building strategy during the early years of the Republic of China –​a task that proved exceedingly difficult, not least because of the Republic’s own internal fragmentation, military deficiencies and weak political institutions. At the time the Republic of China was founded, Nanjing’s authority in much of the far-​flung western hinterland was tenuous at best. Tibetans were therefore of the mind that they could and should be their own masters and were determined to dig in their heels against Chinese efforts to gain a foothold in the region. Even after the resumption of an official Sino-​ Tibetan dialogue in 1936, in which Chinese emissaries demanded the Kashag formally recognize Tibet as part of China and cede control over its foreign affairs to Nanjing, KMT influence in the region remained weak. The meeting resulted in the establishment of a permanent Chinese mission in Lhasa, but the Nationalists soon found themselves preoccupied with the far more pressing matters of a Japanese invasion and an impending civil war with the Communists. Ultimately, they proved unable to bring Tibet back into the Chinese fold. Like those that ruled before them, the Communists were determined to incorporate Tibet into the larger Chinese nation, but proved far less inclined to negotiate terms with the Tibetan government and far more capable of coercion by military means. As Tsering Shakya recounts in the very best political history of Tibet yet written, ‘it was an anathema to them that Tibet should have an international personality beyond being a region of China … Tibet was an “integral part of China” which had been encouraged by anti-​Chinese and imperialist forces to break away from the “Motherland” ’ (Shakya, 1999: 4). Recognizing Tibetan aspirations of statehood would have been impossible for the CCP right from the start. For one thing, nationality policy in the new regime was to be grounded in Marxist-​Leninist theory holding that class identity transcended ethno-​national consciousness, just as in other communist states. Taking a page from the Soviet example, it was the central purpose of the CCP’s nationalities policy to negate separatist sentiment and replace it with a sense of multinational citizenship, in which minorities were united through the socialist transformation of their respective homelands (Smith, 1994:  55).5 Moreover, their victory over the Nationalists had left the CCP suddenly in control of a huge swath of land containing a large number of national minorities. Since granting independence to even one could jeopardize the entire revolution, no piece of territory, no matter how small or inconsequential, was to remain outside PRC jurisdiction. These intentions were signalled publicly in an editorial published on 2 September 1949 in the newspaper Hsin Hwa Pao, which read in part:  ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate the whole territory of China, including Tibet, Xinjiang, and

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State-directed advocacy   111 so forth … We tolerate no longer the aggression of foreign countries. This is the unchangeable policy of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’ (Shakya, 1999: 9). Accordingly, Mao made it clear immediately upon taking power that Tibetans would soon be ‘liberated’, by force if necessary, and immediately thereafter sought to establish a strong military presence in Kham and Amdo –​parts of present-​day Qinghai and northwestern Sichuan regarded by Tibetans to be part of their traditional homeland. By early 1950, PLA troops had pushed into the region of central Tibet known as U-​Tsang, the borders of which coincide roughly with those of the modern Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR, Xizang Zizhiqu). After a decisive battle at Chamdo that May, the PRC assumed de facto control over all of historical and cultural Tibet. On 23 May 1951, the Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet –​better known as the Seventeen Point Agreement –​was signed by delegates from both sides, effectively formalizing Beijing’s control in the region. While explicitly stating that the ‘Central Authorities will not alter the established status, functions, and power of the Dalai Lama’, and that ‘the Tibetan people have the right of exercising national regional autonomy’, the document’s primary objective was made plain in its first article, which stipulated that ‘the Tibetan people shall return to the big family of the Motherland—​the People’s Republic of China’. The imposition of the Seventeen Point Agreement is the major turning point in the evolution of the Tibetan independence movement. Members of the Tibetan government claimed never to have assented to it, and the Dalai Lama later claimed only to have signed it at the point of a gun (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1962: 5, 95). From the Tibetan standpoint, this lent an air of legitimacy to the notion that their land had been unlawfully taken from them, since it gave license for independence supporters to later claim that Tibet’s incorporation into the PRC was forcibly coerced. Some also see Beijing’s tabling of the Agreement in the first place as evidence that even they knew Tibet was not part of China but something that would require legal incorporation with formal documentation (Grunfeld, 2006: 327). More concretely, however, the Agreement provided a basis for specific territorial claims of the embryonic independence movement, since it carved up pieces of historical and cultural Tibet in order to best facilitate control from Beijing. Most of Kham and Amdo, where the Dalai Lama’s authority was mitigated by the influence of fiercely independent local chiefs, were to be absorbed into the existing administrative structure of the PRC and governed as part of any other province. Successfully imposing Chinese rule in U-​ Tsang, where allegiances to the Dalai Lama were much stronger and Tibetans

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112  The advocacy trap more committed to the idea of independence, would require a different strategy. The solution was a separate, joint custodial arrangement involving the complicity of local officials in converting Tibetans to the cause of socialism. Announced by Vice-​Premier Chen Yi on 22 April 1956, the Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region of Tibet, which remained the official government of the territory until creation of the TAR in 1965, was to be the instrument of this conversion.6 Finally, the perceived illegitimacy of the Seventeen Point Agreement from the Tibetan point of view was a direct cause of the uprisings in Lhasa in March of 1959 that culminated in the flight of the Dalai Lama to Dharamasala, India, where a government-​in-​exile was immediately set up and remains in place to this day. While the creation of such an entity is in itself evidence of an abiding commitment to statehood, the Dalai Lama has made propagation of all-​out independence for Tibet his life’s work. This conviction has been reiterated in public statements at various points over the years. In a speech commemorating the 10 March uprising in 1961, he declared that in mounting their resistance two years earlier, Tibetans had ‘asserted their independence after almost nine years of foreign domination’ (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1962). The Dalai Lama’s first autobiography, My Land and My People, made copious references to Tibet’s rightful status as an independent state. A second published in 1990 under the title Freedom in Exile, implores the international community to ‘Help us to be free, to be independent, to be able to do what we choose—​in our own country’ (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1990: iv). In perhaps the most provocative of all statements made during a lifetime in advocacy of his homeland, he told one US audience in 1994 that ‘When Tibetans inside and outside Tibet finally realize the joyful occasion of their reunion, Tibet shall become a nation made up of all of its three provinces [Kham, Amdo, and U-​Tsang]’, indicating an expectation to one day reclaim lands now internationally recognized as belonging exclusively to China (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1994). The CCP has remained implacable on the Tibet question since the days of the revolution, speaking to the matter unequivocally and with a single voice. A series of White Papers makes the CCP’s policy on the matter plain, stating that ‘ “Tibetan Independence” brooks no discussion’, and that ‘The Dalai’s words and deeds show that he is no longer only a religious leader as he claims. On the contrary, he has become a political leader engaged in long-​term divisive activities abroad’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1992). Another accuses him of ‘waving the banner of religion to conduct activities aimed at splitting the motherland’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1998).

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State-directed advocacy   113 To be sure, the decades-​long standoff between the communist leadership and the Dalai Lama has been punctuated by brief periods of détente during which both sides showed an inclination to engage in more cooperative dialogue. In the decade following Mao’s death, the Dalai Lama softened his rhetoric and was less apt to be open in calling for independence. Notably, his ‘5 Point Peace Plan’, introduced on 21 September 1987 before the US Congressional caucus on human rights, called for international recognition of Tibet as a ‘zone of peace’, and stressed the need for earnest negotiations with China concerning human rights in Tibet and the future of Sino-​Tibetan relations (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1987). The Party’s more conciliatory posture in the immediate post-​Mao years originated with a 1980 visit of CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang to Lhasa, which brought to light many of the persistent developmental problems of Tibet. As Hu stated at the time, ‘We feel that our Party has let the Tibetan people down … We have worked for nearly thirty years but the life of the Tibetan people has not been notably improved. Are we not to blame?’ (Wang, 1994: 288). In addition to promoting greater stability and economic progress in the region, the attention focused on Tibetan culture and development by Hu’s visit was supposed to warm Tibetans to the idea of central government leadership. As a further show of Beijing’s good faith efforts to improve life in the region, the Panchen Lama, who is second in status only to the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, was released after fourteen years under house arrest. Despite these public displays of goodwill, engagement with Tibet activists for most of the 1980s remained contingent on any whiff of independence being kept off the negotiating table. When Deng Xiaoping agreed to discuss the subject of human rights in Tibet, he did so only on condition that the Dalai Lama recognize himself as a Chinese citizen. When the Dalai Lama raised the so-​called Strasbourg Proposal in 1988, calling for a peaceful renewal of the suzerain and vassal relationship, the Deng leadership saw it as proof that the Dalai Lama was two-​faced, and that his government continued to cultivate support for Tibetan statehood internationally while offering an olive branch to the Chinese domestically. Talks fizzled, with the central government declaring, ‘of Tibet there could be no independence, nor semi-​ independence, nor independence in disguise’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 1992). Indeed, Party policy on the matter of Tibetan independence has remained consistent through five generations of CCP leadership. Hu Jintao has a unique personal history with Tibet, where he served as Party Secretary from 1988 until 1992. Upon his arrival in Lhasa it was hoped that, as a one-​time client of Hu Yaobang, he would continue the revival of Tibetan culture that was to have followed the reformer’s visit. Yet in

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114  The advocacy trap hindsight, his tenure in the region suggests a greater concern with maintaining order and safeguarding the Chinese presence. It was Hu who presided over the imposition of martial law in Lhasa in March 1989, just three months prior to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The crackdown is thought to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of ethnic Tibetans (Associated Press, 1990). One observer remarks that, at best, Hu’s record ‘shows that he acted more as a transitional figure, who led Tibet out of cultural reform and into the hands of even more conservative leaders in 1993 and 1994’ (Karmel, 1995–​1996:  491). Even before he took office, fifth-​generation leader Xi Jinping made known his intentions to uphold the Party’s position and defend territorial integrity, promising to ‘completely smash any plot to destroy stability in Tibet and jeopardize national unity’ (BBC News, 2011). At the same time, Beijing believes itself to have made significant strides in recent years in addressing the political demands and material needs of Tibetans, who are now much better off than two decades ago. At least this is the message it presents to the world. Written in English for a largely international audience, the 1998 White Paper states that ‘thanks to the care and support of the central government … the region’s economic and social development has been remarkably speeded up, thus further promoting the development of the cause of human rights there’. Hu Jintao devoted much greater attention than any of his predecessors to redressing Tibet’s developmental problems. Characterizing his policy in the region as one of ‘leapfrog development’, Hu stressed the paramount importance of ramping up economic growth and natural resource exploitation balanced by the improvement of living conditions and environmental protections as the key to lasting peace and prosperity in Tibet (Global Times, 2010). Encouraging the migration of educated Chinese from the relatively well-​developed eastern provinces in order to provide new industries in Tibet with a larger supply of skilled labour was central to his plan. Held in Beijing from 18 to 20 January 2010, the Fifth Tibet Work Forum touted the success of the Hu leadership’s development strategy in the region and proposed an extension of its core policies until 2020, when Hu’s successors will begin preparing to leave office. Reflecting on the record of the Party before a crowd gathered outside Lhasa’s Potala Palace to mark sixty years since Tibet’s ‘peaceful liberation’, Xi Jinping remarked, ‘the extraordinary development of Tibet over the past sixty years points to an irrefutable truth: Without the Chinese Communist Party, there would have been no new China, no new Tibet’ (Wee, 2011). On the domestic front, however, the aims and sincerity of Beijing’s plans remain contested. Notably, the policy of encouraging migration from the east has been interpreted by many Tibetans in China and abroad as evidence of

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State-directed advocacy   115 Han Chinese chauvinism expressed by way of a deliberate attempt to flood the region with non-​Tibetans, thereby limiting the influence of Tibetan culture. The Dalai Lama has publicly condemned the policy as one of cultural genocide (Telegraph, 2008). It has also been alleged that the continuation of Patriotic Education Programmes on Hu’s watch was a deliberate effort to eradicate Tibetan identity (Smith, 2008: 170). Classes focus on topics such as patriotism towards China, Tibetan language and culture, and Chinese communist principles on materialism and atheism. Some 48,000 students from Lhasa Prefectures from grades five through high-​school were reported to have completed one such ‘intensive’ Patriotic Education Programme in 2005 (Congressional-​Executive Commission on China, 2005). Promoting the Tibetan cause Now in its sixth decade, the transnational campaign for Tibetan independence comprises a truly global network of about 170 organizations wielding an impressive array of financial, technological, and diplomatic resources.7 The Dalai Lama is the head of the network, both symbolically and organizationally, and without him the campaign for a free Tibet could not have been mounted, grown, or sustained. Indeed, the chief success of his lifetime spent in the public eye has been to raise awareness of himself, his homeland, his religion, and his cause across the world. During the late 1980s and early 1990s he travelled widely, speaking about his dream of Tibetan statehood in order to establish what would later become the transnational Tibet lobby. His efforts were directly responsible for the overseas expansion and eventual professionalization of the network, especially in the United States, where it attracted a substantial following of human rights NGOs and established new organizations of its own. Created in 1988, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) began to disseminate its message more widely through the China Tibet Forum, a newspaper aimed at Chinese expatriate communities and dissidents living outside China. The year 1990 was proclaimed as the ‘Year of Tibet’ and was heralded with the opening of Tibet House, a major cultural and advocacy centre in New  York City. Among the advocacy groups housed in the building over the years have been the Office of Tibet, the US-​Tibet Committee, the Tibetan Women’s Association, the Tibetan Youth Association, Potala Publications, Eco-​Tibet, TibetNet, the Tibet Fund, and the Tibetan-​US Resettlement Project, as well as numerous other societies dedicated to preserving Tibet’s artistic and cultural treasures, and Menla Mountain, a conference and meditation retreat centre in the Catskills.

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116  The advocacy trap The strong base of support established in the United States during the early 1990s served as a launch pad for the professionalization of the Tibet network and its expansion into other countries. Tibet Houses can be found today in Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, India, and Hungary. Such strong support in the United States provided a basis for further expansion into other countries such as the UK, India, Denmark, and Germany, where numerous conferences were held through the late 1980s and early 1990s to coordinate professional advocacy activities. The growing strength of the network during this period also contributed to increases in the density of its internal communication flows, especially as digital technologies came more widely into use. Free Tibet.org, now the most recognizable source of information about the campaign online, was originally founded in 1987. Outside this professional core, the campaign also consists of a less formal grassroots contingent, thanks in large part to its successful framing of a ‘virtual Tibet’ –​a romanticized image of the region as an idyllic, peaceable Shangri-​La. The resulting boost in visibility is due to the support of many artists, musicians, and Hollywood celebrities (Schell, 2000). Actor Richard Gere chairs his own private foundation devoted to supporting the government-​in-​ exile and Tibetan refugees from what it calls ‘the continuing brutal occupation of the Chinese’ (Gere Foundation Charter, n.d.). Other celebrity adherents of Tibetan Buddhism and outspoken advocates of the Free Tibet movement include late rapper and musician Adam Yauch, actors Steven Seagal, John Cleese, Sharon Stone, and Jet Li, and poet Allen Ginsberg. Between 1997 and 2001, several rock concerts dubbed ‘Tibetan Freedom Festivals’ were held in cities across North America and Europe, with one show on the steps of the US Capitol attracting 120,000 people. The participation of such notable performers as the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, REM, Radiohead and others gave the Tibetan cause a modern edge, or ‘coolness factor’ that generated credibility and added awareness of the independence issue on college campuses in the United States, in turn spawning a number of student organizations with links to chapters in other countries. Of these, Students for a Free Tibet is the largest, working ‘in solidarity with the Tibetan people in their struggle for freedom and independence’ (Students for a Free Tibet, n.d.). Framing Tibet: the new global imperialism The very nature of the Tibet issue creates insurmountable barriers to its acceptance in China, where it is portrayed by state media as the attempt of the Dalai Lama and his foreign allies to sow unrest. Viewing any whiff of independence as inimical to the ‘one China’ policy, and the thin end of a

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State-directed advocacy   117 wedge in a nation united under socialism, the CCP has taken up its own domestic propaganda war against what it calls the ‘Dalai Clique’, a compact of ethnic rabble-​rousers and their anti-​Chinese friends. Warren W. Smith, a broadcaster with Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan Service has observed that, ‘ultimately, Chinese propaganda reverted to the traditional themes and justifications for Chinese rule over Tibet, primary among which was Tibet’s inability to govern itself as demonstrated by its “savage, cruel, and barbaric feudal serf system” ’ (Smith, 2010: 79–​81). This attitude was reflected in the words of one Foreign Ministry spokesperson: The Dalai group has always claimed that the Tibetan culture, religion, and environment have been destroyed. There is something destroyed in Tibet, but it is not Tibetan religion or culture. Rather, it is the dark serfdom system that has been destroyed and will never be restored again. (Smith, 2010: 81) The Party’s language only gets stronger from there, most often denouncing the campaign as nothing but the neo-​imperial machinations of foreigners who would see China splintered and weakened. In an October 2000 editorial, Tibet Party Secretary Guo Jinlong called Tibetan independence ‘a vain attempt to divide the Chinese nation, [and] the outcome of class struggle on an international scale’ (Xizang Ribao, 2000). Hu Jintao struck a similar tone when he invoked Marxist theory to describe ethnic separatism in Tibet as a ‘special contradiction’ threatening national unity and stability. The 2008 appearance of a Tibet Daily editorial calling for a ‘people’s war’ against the Lhasa rioters –​a phrase popularized during the ideological witch hunts of the Cultural Revolution –​represents the high-​water mark. Adding to the difficulty is the lack of sympathy for the campaign in mainland China. Though perhaps more circumstantial than scientific, available evidence suggests that Chinese public opinion tends to view Tibetans not as victims but as perpetrators of havoc and their international allies as arrogant China-​bashers. Mainland international relations scholarship supports Beijing, sometimes even accusing Western governments of undermining international order by levelling Cold War-​style accusations in order to ‘discipline’ China (Xu and Feng, 2006: 305). Meanwhile, public intellectuals known for their usual defence of human rights claimants were conspicuously silent in response to the self-​immolations of 2009 in Lhasa –​to much backlash on social media. ‘So many Tibetans have self-​immolated, what have the public opinion leaders done to help?’ wrote one Twitter user. ‘Chinese netizens only enjoy fighting and cursing online. Their indifference is so chilling and shameless’, said another.

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118  The advocacy trap Yet it is not at all clear that these feelings reflect majority opinion. Others expressed support for swift and brutal vengeance against Tibetan protestors, and even attacked Chinese authorities for failing to uphold national pride by being too soft on them. ‘We couldn’t believe our government was being so weak and cowardly’, stated one bystander, upset that the police had not put a stop to the demonstrations. ‘The Dalai Lama is trying to separate China, and it is not acceptable at all. We must crack down on the rioters’ (Yardley, 2008). Conclusion: reorienting the independence struggle Over time, failure to move China from its position has had a reflexive impact on the campaign itself, altering its core values and objectives, and even what it means to support the Tibetan cause. Although ‘self-​ determination’ originally meant an unequivocal backing for Tibetan independence and creation of a sovereign state that included the territories of Kham and Amdo, the Dalai Lama himself has recently acknowledged that this is absolutely ‘out of the question’ (BBC News, 2008b). Instead, the goal is now to secure greater autonomy and cultural protection for the Tibetan people within a multinational or quasi-​federal China, precisely the aim of the Communist’s nationality policy given years before. Advocacy of this ‘middle way’ has been accompanied by less inflammatory speeches by many of the NGOs and human rights groups that have supported the Dalai Lama’s government in the past. The before-​and-​after contrasts are stark. A long-​time defender of statehood, the International Campaign for Tibet now claims to be ‘firmly committed not to seek separation or independence’ but to finding ‘a solution to the Tibetan problem through genuine autonomy, which is compatible with the principles on autonomy in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China’ (International Campaign for Tibet, 2011). SaveTibet.org advocates ‘progress toward a mutually agreeable solution for Tibet’, and that ‘Tibetans be able to maintain their distinctive Tibetan identity into the future’ through governance as a single administrative unit under a unified, coherent PRC policy, rather than as an independent state (Save Tibet, n.d.). In addition to shifting the nature of advocacy goals, Chinese intractability on the Tibetan independence issue has also contributed to fractionalization within the campaign over the preferred methods of advocacy. Traditionally, the campaign has identified with the principle of non-​violent resistance to the so-​called Chinese occupation. Writings of the Dalai Lama through the years make numerous references to pacifism as both a guiding principle and defining objective of the campaign, taking explicit Buddhist teachings as inspiration.8

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State-directed advocacy   119 There is now a greater diversity of opinion over tactics within the campaign. Parts of the network are more prone to carry resistance to extremes compared to ten years ago. There are those living in Tibet for whom setting oneself on fire is the highest form of non-​violent struggle, as there always has been. But incidents of self-​immolation are becoming increasingly common. More than a hundred have been reported since March 2011. This uptick in the frequency of protester suicides may be due to perceptions of an especially harsh reaction from Beijing to the 2008 Lhasa demonstrations. But it can also be seen as an effort to keep traditional, non-​violent forms of protest alive amid the rise of a more militant wing of the independence advocacy network. Forged by decades of frustration with Beijing’s implacability and, equally, with the Dalai Lama’s position that the future of Tibet is within China, this faction views violence as a legitimate tool for promoting the Tibetan cause (Frechette, 2002:  166; Hess, 2009:  229). They also show signs of willingness to act on this conviction. In the wake of the 2008 crackdown in Lhasa, attacks by Tibetan immigrants on Chinese consulates were reported in Delhi, Kathmandu, and Washington. The latter involved an estimated 500 demonstrators, some of whom breached the embassy gates, threw stones and smashed windows on the property  –​hardly the stuff of terrorist insurgency, but nevertheless a departure from the image of stoic serenity in the face of oppression that earned the campaign its worldwide fame. The endorsement of violence in contravention of the Dalai Lama’s exhortations to always maintain a peaceful posture represents a new war for independence activists, not for a homeland of their own but for the soul of their campaign. Those in the new camp opposed to negotiation with Beijing view violence as a way to convey the sense of desperation and urgency they feel for their cause, much in the way that Palestinian suicide bombers have done for theirs. For others, including non-​Tibetans drawn to the Dalai Lama’s message and folk hero status, forsaking non-​violence means ceding the moral high-​ground –​the campaign’s only real weapon. Climate change In contrast to their lack of movement on the Tibet question, China’s leaders recognize the potential threat posed by inaction on climate change and have formulated an ambitious national agenda to fight it. While continually insisting that it is only right and proper that the developed world shoulder its share of the burden in contributing to global warming, balancing a reduction of greenhouse gases with China’s overall economic and social development plan was a particular feature of environmental policy under Hu Jintao.

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120  The advocacy trap Promulgated on Hu’s watch, China’s National Climate Change Programme pledged to make progress on bringing greenhouse gas emissions under control, to encourage climate change research and encourage the development of new green technologies, and to improve public awareness of climate change. In the words of Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission and Head of the National Climate Change Coordination Committee, the policy demonstrated ‘the sincerity and determination of China to actively address climate change’ and participate fully in international discussions on the subject of global warming (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, 2007). While cutting China’s carbon emissions –​now the highest in the world –​is a feature of central government policy, proposals from the global community on how best to achieve that goal have met with lukewarm responses in China. Specifically, China’s policy as presently stated offers no indication of its intentions to accept a cap-​and-​trade agreement limiting its carbon output, as advocated by a global network of climate activists. Also known as ‘emissions trading’, such agreements generally refer to any market-​based tool for controlling pollution that provides economic incentives to reduce emissions and imposes set limits on the emissions of signatories according to a ‘polluter pays’ logic. But many in the Party view these arrangements as likely to be a drag on economic performance –​the CCP’s overriding concern (Lieberthal and Sandalow, 2009: 33). For them, cap-​and-​trade schemes are an ill-​advised tradeoff between environmental and economic priorities that in the short-​run could restrict China’s rise and global competitiveness. Although Beijing was rumoured to be considering imposition of a nation-​wide cap from 2016 and a pilot carbon-​trading programme to be launched in 2013 in Shenzhen, it was reported in July 2013 that this proposal was only one of several under consideration for the Thirteenth Five-​Year Plan (2016–​2020), and was unlikely to be adopted. ‘There are lots of ways we can achieve the carbon-​intensity target by 2020’, said Su Wei, Beijing’s chief spokesmen on global warming and Director-​General of the NDRC’s climate change department. With cap-​and-​trade effectively off the negotiating table, most climate change activists have opted to work collaboratively with agencies of China’s government to meet the country’s climate goals on its own terms. The results have transformed China into a global leader in climate protection and the development of green industries, with targets for emissions reduction far more stringent than those set by many developing world governments (Garnaut, 2008:  293). But cooperation with China has also stretched the principled commitments of many green activists, forcing them to abandon their preferred method, the carbon cap, and move towards solutions favoured by their target government. The story is one of China’s seductiveness, and –​especially

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State-directed advocacy   121 when contrasted with that of the independence movement –​of the vicissitudes of access. Instead of an implacable state unwilling to bend on issues of national sovereignty, climate activists found a China eager to learn, and to receive the intellectual resources the TAN could provide. China’s place in the global climate regime International institutions have been crucial to the fate of cap-​and-​trade advocacy in China, first by promoting the placement of climate change issues on national and international policy agendas, and second, by proposing emissions trading as a solution for discussion and debate. There are, naturally, lingering doubts in many countries as to the nature and severity of the dangers associated with global warming, and whether or not the phenomenon is even real (Brechin, 2003; Oreskes and Conway, 2011). Nevertheless, the proliferation of multilateral accords on climate change in recent times suggests many if not most governments are apt to take the issue seriously. China is no exception, and its participation in multilateral talks has generated greater awareness of the importance of climate governance at home. For example, the results of a report brought back by China’s delegation to the landmark 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm convinced then-​Premier Zhou Enlai to organize a multi-​agency national conference on environmental protection (Economy, 1997:  22). Six years later, the resulting policy commitments were integrated into the reform agenda and formalized in China’s constitution. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is thought to have been directly responsible for China’s Adoption of the UN’s Agenda 21, and committed Beijing to ‘sustainable utilization of resources and preserving a healthy environment’ (‘China’s Agenda 21’, 1992). As Elizabeth Economy concludes, the conference had a ‘profound effect on environmental policies, institutions and thinking in China’ (Economy, 2004:  187). China also ratified the Montreal Protocol for the Protection of the Ozone Layer in 1994, and became an Annex 2 signatory to the Kyoto Protocol in May 1998. Although its Annex 2 status shielded it from having to accept a firm cap on emissions, more than 120 administrative regulations were put in place by 2001 to shore up environmental protection and address emissions standards (Morton, 2009: 38). More recently, participation in international dialogue has highlighted the seriousness of the risks posed to China by the effects of climate change within its borders. A report of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that Asia’s developing nations are particularly susceptible to the impacts of global warming, and among the least capable of

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122  The advocacy trap dealing with these challenges at present (Yu, 2008:  50). China in particular is thought to face an elevated risk of extreme weather patterns and natural disasters jeopardizing human health. It also confronts the prospect of accelerated desertification, deforestation, coastal erosion, floods, and severe water shortages, leading to adverse effects on agricultural production (Li and Nishioka, 2002:  348). In 2008, the central government acknowledged that China is ‘one of the countries most susceptible to the adverse effects of climate change, mainly in the fields of agriculture, livestock breeding, forestry, natural ecosystems, water resources, and coastal zones’ (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2008: 4). International engagement has also shone a spotlight on China’s contribution to global warming. Part of the reason for the increase in scrutiny is China’s unusual dependence on coal, a dirtier, more high-​emissions source of energy than nuclear fission or hydroelectricity. According to one report, coal accounts for 70 per cent of all Chinese energy and 80 per cent of its electricity, helping to make China a focus of international concern (International Energy Agency, 2007:  265).9 More important, however, was the announcement in July 2007 by a group of Dutch scientists that China had surpassed the United States as the world’s number one carbon emitter, a figure it had not been expected to approach until close to 2020. In the past, China had premised its opposition to an emissions cap on the grounds that accepting formal limits on its greenhouse outputs belied the culpability of the developed world in contributing to global warming, leading to unreasonable and unfair expectations with regard to burden-​sharing. Now, however, the United States could reasonably expect China to take greater responsibility. The issue has devolved into a stalemate in US–​China relations, with both governments agreeing something must be done, and even offering to work together, while continually insisting that the other must get its house in order first.10 The push for bolder action by China’s government is not limited to the world’s foremost polluters, but draws support from stakeholders in rich and poor countries alike. Because the effects of global warming are sometimes felt thousands of miles from their source, few advocacy campaigns enjoy the sheer breadth of transnational significance or participation from the global South that climate change does. For example, prior to the Bali climate conference in 2007, a coalition of Pacific microstates concerned with rising sea levels called on other high-​emissions developing economies to reduce their carbon outputs, pointing out that as the single largest emitter, China was culpable in forecasted climate disasters throughout the South Pacific (Mehra, 2007). President Anote Tong of Kiribas, whose country comprises a series of low-​lying atolls some 7,200 kilometres due east of Papua New Guinea, has been particularly active on the issue, calling on the governments of New

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State-directed advocacy   123 Zealand and Australia to accommodate an influx of climate refugees from Kiribas once it is swallowed by the sea. In 2014, he also announced the purchase of a Fijian island in preparation for the eventual evacuation and relocation of the Republic of Kiribati. The development of China’s climate change programme International gatherings may have helped convince Chinese leaders of the need for action, but it is the state that has led the charge for development of a comprehensive domestic climate change programme. The system has evolved alongside the liberalization of the Chinese economy, and to some degree, its politics. Before 1976, environmental degradation was regarded by the Maoist leadership as endemic to capitalist societies due to their over-​exploitation of resources (Schroeder, 2008). Thus the need to differentiate the responsibilities of the developed and developing worlds in contributing to environmental problems was at the core of the CCP’s early environmental diplomacy. Chinese delegates to the Stockholm conference in 1972 supported the right of states to exploit resources as they saw fit, but also pointed out the obligation of individual states to do so responsibly and in a manner suited to cutting down on global pollution (Kent, 2007:  149–​150). The notion of differentiated responsibilities has proved an enduring feature of Chinese policy as the international climate regime blossomed. Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter recount how, at a ‘Conference of Developing Countries on Environment and Development’ convened by the Chinese in 1991, Beijing’s goals … were to line up the forty-​one countries in attendance behind a set of principles Chinese officials had agreed upon internally in the spring of 1990, including the idea of developed country responsibility and culpability, the industrialized world’s need to provide compensatory financial assistance to the developing world in order to help with the implementation of signed agreements and declarations, and the understanding that environmental protection should not lead to the sacrifice of development goals. (Foot and Walter, 2011: 188) These principles were repeated by Premier Li Peng when he signed the UNFCCC in Rio a year later, giving many in the global community an impression of China as a ‘recalcitrant’ participant in climate change negotiations, one that favoured the weakest possible reporting standards and no concrete emission reduction targets (Economy, 1998: 246). Nonetheless, the increasing pace of industrialization during the late 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to a host of new programmes and agencies

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124  The advocacy trap specifically to combat the environmental fallout, including global warming. In 1984, an Environmental Protection Commission was established by the State Council, and was subsequently elevated to the level of national office and housed within the Ministry of Rural Construction and Environmental Protection, before becoming the National Environment Protection Agency in 1988. A decade later, it became the State Environmental Protection Agency, and was accorded the status of a ministry in 2008. A National Climate Change Committee was created in 1987 in order to foster debate among Chinese scientists that could be integrated into policy-​making. By 1989, this had evolved into a national climate change research programme. It incorporated more than 500 experts and twenty state ministries, focused around the training of environmental officials and the refining of monitoring and reporting procedures (Foot and Walter, 2011: 189). Hu Jintao’s ascendance to the state and Party leadership was a critical juncture in the development of China’s climate change policy. Up to that point, CCP leaders had viewed China’s environmental burden as inimical to its economic development goals. Reduced emissions were the enemy of GDP growth, and Chinese accession to the WTO in 2001 had led to new incentives to ramp-​up energy consumption in the name of economic expansion. But with Hu’s rise to power, economic and environmental concerns began to be seen, for the first time, as two sides of the same coin. To be sure, keeping the economy strong remained a top priority, but for Hu, the achievement of social harmony meant counterbalancing that growth with a greater commitment to environmental protection, including safeguarding against ecological disasters, energy shortages and agricultural shortfalls, a commitment that was first articulated in the Tenth Five-​Year Plan (2001–​2005). Premier Wen Jiabao later remarked that an ‘unbalanced economic structure’, ‘excessive consumption of energy and resources’, and ‘worsening environmental pollution’ were among the most serious challenges motivating state action as set forth in the Plan (Sheehan and Sun, 2008: 396–​397). The new administration’s approach of combining growth with environmental protection in one coherent development plan was carried over to the Eleventh Five-​Year Plan (2006–​2010), which explicitly linked climate action to national development, setting compulsory targets to reduce energy consumption and pollution output from 2005 levels ‘by twenty and ten percent respectively’ (Hallding et al., 2009: 49). By the early stages of the Xi presidency, China had evolved one of the world’s most extensive climate change regimes, with a high degree of central coordination. At the apex is the National Development and Reform Commission, which oversees the National Leading Group on Climate Change, the country’s highest decision-​ making body on climate change

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State-directed advocacy   125 issues. As of 2013, it is composed of representatives from approximately twenty different ministries and agencies at the national level (Wubbeke, 2013: 713). Notably, it is also increasingly apt to rely on expert opinion from outside sources for input in the policy process, especially think tanks and quasi-​governmental agencies.11 Prior to the UNFCCC, experts at arm’s-​length from the State Council had been little involved in formulating official positions. This all changed after the conference, which had focused increased attention on the urgency of the climate challenge and led to a surge in government funding to support climate research, which expanded more than 800 per cent between 1994 and 2006 (Wubbeke, 2013: 716). However, the central state retains authority over what to do with the input it receives, and, to some degree, exercises discretion over the tone and direction of the research conducted. Since the time when expert research began in earnest, most of it has approached China’s climate challenges from a natural science perspective, which still predominates. Only recently has climate research in China begun to diversify into other fields such as law, economics, and political science. Actual input in policy is mostly of the engineering or economic variety and is limited to a handful of quasi-​ governmental research institutes. Under the NDRC umbrella, the National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, set up in 2012, and Energy Research Institute have emerged as key providers of information on greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy and support the government in international negotiations. The Research Centre for Sustainable Development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is a leading provider of expertise on the economic impacts of climate change policies, as is the State Council’s Development Research Centre. Being concerned with the effects of climate change itself, the government is generally receptive to the advice experts provide, but not in all forms in all places or all of the time. A 2008 book by Peter Ho and Louis Edmonds entitled China’s Embedded Activism makes the point that a variety of context-​ specific factors shape opportunities for environmental activists to influence policy, resulting in an institutional arrangement that seemingly constrains environmental activism at certain times while enabling it at others. Such factors can include variance in local or provincial governance capacity, levels of economic development, existing levels of environmental damage and accompanying social grievance, and the overall level of civil society development in a given area (Wu, 2013). Much also depends on who is doing the advising and who is doing the listening. At times, the concept of an ‘environmental movement’ or a ‘green civil society’ has often been posed as a form of organized opposition to the state as a whole, exacerbating rather than alleviating misperceptions about the purpose of China’s green groups and their

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126  The advocacy trap potential role in contributing to climate change mitigation (Sun and Zhao, 2008; Turner, 2004). Originally designed to keep environmental and other NGOs from becoming too independently powerful, several domestic green groups report that MOCA’s requirements for registration have become more stringent over the last ten years (Confidential Interviews, 2009e). In still other cases, state representatives may be mistrustful of activist intentions but reliant on them for service provision, leading to a kind of ‘co-​dependence’ –​ a term that implies unease or dysfunction –​between state and third sector actors (Hildebrandt, 2013). Environmental groups in China show signs of adaptability to these uncertain surroundings, and have learned to work within the system and use it to their advantage where and when they can. One of the more common and effective strategies for activists in this situation is to merge themselves with the state through the creation of GONGOs and other kinds of organizations under the state’s purview (Lu, 2007; Tang and Zhan, 2008). As Ho puts it, ‘the semi-​authoritarian context has created an environment in which the divide between civic organizations, state, and Party is extremely blurred’. ‘By establishing informal organizations, façade institutions or “companies” ’, he writes, ‘Environmental NGOs are capable of circumventing the stringent regulations for NGO registration’ (Ho, 2008:  3). In other words, the key to accessing state institutions and policy-​makers is often to become part of the state itself. One of the main advantages of blending state and non-​ state sectors in this way is that it allows informal connections and personal ties –​another significant factor contextualizing the success of green groups in China  –​to be more easily exploited. In an atmosphere of authoritarian state dominance, there is a temptation to assume that it is activists who are the primary seekers of these connections, but the opposite is often also true. For example, one study of green NGOs in Yunnan found a revolving door between the state and non-​state sectors, with more than three-​quarters of the organizations investigated being headed by someone who formerly worked for the government (Cooper, 2006: 121). Self-​limiting strategic engagement, in which NGOs choose their positions carefully so as not to jeopardize official relationships, has become a basic fact of everyday operations for the vast majority of these groups.12 The transnational climate change network in China Environmental NGOs are among the most numerous and well-​established civil society actors in China. Activism by indigenous groups traces its origins to the late 1980s, when many of the environmental costs of Deng’s modernization plan first began to appear. Probably no campaign at this stage gained

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State-directed advocacy   127 more exposure than the effort to stop construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the campaign won the support of many well-​connected scientists and journalists, capturing the imagination of the Chinese public and setting a precedent for cooperation between activists and state officials in other areas of environmental protection. It was not until the mid-​1990s, however, that the Chinese environmental movement truly came into its own. Increasing reliance on green NGOs for service delivery, tasks formerly carried out by state agencies, combined with rebounding tolerance for civil society actors in general following their post-​Tiananmen suppression created new space for domestic groups to flourish. Many of China’s most influential and well-​known NGOs, including the Global Village of Beijing, Friends of Nature (FoN), Green Volunteers of Beijing, Sichuan’s Green Rivers and Green Watershed in Yunnan were initially founded during this period. Their blossoming paved the way for the establishment of environmentalism as the single biggest area of NGO activity in China. Beijing’s own figures indicate that more than 3,000 environmental groups were operating nationwide as of 2006 (Xinhua News Agency, 2006c). When the numbers of unofficial and unregistered groups are included, the true figure may be much higher. Environmental NGOs are also some of the most globally connected of any in China. More than other areas of domestic activism, environmental groups in China have been active in pursuing opportunities for participation in environmental debates internationally, either as members or observers at global gatherings. FoN, for example, sent delegates to the NGO forum of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, in an effort to broaden international attention to biodiversity and other environmental challenges in China (Jie, 2006: 32). The growing presence of domestic Chinese NGOs and journalists at global climate change summits, such as the one held in Copenhagen in December 2009, attests to the growing potential for these groups to assert themselves in discussions about global warming (Shi, 2009). As a consequence of this type of activity, a 2002 study conducted at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center concluded that ‘environmental GONGOs are among the most active in forming transnational advocacy networks across China’s borders’, and ‘are among the most popular partners, second only to governmental agencies, for international environmental NGOs working in China’ (Wu, 2002: 49–​50). Domestic scholar-​activism is just as important to climate change advocacy in China, contributing the kind of trusted expertise the government seeks. Research Institutes at Tsinghua and Renmin universities, for instance, are key providers of advice on economic and technical matters, especially regarding the development of green technologies and the charting of China’s long-​term

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128  The advocacy trap strategy for reducing emissions. Aside from what they can offer the authorities, the prime benefit of their participation in the TAN campaign is twofold. First, scholarly communities equipped the TAN with a pre-​fabricated communicative structure that enables links to develop between experts in China and abroad. By availing itself of this academic ‘network within a network’, information sharing is enhanced among the campaign’s constituent parts. This is as true of data regarding the science and economics of climate change as it is of how to navigate institutional process and roadblocks. Second, the participation of Chinese scholars gives experts and stakeholders within the TAN access to certain framing advantages. Because the line demarcating academic research on climate change from issue advocacy is often a fine one in the Chinese context, partners within the state in a position to receive expert knowledge are more prone to treat research findings as apolitical and therefore non-​threatening, even helpful. ‘Data’, rigorously analysed to produce ‘facts’ under the auspices of scientific research come across as less prosecutorial and more akin to ‘telling it like it is’, and thus are more conducive to cooperation with the state in pursuit of common interests than information that is seen as more politically motivated, as is the case with much human rights activism. Experts and upstart NGOs alike have also been particularly innovative in their use of new media, which has perhaps proven most useful for expanding the overall number of groups active in the network. Many domestic NGOs in China are little more than a single individual working out of a basement or one-​bedroom apartment. In such cases the purchase of a refurbished laptop and an internet connection might constitute a significant part of the overall operating budget  –​a refrain repeated by staff at more than one mainland organization dedicated to the task of capacity-​building in Chinese NGOs. Still, a length of fibre-​optic cable is all it takes to connect less financially well-​ to-​do Chinese NGOs with more professionalized and resourceful international counterparts. Indeed, it may be the only way they can recognize one another. ‘For groups of volunteer environmentalists lacking both official status and office space, an online presence is a key sign of their existence’ (G. Yang, 2003: 90). Websites and social media such as Facebook and Twitter often serve as a way for Chinese and foreign activists to circumvent legal barriers and coordinate their activities beneath the authorities’ radar. But more often, these are tools for public outreach and information-​sharing. News media are a vital source of information about China’s environment, giving environmental groups, scientists, and students access to a huge range of facts and figures about China’s climate record and policies at the local and national levels, and enabling them to connect with similar movements in other countries (Mol,

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State-directed advocacy   129 2009:  125). In some isolated instances, social media has become a way for groups concerned with pollution standards to take their claims directly to the state. One such story involves scientists working for Greenpeace, who in 2008 conducted a study on air and water pollution levels and then used the results to pressure local officials in Shenyang to disclose the information to the public, which they did. Confrontation loomed by 2011, when Greenpeace expanded its air pollution campaign to the national level, using social media to demand Beijing release data on air quality standards. Pressure only intensified when Chinese activists were alerted to the fact that the US embassy in Beijing was taking hourly measurements of air quality and posting these publicly via Twitter (Wong, 2013). In response, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection announced plans to include PM2.5 data in estimates of air pollution. Seventy-​four municipalities nation-​wide are now required to publicize data on air-​borne particulate matter. In general, the international NGOs prominent in climate change advocacy in China have been no less keen to cooperate with the authorities than their domestic counterparts. Some have forged deep partnerships that extend back several decades. The World Wildlife Federation has existed in China since 1978, and was among the first foreign NGOs to arrive on the scene after the initiation of reform and opening up. Eventually, it adopted the panda as its official logo. The unusually strong rapport it has built with the Chinese authorities facilitated a level of ease and cooperation in its dealings with central, provincial, and local government partners on many of its biodiversity and habitat conservation concerns, nearly all of which it attributes to global warming-​related causes (Confidential Interview, 2009f). Headquartered in Baraboo, Wisconsin, the International Crane Foundation has worked for wetlands conservation in China for over thirty years, using the image of the crane –​a symbol of long life and happiness in China –​to foster closer relations. International NGOs newer to China also report working just as intimately with state agencies, using their technical and research expertise to encourage Chinese policy-​makers to allow access to the policy process. For example, Greenpeace-​ China collaborated with the Ministry of Environmental Protection to write the Clean Air Act in 2008. Other large players in the network rely on celebrities to make their connections. In 2011, Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection launched ‘The Climate Project in China’, in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry for Science and Technology, and the China–​U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. The organization claims more than five million members worldwide (China–​U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, 2010). Roots and Shoots, which maintains offices in Beijing and Shanghai, operates as part of the Jane Goodall Institute,

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130  The advocacy trap drawing on her international reputation and brand power to advocate for greater environmental awareness and protection in China. Issue linkage and public opinion A big part of the reason for the explosion of advocacy around China’s role in climate change is the nebulous nature of the issue itself. Indeed, the ability to draw additional support by exploiting the interconnectedness of several large environmental concerns simultaneously is the single most important factor underpinning the size and strength of the network. When done properly, issue grafting turns environmental issues in general into climate change issues  –​the law of ecosystems, in which all elements are interconnected, applies to environmentalism every bit as much as to the environment itself. By pointing to climate change as the lynchpin of China’s environmental problems more broadly, actors in the campaign have gained the backing of others working on many separate but related ecological issues. For example, the attribution of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters in China due to climate change has been a key catalyst of international cooperation and input into government policy (Luo, 2010: 133–​134). Biodiversity and wildlife conservation projects throughout the country have linked the disappearance of species such as the South China tiger, Yunnan golden monkey and Tibetan antelope to habitat loss caused by global warming (Morton, 2005). The opportunities and access for programmes of this sort are even greater where the loss of at-​risk species serves as a barometer for the safety and well-​being of human populations. The presumed-​extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin (baiji) has been particularly alarming for NGOs and state officials alike, since its habitat is also a source of potable water for hundreds of millions. One official interviewed at the World Wildlife Fund’s office in Shanghai recalls how the biodiversity campaigns in which his organization has participated enjoyed the successes they did largely because of the government’s wish to demonstrate its ability to respond quickly and decisively to ecological catastrophes, and to effectively deliver public goods such as safe drinking water (Confidential Interview, 2009g). Issue linkage and the gravity of the potential human costs translates into a growing concern among the Chinese public with environmental challenges and what the government is doing to address them. Due in part to the spread of digital technology, knowledge of environmental challenges is growing, especially in large urban areas where smog impacts air quality (Xie, 2011: 209). Environmental protests have also been on the rise for some time, partly in response to the ecological impacts of global warming (Stalley and Yang, 2006; Zhou, 2011;). In 2012, Chinese Society of Environmental

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State-directed advocacy   131 Sciences Vice-​ Chairman Yang Chaofei told a meeting of the National People’s Congress standing committee that the number of environmental protests was increasing at a rate of 29 per cent per year and had spiked an incredible 120 per cent from 2010–​2011 in response to a larger-​than-​normal number of emergencies involving contamination by hazardous material. An estimated 2,500 people took part in one such incident in Kunming over the proposed construction of a new oil refinery. The Hong Kong-​based South China Morning Post quoted one of the protesters as saying ‘I hope this can be a good beginning for a dialogue between citizens and the government on major decisions’ (Guardian, 2013). For the most part, the state welcomes and encourages such dialogue when it takes place through the proper channels. Indeed, the 1996 State Council Decision Concerning Certain Environmental Protection Issues laid the groundwork for promoting public reporting on violations of environmental regulations and participation in environmental protection (Schwartz, 2004:  35). Since that time, ordinary Chinese citizens have had access to a wide variety of fora for complaint-​making, and data collected annually by the State Statistical Bureau and published in yearbooks indicates that they are increasingly prone to take advantage of opportunities to report environmental problems (State Statistical Bureau of the People’s Republic of China, 1996). Telephone hotlines and legal mechanisms allowing the public to disclose the names of polluters or officials who fail to uphold environmental regulations have proven especially popular. Still, ample evidence suggests that the Chinese public remains unsatisfied. A poll conducted by the Public Opinion Research Centre and Shanghai Jiaotong University found that more than 80 per cent of citizens regard environmental protection as more important than economic development, that more than 60 per cent felt that anti-​ pollution and reporting measures were not sufficiently transparent, and that some 78 per cent planned to join a protest if facilities that pollute were constructed near their homes (People’s Daily, 2013). Conclusion: state-​led climate action and advocacy of emissions trading In sum, it is clear that climate change and its consequences are matters of broad concern to the Chinese people, their government, and a transnational community of environmental activists. What is less certain is whether or not China’s climate change policies are the result of its socialization to a global normative framework. Notwithstanding its heightened awareness of global warming’s impacts on the heels of international talks, and its endorsement of recent efforts by the international community to set binding time-​targets for reaching emissions goals under the so-​called ‘Bali Road Map’, Chinese climate change

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132  The advocacy trap policy is essentially the self-​interested by-​product of domestic priorities. The most telling piece of evidence in this regard is China’s persistent rejection of an emissions cap, which it continues to perceive as bad for economic growth. Beyond that, China’s climate change policy, summarized by Foreign Minister Xie Zhenhua as a blend of ‘reduction, adaption, technology, and funds’, is driven by the economic incentives attached to the encouragement of green industries under the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, a concomitant increase in reliance on green service providers and expert research to aid technology transfers, and especially by a growing eagerness to demonstrate its responsiveness to citizen concerns on environmental issues. In other words, China’s piecemeal acceptance of the global climate change framework has been limited to those dictates it deems complementary to its own purposes. Although the campaign on climate change met with the adoption of new and innovative policies from the Chinese government, the experience was transformative for the campaign in two separate but interrelated ways. First, close cooperation with the state affected the anatomical structure of the campaign. State permeability by foreign NGOs was primarily a function of growing official demand for assistance, and the blurring of lines between state and non-​state actors through GONGOs was a matter of practical necessity for a campaign simply seeking to have the greatest possible impact given the repertoire of available strategies. Thus while environmental activism sometimes presents itself in opposition to the state, China’s receptivity to external inputs led to the co-​opting of climate change advocates and their redeployment in the service of regime interests. In turn, the severely reduced autonomy of TAN actors made it virtually impossible to ascertain any independent causal effect on state policy they might otherwise have had. Second, state–​TAN cooperation produced a change in the tactics and message of the campaign. Prior to Kyoto, NGOs and their national partners exerted pressure on the world’s leading carbon producers to accept an emissions trading scheme that would impose a cap on greenhouse gases. However, with China premising its ratification of the Kyoto Accord on its status as a non-​Annex I nation and ongoing refusal to accept such a cap, TAN organizations in the country have been conspicuously silent on the subject, opting instead for self-​censorship and strategic engagement to optimize the campaign’s chances of success. The official website for Greenpeace in China, for instance, touts its commitment to ‘working with scientists, industry and the government to push China to fulfill its enormous potential for renewable energy’ (Greenpeace East Asia, 2011). This contrasts markedly with its argument made elsewhere that ‘an effective emissions trading system should be put in place’ and that ‘tough mandatory caps must be placed on all large

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State-directed advocacy   133 industrial polluters’ in industrial nations (Greenpeace Canada, 2008). In light of the difficult circumstances the campaign was forced to contend with, this tack is understandable. Indeed, to do otherwise would be to risk a very tolerable emerging status quo in China’s environmental policy. Conclusion As with the campaigns explored in previous chapters, the cases above present strong confirmation of the realist/​state-​centred hypothesis. Access for climate change activists came about because it was clearly in the interest of the state, yet their role in policy development was clearly limited to those aspects of their mission deemed complementary to the CCP’s development goals. In some instances, the state actually created new access points for environmentalists to blow the whistle on major polluters. Likewise, what began as a campaign for Tibetan independence wound up as something else entirely, predominantly because of the central government’s implacability on matters of national sovereignty and territorial integrity. China’s immovability on the question of minority nationalism within its borders forced a change in both the structural composition and normative orientation of the TAN. A lack of clarity and cohesion on the central objective and how best to pursue it has thrown the Tibet campaign into disarray, shaking the very core of collective identity and common purpose that has enabled the campaign to sustain itself for so long. Given the Dalai Lama’s plans to step down as head of the government-​in-​exile, it is uncertain when, if, or in what form the campaign may continue. In the Tibetan independence case, the issue of domestic societal support –​ considered as confirmation of the liberal hypothesis  –​is a non-​starter. No organized force for a Tibetan homeland exists in China, and Tibetan groups espousing this view operate from outside the country. Likewise, there is little meaningful evidence to support the norm-​diffusion hypothesis –​normative support for Tibetan statehood is limited to a few Western allies and is profoundly muted within international organizations. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that the Chinese public is not just aware of but is increasingly concerned about numerous interrelated environmental challenges facing the country, and is inclined to seek satisfaction of these concerns from the state. Domestic NGOs and think tanks, working in tandem with government agencies and transnational actors, are a key part of the central government’s action plan. Once thought to be bad for economic growth, green technology and industry are now engines of growth in their own right, and collaboration between domestic and foreign organizations provides key

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134  The advocacy trap inputs in the process. However, the creation of these new nodes of access in the environmental sphere should not be taken as evidence of norm uptake at work as the constructivist hypothesis would suggest (indeed, it is not clear that ‘global climate norm’ exists). It is not as though China was suddenly awakened to the reality of its role in global warming and, beset by an attack of conscience, changed it ways. Rather, action on climate change was undertaken in the service of state-​led developmentalism. In sum, both the transnational campaigns sketched in this chapter present a third kind of functional form taken by TANs in China. While existing theories of transnational advocacy emphasize the transformative effect of TANs on state preferences and behaviours, the campaigns around Tibetan independence and global warming indicate that the opposite may be true as well, as both experienced transformations of their own through their interactions with the Chinese authorities. In the Tibetan case, the failure of the campaign to garner any significant recognition after more than six decades of trying led to the eventual abandonment of statehood as its core motivating principle. Climate change mitigation advocates saw cooperation with the state as a meaningful opportunity to advance their agenda, but through that process lost their autonomy and became the instruments of state preference. The reversal of causal steps demonstrated by these two above cases is significant, as it implies that the principled bases of TAN mobilization are more malleable than is currently supposed. The next chapter develops a new theory of the conditions under which this ‘advocacy drift’ is prone to occur. Notes 1 See Rossabi (2004: 186) and Sautman and Dreyer (2006: 6). 2 For a more distinctly Tibetan perspective on the CIA’s role in support of a Tibetan resistance during the early years of Chinese communism, see Norbu (1994). 3 See, for example, Remarks by India’s Representative (1965). 4 This translation of the 1913 original Tibetan text is rendered in Shakabpa (1967: 246–​248). 5 On the basis of CCP nationalities policy in the Soviet example, see Norbu (2001: 370). 6 For an excellent memoir of the communist takeover of 1950s Tibet, see Norbu (1987). 7 This is the estimate provided by tibetnetwork.org on its homepage as of 7 March 2011. 8 Jane Ardley calls this the ‘Gandhian’ paradigm of Tibet independence. See Ardley (2002).

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State-directed advocacy   135 9 On China’s coal dependence, see Yang (2011: 138–​147). 10 For an overview of bilateral cooperation to date, see US-​ China Joint Announcement on Climate Change (2014). 11 This increased receptiveness to input from environmental experts coincides with a more general inclination to listen to think tank experts in other areas. See Shambaugh (2002). 12 For a few examples see, Spires (2011) and Ru and Ortolano (2009).

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5

Strategic considerations, tough choices: how state preferences influence campaign forms

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ransnational advocacy campaigns come in a variety of forms and produce a variety of results. The purpose of this chapter is to enumerate some of the reasons why, drawing on the case studies of the preceding chapters to deduce some patterns or trends across issue areas in China. Given the prevalence of state preferences in the results and functional forms of campaigns explored, it falls upon this chapter to also examine the character and origins of those preferences. The picture that emerges is one of deep concern for popular legitimacy as a lynchpin of the Party-​state’s stability and survival. This calculus of self-​preservation imposes a preference hierarchy that structures official responses to TAN campaigns, leaving the question of how to respond in the hands of activists themselves. In many ways, it is no surprise that the power of the Chinese state and the configuration of its interests play a key role in the way foreign efforts to influence its behaviour play out. TANs are effective often because it is in the interest of the state to be open to them in the first place. Indeed, state demand for new policy in a certain area, or an issue’s ‘fit’ with official priorities, provides the strongest indication of a TAN’s likely influence in China. The trouble with this is that state preferences or ‘political will’ by itself does not tell us much. In order for this to be a truly insightful point, one must know where a given choice fits into China’s preference hierarchy. This opens up the question of where the preferences of CCP elite originate, why some of the issues TANs espouse have more political currency than others, and what factors cause central government priorities to shift over time. In general, issues are most likely to gain currency and elicit policy responses when a legitimacy-​ seeking state judges them to be consequential for the preservation of its own security. However, not all states can equally be persuaded, and one expects China, with its insular, authoritarian model of political decision-​making

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Strategic considerations, tough choices    137 and well-​documented distrust of foreign actors and ideas, to be among the most difficult to convince. I  contend that state preferences, which exercise the strongest influence of any factors over the impact of TANs in China, are most often borne out of domestic circumstances and seldom if ever the agenda-​setting power of TANs. The truly meaningful issue, therefore, is when and why issues become connected to perceptions of legitimacy and important for social stability, or even the survival of the regime. This is taken up in the latter part of this chapter. Some TANs have been successful in identifying ways in which they can leverage gaps in legitimacy and make a meaningful contribution to state policies and state behaviour. The HIV/​AIDS campaign of chapter three constitutes a prime example. In that instance, activists seized upon an opportunity for involvement borne out of a change in official attitudes that was itself a product of a crisis of legitimacy caused by major scandals like the incident over tainted ​blood in Henan. In much the same way, global warming advocates saw in partnering with state institutions the potential to affect China’s carbon emissions for the better, even if it meant doing so via a different means than the one the campaign originally envisioned. These relationships were only possible in the first place because the state had identified environmental problems as a possible source of challenges to its legitimacy. The IPR campaign recognized the importance of strengthened protection for the health of China’s export-​led economy, a crucial, if somewhat obvious, pillar of popular approval for the regime. In a broader sense, however, it is what TANs do with the information they have that shapes their functional forms, and not all are interested or able to shift their missions or strategies. Campaigns unfold differently not only because of the reaction of China’s government to their core claims, but also because not all campaigns face the same incentives to change their approach, or are as willing to compromise the values that led to their formation. Ultimately, the discussion of TANs in China revolves around tradeoffs. Some, like the campaign for Falun Gong, choose to keep their principles but forego the possibility of dialogue with their target. Others, like the campaign around global warming, elect to self-​censor and find satisfactory means to address their core concerns. The choices at play may not always be so stark, but it is rare that nothing needs to be given up to engage China. Moreover, because the state largely sets the terms of this engagement, it is typically activists who must decide how flexible they are prepared to be. Returning to the framework introduced in chapter one, this chapter offers some lessons for negotiating the uncertainty of Chinese institutions, and for taking advantage of opportunities when and where they arise. A central

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138  The advocacy trap premise of this discussion is that while a huge range of factors matter, some have more bearing than others on the results of advocacy campaigns, with state preferences and demand for new policy being the two most consistently important. What follows explores the sources of that demand and the political logic undergirding state preferences across issue areas. Viewing the maintenance of popular consent as the key to its survival and aiming to short-​circuit existential threats from within before they get out of hand, the CCP bases policy choices primarily on perceptions about what is more or less likely to influence the Party’s moral authority. When seen through this lens, the issues and policy choices engendered by activist campaigns position themselves clearly within a risk probabilities distribution. Those around issues presenting clear and present threats to legitimacy are greeted with a much greater sense of urgency and welcome than those perceived as being of little consequence for popular approval of the regime. Of course, much depends on the quality of information and how confident Chinese policy-​makers are that they are correctly attuned to the national mood. Because the costs of a miscalculation could be nothing short of catastrophic for their future hold on power, this means that it’s gut-​check time for China’s communist leaders. The latter portion of the chapter explores in detail the notion of ‘advocacy drift’, specifically why it comes into play in some transnational advocacy campaigns and not others. For some campaigns the shift in tactics comes from a prolonged lack of success with dearly held or even defining values. In others the changes to core objectives come from a self-​limiting impulse and/​or decision to incorporate with government agencies. In either event, the choice to do so is intentional, strategic, and driven by factors within each network. The more important point, however, is that whatever choice is made, TANs take their cues from the state when making these decisions.

Crafting advocacy in China: some tips for success Using international institutions Not surprisingly, international institutions are primarily useful for TANs in situations where concrete policy regimes have already formed around an issue and, crucially, where China itself is a signatory to the accords embodied by those regimes. While UN human rights officials have sounded the alarm over the persecution of Falun Gong, Beijing’s assault on the group in the global media has sown enough doubt to limit overt diplomatic support for the group internationally. Even if a consensus existed, concerted action by a third-​party government acting in or through an international body is unlikely

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   139 to bring results, and could even provoke diplomatic retribution from China. In much the same way, successive attempts to create broad international consensus around Tibetan self-​determination have been stymied in the UN by the abstention of many of Dharamsala’s allies –​most of whom do a great deal of business with China –​from key floor votes. In the end, a broad lack of recognition for the Tibetan government-​in-​exile and the pigeon-​holing of Falun Gong as a cult in the global consciousness, both of which are the Chinese government’s handiwork, have hampered the ability of these campaigns to gain traction. The campaign to end capital punishment is beset by similar challenges. While abolition of the practice has been on the upswing internationally since the end of the Second World War, and has been upheld in a variety of interstate treaties and protocols including two General Assembly resolutions, the practice remains widely used by several UN heavyweights including the United States, something that gives political cover to other retentionist hold-​outs, as is the case in China. Because the death penalty is fundamentally a matter of domestic criminal policies, binding rules or sanctions have been slow to develop around the practice. Abolition of the death penalty is not and never has been a customary norm in international law. Instead, abolitionist norms have tended to develop at the regional level, resulting in norms that are geographically limited in scope. Because abolition is specifically included in the price of admission, the European Union stands out as the world’s only death-​penalty-​free zone. On the other hand, China has willingly committed itself to beefing up IPR protection standards and their enforcement through at least a half-​dozen multilateral agreements since the beginning of its reform and opening up. Indeed, these measures were explicitly framed as necessary for the reform project itself, and the sustainability of the economic development that followed. Likewise, China has forged partnerships with the World Bank, UNAIDS, WHO, UNICEF, WFP and UNHCR and others to control the spread of HIV/​AIDS. Action on climate change has been stronger still. Beijing has not only signed international agreements committing it to reduced emissions, but has taken the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, albeit on its own terms. Although hegemonic influence is generally thought to enhance leverage over target states, having friends in high places is, as it turns out, a mixed blessing in China. Indeed, strong American support may be a liability for activists working in certain fields, especially human rights. Advocacy by US-​ based groups on this subject in particular sounds like high-​handed lecturing to Chinese ears. At their most extreme, official reactions involve allegations of foreign conspiracies to destabilize, split, or otherwise engineer the outright collapse of the CCP. Such hyperbolic rhetoric is most clearly visible in the

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140  The advocacy trap Tibetan independence and Falun Gong cases, and betrays a paranoia and fear of outsiders that lies just beneath China’s global integration. Most tellingly, of the campaigns in which the United States provides the strongest support by a foreign government, only the one around IPR protection did not attract these sorts of barbs. Even at their mildest, Party-​state responses carry a disaffected note of ‘mind your own business’. As Assistant Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told the People’s Daily, ‘We have heard from the outside world both kind reminders and gloating comments or even harsh criticisms, [but] we Chinese understand far better than anyone else what our problems are and how to prioritize them’ (People’s Daily, 2012). On the other hand, linkage to foreign governments tends to be slightly more effective where US involvement is complemented by the participation of a wider variety of countries. The climate change campaign had the greatest breadth of participation by foreign governments, and was no doubt lent extra credibility by the involvement of those in the developing world  –​notably Pacific Island countries facing the challenges of rising sea levels –​who were not in a position to strong-​arm China by imposing terms, but were merely speaking up for their own survival. True, their presence at the table would have made it more difficult for Chinese policy-​makers to cast pressure for new policy as nothing but the arrogant demands of the wealthy, developed West. But it also strengthened China’s own efforts to project its power and global leadership through a stated preference for South–​South cooperation (Hayward-​Jones, 2013: 8–​12; Lancaster, 2007: 5). The lesson for those considering advocacy in China is that it matters who is doing the speaking and there are potential advantages to diversifying governmental links beyond the United States, since the positive effects of any resource advantages could be cancelled out by China’s tendency to simply ignore them. On the other hand, even poor microstates may be able to parlay their membership in a brotherhood of developing countries into constructive, mutually beneficial partnerships with Beijing. Target state institutions Perhaps the most enduring truth to arise from the experiences of activism in China is that of the relationship between access to the decision-​making structures of the state and the process of gaining influence within them. Access, though an essential prerequisite for gaining political influence, is no guarantee of it. None of the campaigns that lacked access was ultimately effective, but equally, no campaign won influence because of its access alone. The global warming, HIV/​AIDS, and IPR protection campaigns began with big advantages over the Falun Gong, capital punishment, and Free Tibet activists

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   141 whose claims and rhetoric meant their hopes for access were faint from the start. But they also confronted the burden of having to maintain their access by learning to live and work with state actors, something requiring compromises not everyone is equally willing to make. Beyond that, there are a few other caveats that should be borne in mind when attempting to break into the Chinese system of policy-​making. The first is that there is no obvious connection between the decentralization of authority and the ultimate effectiveness of advocacy campaigns. Rather, decentralization may help to improve lower-​order advocacy goals, such as institutional access, without necessarily having much influence on the adoption of specific policy goals. However, local conditions can also lead to a failure to adopt new policy even where local officials are strongly incentivized to act (Yasuda, 2015). Conventional wisdom suggests that the devolution of power from the centre to the periphery should multiply the number of potential points at which the system can be accessed, resulting in an overall greater likelihood that some activists will breach the gates and make an impact. A larger number of sources of authority should also raise the possibility that local interests rather than central ones will guide decision-​ making and that the breach between the two creates space for activists to gain a foothold politically. On balance, the cases included in this book suggest that decentralization does in fact create more access but it does not ensure success for specific advocacy goals, namely the ones that are comprehensive or national in nature. It is not clear, for example, that an alternative strategy by the Tibet campaign that attempted to gain influence on a province-​by-​ province basis would be more likely to lead to independence, even if it did enable the campaign to initiate more numerous lines of dialogue with state actors. Similarly, the adoption of emissions targets by one provincial government but not others would be unlikely to get the global warming campaign closer to its goal. In theory, local access could provide a point of entry for the introduction of pilot programmes which are later scaled up, but this is heavily contingent on the issue in question. Local experimentation with the legalization of Falun Gong is a pipe dream, for example, though the creation of specialized local courts to handle intellectual property theft may not be. Moreover, it is not a given that greater fragmentation of authority automatically leads to increased access. Indeed, in the case of the Falun Gong, the opposite was true. Branches of the 6–​10 Office were created specially to curtail and police activism at the local and regional levels. The handful of genuine abolitionists scattered across China’s legal system have done little to promote the idea of ending the death penalty, which remains enormously popular despite the 2007 decentralization of judicial authority in capital cases. In several of the more successful cases, subnational bodies dedicated to

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142  The advocacy trap the execution of central government policies were created to address a core challenge represented by foreign activists, though generally not as a specific response to activism itself, and not always with the level of effectiveness the state leadership envisioned. IPR protection is a case in point. In that instance, the central government created specialized courts in major commercial centres throughout the country in order to prosecute piracy cases in those jurisdictions, separate from other major anti-​piracy offices headquartered in Beijing, though the degree to which these have halted illegal copyright violations remains suspect as of this writing. The second lesson is that while China shows a surprising degree of openness to new actors, it is unclear whether campaigns with longer histories and a more established record of experience in China fare better overall. The accepted wisdom is that newcomers frequently experience difficulty when first attempting to break into the target state, and struggle for the kinds of connections with policy-​makers that can improve the odds of forging productive partnerships or having their causes heard. However, the campaign with the longest history, the one around Tibetan sovereignty, fared perhaps the least well of any considered in the preceding chapters. This suggests that state actors are more open to advocacy campaigns relatively free of historical significance or that have not been around long enough to acquire as much sensitivity. On the other hand, both the HIV/​AIDS campaign and the global warming campaign are older than the case of Falun Gong, and exhibit some of the strongest relationships with state actors of any examined here, despite the baggage they possess. Links to state power and the availability of allies in key positions is a predictor of both access and effectiveness in advocacy campaigns. The more direct and personal the ties, the better the chances of gaining traction. Interviews conducted for this book were replete with tales, too numerous to be anecdotal, of long-​standing personal or professional acquaintances making the difference between concerns that got heard and those that went nowhere. While the Falun Gong and Tibet campaigns never had the expressed backing of Party insiders and never gained systematic access to the state, the IPR, HIV/​AIDS, and climate change networks all managed to find such supports and parlay them into much more successful advocacy campaigns. As officials in China rarely speak as individuals separate from the Party line, at least not publicly, the fact that these networks in particular saw successes suggests that the sentiments of their partners were shared more broadly within the offices and agencies of the target government. The capital punishment case stands alone as an example of a campaign that lacked the known support of insiders but nevertheless saw policies enacted for reduced use of the death penalty, though not its outright abolishment. In that case, reducing the annual rate of

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   143 executions was widely favoured at the uppermost levels of the Party, but support for abolition was limited to a tiny minority of internationally connected lawyers and judges, most of whom favoured either a gradual phase-​out of the death penalty or its abolition only for certain crimes. Two further caveats are worth bearing in mind when considering the role of relationships. First, exploiting connections depends upon having some to begin with. Of all those interviewed for this book, not a single soul admitted to having Falun Gong connections inside the state, for obvious reasons. Second, types of connections may matter as much as the mere existence of ties. HIV/​AIDS and global warming activists forged their relationships with the state on the basis of professional credibility, rather than personal networks or kinship, suggesting that what one knows is equally as important as who one knows. Third, while generally it is thought that China has seen an across-​the-​ board reduction in the nature and degree of state repression since the Tiananmen Square massacre, it is important to remember that almost all foreign activists working on Chinese soil are subject to constraints in one form or another at some point, and that this can and does affect the access and political potential of transnational campaigns. For most NGOs working as part of a larger advocacy network, living with the risk of repression is the cost of doing business in China, and a natural, inevitable part of operating in its uncertain institutional environment. Even those who offer services seemingly helpful to the regime are not immune, as the staff of the China Development Brief discovered when their offices were shut down in 2008 and their one-​time editor, Nick Young, was permanently barred from China. Of the six campaigns considered here, only the one around IPR protection has so far had a virtually repression-​free experience. That said, some are subject to more consistent and severe repression than others. Advocates of Tibetan independence have been continually branded enemies of the state for more than six decades, as have those arguing for the right of Falun Gong practitioners to freely practise their faith since the movement first came to be seen as threatening to the CCP in the late 1990s. The experiences of both groups show that the regime does not shy from the use of violence where it deems it necessary to do so. By contrast, activists working within the other campaigns examined here have had a comparatively easy ride. Even some of those who have called a great deal of attention to state mistakes have been treated with a gentler hand. In making recommendations for stopping the AIDS crisis, for example, activists in that campaign highlighted the callousness of government officials in treating victims of the Henan blood transfusion debacle, as well as their complicity in causing the crisis in the first place, but still found the central state relatively receptive to their suggestions of new treatment programmes.

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144  The advocacy trap A fourth consideration is the opening of new opportunities for advocacy made possible by turnovers in state leadership. China’s passing of the torch from the third-​generation leadership of Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, and Zhu Rongji to the fourth-​generation administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2003 has been the most important of these to date. The transition marked a shift in domestic policy towards greater concern with social development, and with it new actions on climate change, the administration of criminal justice, the tightening of anti-​piracy measures, and the role of scientific evidence in setting public health priorities, including the landmark new policies to fight China’s large and growing AIDS problem, particularly the landmark ‘Four Frees and One Care’ policy, as well as the AIDS Prevention and Control Regulations of 2006 and the overarching Five-​Year Action Plan to Control HIV/​AIDS (2006–​2010). At the same time, a number of constants carried over from the Jiang administration played a significant role in determining TAN access under Hu. Because economic performance is no less important to the fourth-​generation leadership than it was to their predecessors, it comes as no surprise that the central government has taken steps necessary to promote continued growth and overcome barriers to foreign trade where they arise, such as through the creation of an IPR protection regime. On the other end of the spectrum, the fourth generation inherited much of the Jiang administration’s preoccupation with the perceived ‘threat’ of Falun Gong, and continued to diligently prosecute its war on the movement both at home and abroad. Central government policy on Tibetan independence has also remained unchanged through multiple generations of CCP leadership, a fact which has directly contributed to violent uprisings in Lhasa in recent times. Yet the coming of Hu to office brought state support of a different kind in that case. Discussions of sovereignty may be off the table, but funding for Tibetan cultural autonomy, education, health, and development is now stronger than at any point since 1950. Finally, while censorship is perhaps less meaningful in the context of the indirect forms of advocacy targeting the state discussed here than in situations where TANs target public opinion directly, activists working in China should still be aware that the ‘Great Firewall of China’ is real. While each of the six campaigns detailed here had approximately equal access to technology beyond China’s borders, online censorship is the constraint most commonly confronted by activists within China. The challenge is not a lack of access to digital technologies, but an overabundance of state resources devoted to restricting the flow of information around certain issues at certain times. Those working in highly sensitive areas face an inability to effectively counter information from official sources and change minds that are deeply enamoured with the practice of capital

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Strategic considerations, tough choices    145 punishment, or revile ‘anti-​China’ forces like Free Tibet activists or Falun Gong. Despite a growing number of technically savvy netizens employing ever more creative methods of bypassing state controls on information (for instance by routing data through servers located outside China, most often in Japan or South Korea), there seem to be few limits on the state’s ability to silence or redirect those pieces of information it deems to be contrary to its interests once it has decided to do so. Beijing now spends upwards of 111 billion USD on domestic surveillance annually, nearly 12 per cent more than it does on military costs (Reuters, 2012). However, that does not mean it has the ability to be everywhere at once. Priorities still have to be set and both resources and potential threats to domestic security monitored carefully. As a result, there is an idiosyncratic aspect to the availability of information online for almost all but the most extreme groups. There is no obvious logic, and certainly none that is publicly explicated, as to why some websites can be freely accessed while others cannot, or why access to certain sites, newsfeeds, threads, or discussion groups can suddenly change without warning. Bearing this capriciousness in mind, and the wider set of digital communication problems faced by activists in China, some hacktivists may wish to try their luck. Network attributes As with institutional resources, a campaign’s structure is not the only or even the most important factor determining its effectiveness. Network characteristics matter, of course, particularly at the early stages of mustering transnational support and for coordinating and sustaining mobilization in the long run. In the early stages of a campaign, the number, size, and skills of organizations in a network can be very helpful in getting the word out about an issue and adding to the group’s overall strength. Larger networks have a natural advantage in this process, as the ability to impact a broader audience tends to create a snowball effect that increases internal strength further. In this sense, a network’s ‘start-​up capital’ appreciates in value the same way investments of financial capital do  –​the more support a network has, the easier it is to obtain more. This ability to generate staying power is especially important when confronting the uncertainties of a changing China, where opportunities for influence come and go with little advance notice. Internal structural characteristics remain important throughout the entire cycle of a transnational campaign, but there are simply no guarantees when it comes to foreign NGOs engaging China. Even the most cohesive and resourceful campaigns able to multiply support at their beginnings may face domestic obstacles that prove insurmountable, resulting in little or no political impact.

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146  The advocacy trap Still, there are definite patterns and qualitative caveats arising from the lessons China has to teach. There is some indication that the sum total and size of organizations in a network can improve chances for effective advocacy. The optimal scenario involves maximizing the raw number of constituent groups and ensuring that as many of these as possible are large, high-​profile outfits who bring serious resource mobilization capabilities to the table. Both the climate change and HIV/​AIDS campaigns, which saw the adoption of major new policy initiatives in their respective areas, drew in a huge number of foreign and domestic organizations, virtually too many to count, but also included the participation of many major international NGOs whose money, level of professionalization, and name recognition were undoubtedly assets. A similarly positive outcome resulted in the case of the IPR protection campaign, which incorporated a large number of organizations and firms representing different industries, almost all of which were individually sizeable and strong. On the other hand, campaigns comprised of a lower number of groups fared relatively poorly. For example, in the Falun Gong campaign, the total number of constituent groups making up the networks could be counted on one hand. Instead, the network was structured around a single large organization having just a few smaller ‘satellite’ groups in its orbit. That this central organization was big and resourceful seemed to make little difference, as neither campaign succeeded in penetrating the state or saw any change in policy for their trouble. Only in the campaign to abolish capital punishment did a network built mostly around the information provided by a single strong organization see policy changes generally favourable to its mission, even if these nevertheless fell short of the network’s ultimate goal. Information density bears a strong relationship to network size, and is also a characteristic of more effective advocacy campaigns. Generally speaking, the larger the network, the denser its internal communication streams will be. Since bigger networks transmit a greater overall volume of information than small ones, it comes as no surprise that denser networks tend to be more successful. However, activists should be aware of a potential tradeoff between the density of information exchanges and the clarity of intra-​network signalling. This is important because clearer information can help induce greater cohesion in a network without necessarily improving its chances of success. In larger networks, such as those around climate change and HIV/​AIDS, the participation of such a large number of individual organizations means that information flows tend to be relatively decentralized. Higher overall frequencies of information exchange are spread out across many different organizations in order to maintain coherent campaign strategies. By contrast, smaller networks typically have more centralized internal communication flows.

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   147 A  lower density of exchange between fewer member organizations means that it is often easier for these networks to control their message. Because the information passed is less vulnerable to the interference or distortion caused by a larger number of groups, smaller, more centralized networks tend to be more internally cohesive, bound together by clearer and often (though not always) more reliable information. Activists face a choice between mounting a smaller campaign involving a lesser number of participants but with a more manageable centralized communications structure, or a stronger one that harnesses the resources of many more organizations but has weaker control over framing and group identity. Evidence from the experiences of issue advocacy in China suggests that the latter option is the better one, since the largest and most decentralized networks saw significant changes in state policies in accordance with their goals, while the smaller, more centralized ones did not. Domestic constituencies can be helpful too, but not in all cases or all of the time. More important than whether a campaign has links to domestic actors is how these groups choose to express themselves. Indigenous NGO communities sprouted in both the climate change and HIV/​AIDS campaigns in response to new opportunities for constructive collaboration and service provision alongside state authorities. Corporate entities with a stake in Chinese markets found their interests well represented domestically by organizations committed to safeguarding brand integrity in an environment where piracy is nearly an endemic feature of everyday commerce. Unsurprisingly, the Tibetan independence cause has no significant support within China, aside from the collection of clerics whose occasional acts of self-​immolation and protest only feed the perception that the Dalai Clique aims to destroy Chinese unity. The Falun Gong case stands out as an example where both foreign activists and state authorities acknowledge the presence of a large and growing contingent inside China, but where participants remain enemies of the state and are actively hunted through well-​coordinated campaigns meant to end them entirely. The fundamental lesson is that domestic constituencies help most when their mobilization appears constructive and collaborative, geared towards solving problems and working within the system rather than against it. Principles aside, TANs whose domestic adherents fail to heed this tactical advice risk making the odds much worse for the campaign as a whole. Moral entrepreneurship, in the sense of norm promotion by a single authoritative individual, is not a feature of effective advocacy campaigns in China. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that in many cases the presence of such a figurehead does more harm than good. The championing of core objectives by Li Hongzhi and the Dalai Lama, two highly controversial and polarizing figures, met only with failure in the Falun Gong and Tibetan

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148  The advocacy trap independence campaigns. Neither one makes for a sympathetic paragon from the perspective of CCP leaders, even though the Dalai Lama in particular personifies moral leadership in the eyes of millions around the world. On the other hand, the more effective campaigns mostly lacked a single poster child synonymous with TAN principles to galvanize collective identity. Instead, moral leadership took the form of a collective effort by several of the most prominent member organizations sharing responsibility for issue placement and government pressure. In the HIV/​AIDS and climate change campaigns, for example, leadership came from several loosely affiliated NGOs, most of whom had some pre-​established global presence from which to draw their moral authority. Likewise, there was no singular cementing force behind the anti-​piracy campaign. Political pressure came instead from an array of associations, mostly Western-​based, representing a host of different industries whose interests all happened to be served by obtaining policy concessions from the state. In sum, there are better and worse ways to coordinate advocacy campaigns in China, even if no single way is enough to guarantee impacts on state policy. From among the six cases considered here, four lessons stand out as particularly important. First, bigger is generally better. The largest campaigns received the most positive responses, and even where greater size suggests greater internal pluralism, more effective campaigns can yoke diversity to build a broader coalition in support of their issue. Second, there is a tradeoff in network structures favouring the decentralized channelling of information over more centralized control of internal communications, even if decentralization comes at the cost of weaker internal bonding. Interestingly, there is no indication that more centrally controlled information or more tightly knit networks are more effective than more internally segregated ones. Indeed, just the opposite appears to be true  –​the most cohesive of the chosen campaigns, the one around justice for Falun Gong, was the biggest failure, while the most internally differentiated one, the campaign for IPR protection, saw major new policy commitments from the Chinese government. Third, even though moral entrepreneurship is useful at the emergence phase of a campaign, it can backfire at later stages, especially when moral authority is vested in a single divisive figure at odds with the Party. Fourth, the activation of domestic constituencies is correlated with effective campaigning, but this is heavily dependent on how those constituencies go about expressing themselves. As the Falun Gong and Tibet cases demonstrate, it may be a negative to have activists living in close proximity to the target government, particularly if the chief effect of that closeness is to continually stoke hardline responses against long-​ standing enemies of the state.

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Strategic considerations, tough choices    149 Issue features Issue-​focus clearly makes some advocates more likely to succeed than others. Traditionally, issues involving bodily harm to vulnerable individuals and groups are thought to be the substance of the most effective campaigns. This is because nearly all states concern themselves with the protection of human dignity, even if they adhere to differing conceptions over what such protection means, and because ‘harm’ issues can have important security implications for states themselves –​a concern that sits at the apex of their preference hierarchies. Environmental issues, however serious, are judged not to have the same gravity. What is striking about the Chinese case, however, is the apparent inversion of this common assumption  –​the success of the environmental campaign contrasts sharply with the ineffectiveness of two very high-​profile human dignity cases in the Tibetan independence and Falun Gong campaigns. The adoption of new climate change policies indicates that China is indeed attentive to matters where public welfare is threatened, but its simultaneous repression of secessionist and spiritual movements suggests the unevenness of its commitment to citizen security broadly conceived, and that its commitment to harm-​reduction does not cover harm inflicted by the state itself. Not surprisingly, issues packaged in ways perceived by the state as politically neutral and ostensibly value-​free fared better overall. It is no accident that the anti-​piracy, climate change, and HIV/​AIDS campaigns found greater access and more favourable policy responses, as each of these campaigns mastered the all-​important skill of framing their claims in ways perceived as being ideologically neutral. Activists in the HIV/​AIDS campaign eventually were able to play a role in the development of new treatment and prevention policies because their appeals for new policy were rooted in data collected in a very clinical fashion by untold numbers of medical experts through years of scientific study and research. Similarly, climate change activists were more politically influential than they would have been without the input of a global network of trained scientists and technical experts inside and outside China. In both cases, the motives of foreign actors appeared less questionable and their attempts at advocacy more persuasive because those attempts came cloaked in the mantle of science, which the state actors saw as value-​free. Conversely, the framings of the Falun Gong and Tibet campaigns were explicitly and unapologetically ideological, and in the former case went so far as to call for the destruction of the regime. Future activists should therefore consider the important distinction that is made between ‘data’ and ‘information’, and the way these influence the outcome of advocacy campaigns in China. Claims derived from data are an important determinant of a network’s right

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150  The advocacy trap to speak to government officials and override the credibility that comes from experience or professionalization alone. Indeed, as Amnesty International’s campaign to end capital punishment shows, the regime is dismissive even of highly professionalized and globally credible organizations when it feels that their claims are politically motivated or steeped in values it perceives as being at odds with China’s own. By extension, the grafting of an issue onto some larger moral code with broad international acceptance is only effective when the overarching principles are presented in ways that are not overtly antagonistic to China’s interests. As the Falun Gong and Tibet campaigns illustrate, linking the claims of an oppressed group to international human rights discourses does not necessarily get a campaign any closer to obtaining concessions from the state, no matter how skilled its framing techniques are or how much transnational support it is able to cultivate. Falun Gong activists, through their use of various print and electronic media in a wide array of languages and countries, fared among the best in successfully painting its grievances as part of global struggle for justice and human rights. Yet the stratagem was ultimately a poor one, as it bound redress for persecuted practitioners to a particular brand of human rights discourse that China had no role in creating and the central message of which it does not want to hear. Human rights issues tend to gain greater acceptance in China only when the concept is stripped for parts, repackaged, and sold in ways that mesh with the state’s development agenda. In the words of one Beijing-​based NGO spokesperson, ‘by reinterpreting the concept of human rights so that groups are more focused on meeting human needs [like] adequate hospital care and education, [activists] become much less threatening’ (Confidential Interview, 2009h). The realities of human rights advocacy in China may therefore put activists in a position to have to reframe aspects of their mission to match what is institutionally feasible. Advocates in other areas such as climate change have a natural advantage over those working on human rights, since the overarching principles of those debates are not scorned but welcomed by a Chinese government that sees the objectives of the global environmentalist community and their own as two sides of the same coin, even if they disagree over methods. The attitude of the Chinese public towards an issue, or its degree of cultural fit, is a powerful indicator of its likely impact on policy. Forced underground after the 1999 crackdown, Falun Gong has largely disappeared from headlines on the mainland and few among the general public regard it with the sense of urgency they once did. To the extent that the public cares about Falun Gong at all, its perceptions of the group mostly reflect prolonged exposure to the state’s propaganda war, which cast practitioners as vermin to be exterminated lest they spread their ‘disease’ to the rest of society. Similarly,

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   151 popular support for Tibetan sovereignty is almost non-​existent outside Tibet itself. So far there have been no protests of Han Chinese against Tibetans –​ anti-​China attitudes in Tibet are much more common. But if the 2012 anti-​ Japanese demonstrations are any indication, Chinese nationalism appears to be growing more virulent and ethnicized by the day (Wee and Duncan, 2012). By contrast, the public favours bold action on the environment, expects the government to contain the HIV/​AIDS epidemic and prevent further Shangcai county-​style catastrophes, and generally work to promote and extend public health benefits. The death penalty and IPR campaigns represent two deviations from the general pattern, as high popular support for capital punishment clashes with both the spirit and letter of the ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws, and the lack of rights consciousness among the Chinese public has not kept the state from working to protect economic growth through more stringent anti-​piracy measures. Out of all the factors to consider when launching a foray into China’s policy world, one unsurprising lesson stands out above all others:  fitting with government priorities is the single most reliable predictor of a campaign’s effectiveness. For every one of the cases considered here, the realization of policy objectives (or lack of it) corresponded directly with the state’s need for new policy in their area of advocacy. As one might expect, state preferences varied widely depending on the issue, resulting in some being placed quite high on the priority list while others took a back seat or were omitted from the list altogether. The vital importance of this ‘demand’ for new policy initiatives was summed up perfectly by a staffer at one NGO office in Shanghai:  ‘[we] only succeed when the government wants us to’ (Confidential Interview, 2009i). The existence of strong demand for new policy does not mean that it was induced by foreign activists. In none of the six campaigns did foreign activists persuade Chinese policy-​makers to enact measures that they were not already prepared to enact, though in some instances they did have a hand in shaping the nature of state responses. Although they were successful in the sense that each saw the adoption of new policies complementary to their goals, the climate change, IPR, and HIV/​AIDS campaigns owe much of their ‘influence’ to the fact that the Hu-​Wen leadership had already committed itself to new initiatives in these areas when it placed social development side-​ by-​side with economic modernization in its guiding development plan. In the case of capital punishment, the move to reduce the number of executions is part of an across-​the-​board legal reform programme underway since 1978 intended to deepen the rule of law and lead to more rational standards of judicial decision-​making. While the Party-​state speaks with an unequivocal voice on the matter of Tibetan independence, its policy on Tibet in general

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152  The advocacy trap is considerably more complex, making use of carrots as well as sticks in an effort to maintain stability and foster development in the region. Finally, there has been no push from within for a rapprochement with Falun Gong, and with almost two decades’ worth of resources having gone into the CCP’s scorched-​earth campaign against the group, none is likely to emerge anytime soon. This suggests that there are quite predictable limits to the power of purely moral arguments in Beijing, but more importantly that the definitions of morality embodied in global activist networks can often be lost in translation. Progressive values are not progressive everywhere, a point too easily lost amid all the chatter over a rising China. Finally, it is worth pointing out that there is some limited scope for TANs to shape issues even where ‘fit’ with state preferences is already determined and priorities are set. This can occur when a TAN is involved in elaborating the nature or scale of a problem that the authorities have already decided to address. For example, the HIV/​AIDS campaign has served as a clearinghouse for information consolidation. Where once the UN, Global Fund, and WHO all used different standards to measure the effectiveness of their programmes, the campaign has been instrumental in the creation of a China-​wide database of experts, laboratories, and other platforms for uniform reporting of AIDS facts and figures. Environmental advocates have at times performed a similar function by partnering with state agencies and domestic Chinese NGOs, as in the case of Greenpeace’s collaboration with the Ministry of Environmental Protection to write the 2008 Clean Air Act. Of course, this option is off the table for the likes of Falun Gong and Free Tibet activists, but TANs experiencing even a vague modicum of warmth from the state might consider how to best tailor their involvement policy-​making. In order to assess this potential, all TANs are advised to educate themselves on the sources of official preferences. Understanding interests: the role of domestic legitimacy So where does the demand for policy change come from, if not from foreign activists? A concern with winning and maintaining popular legitimacy is the primary factor driving China’s national policy agenda and the main inspiration for the enactment of new policy in some areas but not others. While the focus of any legitimacy-​based explanation is on the power of social attitudes, beliefs, and preferences to sway state action, exactly how social preferences matter and the ways in which they are articulated can vary sharply depending on the political context. In China, the methods of measuring the public’s mood are complicated by the fact that public opinion is not registered at the ballot box and that many political institutions designed with a worker’s

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   153 vanguard in mind remain in place. In cases like this, the responses given to advocacy in particular policy areas depends much more on the informed guesswork of political leaders about which issues are most important. Social preferences are an important part of the process, but become meaningful only when the state perceives it to be strongly in its interest to act on them, something that assumes the state is both aware of its best interests and of its relationship to individual issues. Concern for its legitimacy has been the central preoccupation of the CCP for the last thirty years. Indeed, the entire political history of post-​Mao China can be read as a quest by the CCP for renewed legitimacy after the replacement of the radical socialist ideology used to justify its rule since 1949 with the more market-​oriented philosophies of Deng Xiaoping and his allies. By the spring of 1989 that quest had stalled, and popular dissatisfaction with a range of factors, including skyrocketing inflation, ineffectual local government, and the slow pace of political reform, had reached a tipping point. That June, the Party came face-​to-​face with a challenge to its legitimacy more serious than any it had ever experienced before, and from which it only narrowly escaped intact. Recognizing that the best hope for its long-​term survival lay in listening to and addressing popular demands, the Party has viewed the restoration and maintenance of its legitimacy with a strong sense of urgency ever since. In 2004, it publicly acknowledged for the first time that its rule could no longer be taken for granted, saying that ‘the CCP’s ruling status is by no means a natural result of the Party’s founding, and will not remain forever if the Party does nothing to safeguard it’ (People’s Daily, 2004). Over the following months, similar feelings were expressed from various corners of the Party-​state apparatus (Li, 2006: 27; Xu and Xianping, 2005: 41). A 2005 article in the Journal of the Central Party School even went as far as to state that the CCP’s legitimacy was ‘already exhausted’ (Zhu, 2005: 46). In response, the state has taken the lead in institutional reform in order to protect and maintain its legitimacy. The goal is to prevent the onset of another Tiananmen-​grade legitimacy crisis by reconfiguring both the machinery of government to be more sensitive to citizen concerns and better able to keep pace with evolving popular sentiment (Tsai, 2006; Weller, 2008). The introduction and then scaling up of village elections were two of the earliest and most obvious signs of this instrumentalist logic at work within the CCP, who two decades ago undertook grassroots reforms voluntarily to counter widespread perceptions of local cadres as hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual (He, 2007). More recent attempts at direct public consultation have come in the form of improvements to the petition and public hearing systems, and the use of polling models to connect citizens to their leaders and improve responsiveness to social demands (Fishkin et al., 2010; Peng et al., 2004). Many such

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154  The advocacy trap deliberative polls have been conducted in China to date, the first being held in Zeguo Township, Wenling City, in 1996. Hong Kong-​based scholar and journalist Willy Lam argues that by making these changes, China’s leaders demonstrate what he calls the ‘self-​perfectionism’ of the Party, a conviction that ‘if the Party’s ideology, approaches, and policies can be retooled properly, the CCP’s seventy million members can still lead China from strength to strength’ (Lam, 2006: 35). Managing uncertainties As the key to state survival, the concern for popular legitimacy sits front and centre in CCP policy choices. Domestic opinion looms large in state decision-​making, now more than at any point in the nearly seventy-year history of the PRC. Yet the path to renewed legitimacy is a complicated one. State choices are mitigated by uncertainties about what the public actually wants. Levels of uncertainty vary depending on the issue, but an issue’s place within the distribution of risk probabilities in no small way determines its position within the state’s preference hierarchy. Simply put, the demand for policy action is clearer-​cut for some issues than others. The need to appease domestic demands while hedging against uncertainty is what most conditions the responses met by foreign activists. There are circumstances where the consequences of inaction could be dire for the Party. The adoption of new climate policies, for example, owes much to the concerns of authorities over who is likely to shoulder the blame when declining air quality or other forms of environmental degradation begin to affect human health on a large scale. In the same way, the adoption of a comprehensive new strategy to combat the spread of HIV/​ AIDS was undertaken with a view to protecting the uninfected and never again repeating the Henan blood bank disaster. The creation of a new IPR regime resulted from a recognized need for legal reforms to maintain economic performance, specifically by maintaining the confidence of foreign investors. Finally, the recent move to more infrequent and judicious use of the death penalty stems in part from the regime’s desire to simultaneously demonstrate a firm commitment to law and order and the seriousness with which it regards official corruption, and its advances in the rule of law and public accountability. In none of these cases was information perfect, but the overriding implications for CCP legitimacy made the crafting of new policy a sound bet. On the other hand, the campaigns around issues on which the expected payoffs or pitfalls of adopting new policy were low failed to achieve significant political impacts. The lower the risk and rewards associated with

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Strategic considerations, tough choices    155 action, the lower the demand for new policy is likely to be. For example, the CCP can easily afford to ignore calls for justice on behalf of Falun Gong, since the movement, its spiritual and political message, and alleged persecution are not viewed by large numbers on the mainland with the seriousness they once were. Except for on a few occasions when the state has publicly repressed underground practitioner cells, as occurred in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Falun Gong has all but vanished from the headlines. Indeed, to the extent that the issue remains visible domestically, the state continues to assert its justification in removing an ‘evil cult’ that posed a genuine threat to social order, and as in the case of the Beijing Games, national pride as well. Similarly, the Party can rebuff the transnational campaign for Tibetan independence at virtually no cost to itself as long as it continues to support Tibetan development and the preservation of Buddhist culture, denial of which is likely to provoke more violence of the kind that erupted in Lhasa in March 2008, adding a spark to secessionist movements elsewhere. The collision of interests and the spectrum of TAN campaigns Perhaps the lesson that hits the hardest is that transnational advocacy campaigns have in fact done little to influence China’s incentives or behaviours on the world stage. The challenge is not that national interests are unchangeable  –​but that foreign activists simply are not doing the heavy lifting. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that Beijing listens more closely than ever to ideas for policy innovation, but also that it is much more attuned and responsive to domestic political factors than advocacy by external pressure groups. Rarely, if ever, do outsiders succeed in persuading China’s leaders to pursue a course of action they do not already favour for other reasons. Considering its history of humiliation at foreign hands and the authoritarian character of its politics, this probably should not come as too surprising. Nevertheless, China’s resilience in the face of so many efforts from activists abroad to shape it from the outside-in is a bucket of cold water on the usually progressive, even triumphalist take on globalization and its claims about universal values. Activists of all stripes need to bear the domestic determinants of state interests in mind and be realistic about what they can accomplish. But if state preferences are to be considered meaningful and are usually not responsive to transnational advocacy campaigns, then why engage China at all? Is it worth it? Taking state preferences seriously, how should activists in transnational civil society proceed? The answer to these questions ultimately

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156  The advocacy trap depends on how TANs choose to respond when confronted with the political realities of their issue in China. For some, the gains made possible by compromising some aspect of their mission or message may be worthwhile. Others might value the integrity of their core principles over the incremental headway that could be made by negotiating those values away. Ultimately, it is the interaction of state preferences and TAN incentives to cooperate that produces the different forms of campaigns present in China. Given that their central agenda never had any hope of succeeding, the decision of Falun Gong’s allies to commit fully to their core principle and never retreat from it was strategically the soundest option. Simply discussing the allegations of persecution and torture is a non-​starter for CCP leaders, who have never shown the slightest inclination towards entertaining an audience with Falun Gong supporters. Nor was there much hope for the campaign’s stated aim of bringing Jiang Zemin to trial and the CCP to its knees. Much evidence also suggests that the Party continued its campaign of repression against the group long after it ceased to have any overt presence on the mainland. Yet Falun Gong has not gone away, and the group is now as readily identifiable by its political mission as its spiritual message. Since 1999, the movement has spread throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and especially North America, earning the sympathy of politicians, legislatures, and world-​ class professional NGOs whose dedication and tenacity has been crucial in sustaining the campaign. A  deep and unwavering commitment to seeking justice and to the principled validity of that cause is a strategic tool for keeping the issue fresh in the mind of the global public, and an indispensable one for the campaign considering its limited options to the contrary. Simply put, Falun Gong activists were never going to win their objective, and thus had nothing to lose by sticking with their convictions. For the IPR protection campaign, the explanation is straightforward enough: campaign objectives had the highest level of congruence with state preferences of any selected for this book. It did not come pushing objectives significantly at odds with the state’s own, or advocate solutions to common challenges the state did not desire. Consequently, it was readily granted access and there was no need for the kind of state-​power pushback that led to advocacy drift in the Tibet case. Moreover, TAN organizations were never incorporated into the state, though they did cooperate with Chinese government counterparts interested in strengthening anti-​piracy legislation. Unlike the global warming TAN, which was comprised primarily of NGOs and scientific experts, the IPR campaign consisted almost entirely of groups representing foreign business concerns. This made the task of incorporation much more difficult, as private companies are not inclined towards being legally conjoined with the state, as the green NGOs were.

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   157 Likewise, the campaign around capital punishment held fast to its core objective despite state resistance to the idea of abolition. In that case, access to state institutions was also tightly restricted, so much so that TAN organizations maintained virtually no mainland presence at all but instead were forced to operate from nearby Hong Kong, working on speculative information about the true number of executions carried out each year in China, which technically remains a state secret. Passage of the most recent ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ laws had nothing to do with the efforts of the TAN seeking more incremental satisfaction of its goals, but were motivated instead by domestic legitimacy-​based factors. The exigencies of modernizing the legal system and developing the rule of law are seen by state leaders as especially vital to China’s continued economic success, and the introduction of more rational, standardized judicial rulings are a key part of their strategy. At the same time, the death penalty remains overwhelmingly popular with the Chinese public as a means of seeking justice against violent offenders. Thus, while the recent reforms reflect a shift in state preferences on the way capital punishment is applied, those same preferences were static on the matter of its retention. Advocacy drift also failed to occur in the campaign to enhance the treatment and prevention of HIV/​AIDS, which was never formally incorporated into the state and experienced no pushback of CCP interests against its prime objective. However, a change in state interests was already well underway before advocacy for particular treatment programmes began in earnest. For most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the central government responded to talk of the epidemic with a blend of denial and indifference. At the time, advocacy was limited to criticisms of China’s inaction and normative position on AIDS, which cast patients as morally depraved and deserving of their lot. Only after severe gaps in the public health system were brought to light by crises –​and revelations of state culpability –​did official attitudes begin to change. The key turning point came in 2003 following Hu Jintao’s ascendance to the position of paramount leader. A new emphasis on social development, a stronger commitment to the logic of harm reduction, and, crucially, a deepening valuation of expert scientific knowledge to guide policy-​making suddenly put TAN-​sanctioned solutions in high demand. By depoliticizing its message and adopting a more strictly governance-​based approach, the TAN became a partner in the creation of a comprehensive, nation-​wide treatment regime. The migration of principles underpinning the identities and activities of TANs is likewise the product of an internal calculus. Though set in motion by the target state, these thought processes are nonetheless highly contingent on circumstance, and the positions of activists’ goals in relation to government interests.

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158  The advocacy trap The experience of the Tibetan independence campaign is similar to that of Falun Gong activists in the sense that it had little hope of ever realizing its core objective. After fifty years of struggle, the free Tibet campaign failed to provoke any meaningful response from Beijing beyond the unflinching insistence that ‘there is only one China’, and that Tibet is a part of it. Mindful of ethno-​national uprisings elsewhere on the mainland and of the role nationalist movements played in undermining communist regimes in Europe a quarter century ago, the stance of China’s own leaders on the subject of a Tibetan homeland has been implacable through five generations. Even the support of the international community, including the UN, US government, and countless grassroots supporters who flocked to the cause of ‘Tibetan freedom’ and the Dalai Lama’s message of non-​violent resistance in the 1990s has done little good. Worn down by several decades without hope of a policy concession from Beijing –​and the ever-​present threat of force against Tibetans –​the campaign has been forced to rethink its goals and explore alternative courses of action. Many see true independence as a pipe dream and appear ready to engage in a dialogue on Beijing’s terms. The aim of statehood has been officially abandoned, the Dalai Lama himself acknowledging it is unlikely to ever happen. Instead, the campaign is focused on cooperative dialogue with the regime, with the goal of securing appropriate representation of Tibet’s cultural distinctiveness and genuine autonomy for the territory within the existing legal parameters of the People’s Republic. This shift has itself compounded division within the activist camp, giving cause to a fringe minority of Tibetan exiles to espouse the use of any means necessary, including violent insurgency, to make their dream of a Tibetan homeland a reality. The net effect of these changes is a crisis of identity and concern for the future of Tibetan activism. As a staffer of one New York-​based refugee’s rights NGO put it, ‘If we aren’t for a free and independent Tibet, I don’t even know who we are anymore [emphasis added]’ (Confidential Interview, 2011c). In the case of the campaign to fight global warming, NGOs and experts in the TAN found the state eager to adopt new measures to reduce carbon outputs, in compliance with its obligations as a non-​Annex I  signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. China’s twin interests in keeping the country economically competitive and in limiting the effects of environmental degradation produced a particular demand for international expertise in ecological management and disaster mitigation, as well as research that would allow China’s industrial sector to be outfitted with the latest green technology. Faced with few viable alternatives, most climate change activists opted for collaboration, swapping talk of emissions trading and perhaps some organizational autonomy for a chance to participate in a climate strategy of China’s own choosing.

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   159 The benefits of this strategic silence on a plan activists had advocated openly were obvious enough. Foreign activists could maintain and build new ties with domestic green groups and other allies while still having a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions and without alienating the Chinese government. Talk of a carbon cap could be pushed into abeyance and resurrected at another time when the regime was more open to considering such a proposal, or when it requires guidance on execution, such as the commencement of cap-​and-​trade pilot programmes in seven provinces in 2016. In return for taking a longer view of China’s impact on the global climate and their commitment to an idea in the short-​run, activists were able to capitalize on an opportunity to advance the cause they cared about, without necessarily mortgaging the future. Of course, decisions like this are easier when principles are not conceived as zero-​sum, and when the payoffs associated with compromise are clear. Not all activists have this luxury, but to charge those who choose to cooperate with hypocrisy is unwarranted. They are not necessarily stooges of the state, but neither are they suicidal. Conclusion Transnational engagement is fraught with difficult choices on all sides. In an age of globalization where states were thought to be in decline, TANs were supposed to be the tip of the arrow that delivered new ideas, values, and norms to places where they were previously unknown, socializing states to new ways of behaving. Yet as the discussion here has shown, the acceptance of new ideas and subsequent policy changes is more often the result of domestic politics in the Chinese context. Concerned first and foremost with stability and survival, the Party-​state is far more attuned to a logic of political consequences at home than it is sensitive to the entreaties of foreign activists. Indeed, the foregoing sections suggest that there is very little TANs can do to persuade China to act a certain way. Usually the best they can do is to offer suggestions as to how the state might proceed once the choice to change policies has already been made. To be able to do so is a significant accomplishment in its own right, and ought to prompt a reconsideration, both analytically and practically, of the ‘goals’ or ‘results’ of advocacy and what foreign activists can reasonably hope to achieve in China. If state preferences are the determining factor in TAN effectiveness, then of what use are network strategies, resources, or timing? It is difficult to imagine either the Falun Gong or Tibetan independence campaigns turning out much differently, even if they persisted in pursuing their claims for a further twenty years. To begin with, it’s worth recognizing that some issues are simply off the table. There is no strategy or point in time at which ‘Bringing

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160  The advocacy trap Jiang Zemin to Justice’ for his actions against Falun Gong are likely to produce the result desired by the TAN. Only by tinkering with the issue are some issues brought into play. The Tibetan campaign exemplifies this well, as only when all talk of a sovereign homeland had ceased were significant gains made for cultural preservation, protection, and representation of Tibetan identity, albeit within a multinational –​but ultimately undivided –​ China. A second point concerns the differences of strategy that may be employed as a TAN seeks initial access. Personal relationships can be good for opening up opportunities for influence, but professional ones are better, and neither provides any guarantee that a campaign, once granted admission to the corridors of power, will be able to exert causal force over the policy process. Likewise, a strategy that relies on the decentralized targeting of subnational institutions can multiply opportunities for advocacy, but this does not constitute an assurance that the TAN will affect national-​level policy outcomes. Access to multiple provincial governments, for example, is not the same thing as access to the central government, and even if policy outcomes could be affected in some provinces, there is nothing to say that the sum of these victories would be sufficient to affect country-​wide patterns. Moreover, how one speaks to the state once in a position to nudge policy in a given direction matters a great deal. An ability to talk in the ostensibly value-​neutral, apolitical language of science was the key to collaboration for both the global warming and HIV/​AIDS campaigns. Of course, these issues lend themselves to this style of discourse. Human rights claims, such as those made on behalf of Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, or those on death row lack the ability to use language in a similar way. Network-​based factors, including types of claims, are also critical for determining what happens after TANs face an implacable state. For example, it is these that help us to understand why interaction with a strong central Chinese state caused the fracture of the Tibet campaign but not the one around global warming. In the latter case, activists were able to differentiate between the means to their desired end and the end itself, and to alter the means without impinging upon collective identity or the motivations underlying the TAN’s initial formation. Shifting the strategy of the campaign to collaboration with state-​based partners from emissions trading did not undermine the belief of climate activists that they were helping to reduce the output of a leading polluter state, and certainly did not compromise collective commitment to environmentalism. By contrast, differentiation between the means and the end was more complicated and contentious for the free Tibet campaign, which had long premised its mobilization on a philosophy of non-​violence. Once this tenet of group identity was lost and it was clear that Beijing would not bend on matters of territorial autonomy, the TAN

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Strategic considerations, tough choices   161 became more fractious, sparking a larger crisis of identity from which the TAN has not recovered. In the end, the larger question of whether to compromise core aspects of network identity in light of the target’s soft power preferences is one that each campaign must make for itself, a decision that is bound to be shaped by issue profiles, network structures, resources, and internal governance mechanisms. Sacrifices are sometimes worth making, but not always. Despite the differences in the receptions each received, neither the Falun Gong or IPR campaign has reason to compromise core ideals. In the case of the IPR campaign, the state was eager to comply with calls for tougher anti-​piracy measures. In the case of Falun Gong, abandoning core principles would effectively mean the end of mobilization, and a loss of the recognition and identification with their claims, which is perhaps the TAN’s greatest asset. Such a self-​induced end to advocacy would be tantamount to ‘giving up’, possibly the only outcome less palatable to the Falun Gong campaign than the refusal of China’s leaders to hear what they have to say. Even stickier is the issue of how far is too far when considering a renegotiation of core principles. Is there a point, for example, at which cooperation in state-​led projects could undermine global warming activists’ commitment to the environment? What would this be, and who would decide? Again, there is no single answer, and the process by which campaigns unfold is contingent on a huge assortment of factors which vary by issue area and group, and may in turn be products of the contexts in which TANs operate. But the process of internal soul-​searching that comes from close engagement with a strong target is a realistic challenge, and one that activists considering a foray into China should be prepared to confront. Decisions are not always easy for the state either. Just because the state weighs heavily in the trajectory of TAN campaigns does not mean that it is unassailable, a fact CCP leaders are well aware of. Considering the very real threats to social order and stability of the regime engendered by some policy issues, making the right call is a do-​or-​die proposition for the Party. Making politically wise choices depends to a great extent on the quality of information officials receive about what the public wants. China’s system of consultative authoritarianism requires that a great deal of faith be placed in institutions that remain largely untested and are still in the early stages of development. So perhaps the question to be asked of China’s leaders is ‘do you feel lucky?’

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Conclusion

State power as reality

T

here is more to consider here than the troubled sleep of the world’s advocates and activists, drawn ever closer to the world’s largest country and the only one positioned to rival American influence internationally. China’s ability to shape the patterns and pathways of global campaigns has rippling consequences for understanding the full scope of its rise and its role in changing the face of world order. A  latecomer to discussions of global governance, China increasingly finds itself in a position to determine what items are discussed, how, and by whom. This in turn raises difficult questions of representation and ethics, and even some unease at the prospect of having to once again recognize the values, input, and authority of a non-​Western, illiberal superpower. Changes often stir discomfort, but China’s pull on the principled substance of activist networks is troubling precisely because it is the inverse of what was supposed to happen. The dominant line of reasoning contends that TANs become effective politically when national interests are altered via the transnational promotion and diffusion of norms. If this is correct, China’s global integration should make it progressively susceptible to pressure for norm compliance, since interdependence only increases opportunities for its interaction with international society and consequently the likelihood of China socializing to its rules. In theory, a rising China should become increasingly acculturated to the mores of global citizenship. Its opening to the outside world in 1978 and the influx of foreign NGOs that followed was viewed by Western governments as a way to transform the country from the outside-​in, bringing with it rules and practices that would ultimately see China socialized to the role of upstanding global citizen. In the 1990s, the United States and its allies, fresh from the Cold War victory, envisioned an opportunity to transplant norms of democracy and human rights into one of communism’s last remaining strongholds through systemic integration. Actors in a global civil society found themselves on the front lines of a struggle to convert a backward dictatorship to a full-​fledged member of the global

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Conclusion: state power as reality    163 community, and its success was all but assured. China’s own role in the process was envisioned to be that of a passive and compliant neophyte, and questions of pushback or parallel influence on global civil society were not part of the equation. And why should they have been? After all, this was the era of globalization, when states across the board appeared more antiquated and less powerful with each passing day. State-​oriented, realist perspectives were little more than an outmoded relic of Cold War bipolarity, while TANs were the standard-​bearers of a new global order. Yet China’s interaction with foreign activists has been a two-​way street. The range of functional forms taken by TAN campaigns made visible by the multi-​issue comparative approach of this book has shown that there certainly are instances when adroit NGOs and experts have been able to nudge national policy in a desirable direction, helping to steer China towards achievement of goals activists share, both of which leave space to conclude that TAN attributes have something to do with success, and that not all campaigns possess the same strengths or experience. On the other hand, the book has highlighted many more examples of China’s ability to shape the way transnational advocacy is done, whether by creating new windows of opportunity to float expert advice, partner with official agencies, or by drastically altering the long-​standing and deeply held values that motivated the initial formation of an advocacy campaign. Playing by China’s rules I have argued that forces that lie outside their control shape TAN campaigns, including the preferences of the very states they seek to change. Taking states seriously does not mean that values and ideational factors are meaningless, or that norm-​resistant targets are completely impervious to outside influences. But it does suggest that states are more than a mitigating factor in the extent to which global norms influence domestic politics. This book has presented evidence that states play a central role in the (re)construction of idea-​based networks and decisively influence patterns of transnational mobilization. Recognizing this reality is crucial for managing relationships with China in the twenty-​first century because China’s leaders are seldom persuaded to follow a given course purely on the recommendation of foreign advocates. Rather, as shown in chapter five, policy priorities are set with a keen eye trained on domestic legitimacy and the consequences of a given action (or inaction) for the stability and survival of CCP rule. Even in situations where it appears that activists’ influence on policy has been strongest, their ability to gain any leverage was dependent on the state’s creation of new opportunities

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164  The advocacy trap for advocacy independently of external pressure. China’s part in determining the course and character of transnational advocacy also complicates the long-​ standing assumption of Western progressivism within TANs. The pertinent question is not whether norms matter, but whose norms end up shaping the global conversation, and indeed the role of agenda-​setting power on compliance among the world’s governments. China’s assertion of its own norms is not necessarily a bad thing, as the case of the global warming campaign has suggested. Altering its stance in such a way as to allow China to pursue lower carbon emissions on its own terms led to more gains in the fight against global warming than would ever have happened had activists continued to insist on emissions trading as the only choice for China, and which the state saw as inimical to economic development. I have situated the issue of how China’s preferences originate within the context of the CCP’s legitimacy and, by extension, the stability and security of the regime. This position rests on three assumptions:  that all states are ultimately concerned with their survival, that survival depends on performance as measured by popular legitimacy, and that policy-​makers have relatively strong assurances about what the public wants and that they have some means to connect this information to the policy process. The advantage of this view is that it allows us to get a look at the important social dimensions of state preference formation, a too-​rare feature of state-​based perspectives on international politics, and even rarer in discussions of ex-​Leninist states designed with the suppression of civil society in mind. The argument here is that the drive to survive comes from domestic factors rather than international ones, and that state self-​interest is particularly valuable for explaining why certain policy positions gain favour at certain times while others fail to do so. All states save for those that seek to rule by the naked use of force care about their legitimacy, and just because China is rising does not mean that it is indestructible. By expressing concern for its legitimacy and moving to a more socially responsive form of governance, the state hedges against existential threats from within, short-​circuiting the potential for social grievances to escalate into national legitimacy crises that would threaten the survival of Chinese communism. This is why China’s leaders have demonstrated with such eagerness their enthusiasm for policies reflecting social preferences. Sometimes this is manifested in the output of policies significantly at odds with the CCP’s historic positioning of itself on an issue, but that it came to regard as politically expedient because the public favours it. Such is the case with capital punishment, of which a broad cross-​section of Chinese society approves by an overwhelming margin. By retaining the use of criminal executions within more circumscribed legal guidelines, the Party leadership simultaneously shows its commitment

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Conclusion: state power as reality   165 to punishing violent offenders and to the kind of rule of law development that limits the misuse of capital punishment for political ends. In still other cases, policy outputs reflect a tendency towards the appeasement of particular social interests with a view to preserving order. Having observed the consequences of acquiescing to ethno-​national minorities in the USSR, the Party remains as obstinate as ever on the issue of independence for Tibet while simultaneously prioritizing Tibet’s social, educational, and infrastructural development, and working for the preservation of Tibet’s cultural distinctiveness in an attempt to ward off a rising tide of regional instability since 2008. The issue of clear information must be more concerning to the CCP leadership. Unable to rule purely by ideological fiat or dictatorial muscle, China’s post-​Tiananmen leaders have been hard at work developing new mechanisms to learn about public demands and to govern with greater responsiveness. These are essential if the Party is to adequately evaluate the risks associated with certain policy choices, particularly when failing to respond appropriately could trigger destabilizing legitimacy crises. The challenge is to introduce enough accountability to provide the regime with the public input it needs without destabilizing it completely. In this sense, state-​led reforms operate like a release valve to take public pressure off the regime. Opening them too far could be toxic, but the controlled expansion of accountability mechanisms gives a vent to pressure that otherwise threatens to explode. This challenge is pivotal for understanding authoritarian resilience in a global democratic age. Authentic democracies come ready-​made with accountability mechanisms and are more permeable by nature to outside forces. Where they exist, genuinely representative institutions reduce the transaction costs of state–​society interaction by enabling the reliable and accurate communication of popular preferences. Their absence elevates the uncertainty of that process, increasing the potential for authoritarian leaders to misjudge the public mood, the results of which could be the destabilization and destruction of the regime. In China’s case, local direct elections have been carried out for over thirty years, and in over a million municipalities nation-​wide. Petition offices exist to field citizen complaints and deliberative polling seeks to connect opinions to decisions about a range of social services. Significant space exists for popular mobilization and protests, provided these are issue-​based, peaceful, and not directed at the regime itself. Domestic NGOs, and even a few foreign ones, serve as conduits of information about how best to deliver public goods. All are potential sources of information that, at least theoretically, ought to help an authoritarian state to govern better.

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166  The advocacy trap The question is how well any of these measures convey regular, reliable information about what the public wants, or more to the point, how much faith the CCP is willing to place in its own reforms. Elections are non-​competitive and prone to vote-​buying activity. Petition offices are overwhelmed. It is not at all certain that polling returns reflect scientific samples, how data is used once it is collected, or what processes exist to ensure that it reaches those responsible for making decisions or enforcing regulations. What is clear is that the stakes for the Party are extremely high, that they are aware of this fact, and are prepared to do what must be done to protect social stability and their right to rule. The more critical point, though, is that the choice to enact these reforms in the first place is motivated by the need for self-​preservation, rather than the persuasiveness of foreign activists or any special desire of China’s leaders to appease them. Of course, if decisions made for domestic political reasons happen to placate the global community at the same time, then so much the better. This situation arose in the anti-​capital-​punishment campaign, where the decision to retain the death penalty while reducing incidence of its use was driven by parallel concerns for greater accountability in application of the law and the wishes of China’s overwhelming pro-​death-​penalty public. The global abolitionist community had nothing to do with Beijing’s new policy, but nevertheless took heart in knowing that fewer would be put to death as a result of the policy shift. The supreme irony arising from this book is that although the Chinese state exercises major, even formative influence over TANs, it is itself vulnerable and hyper-​attuned to the domestic political mood. Implications for transnational activists: thinking beyond success and failure Transnational activists are not puppets of the Chinese state. Each of those explored here contains a professionalized element that is well educated, experienced, and fully capable of weighing the risks and rewards of cooperating with Chinese authorities or not. These choices are made consciously, and the criteria applied in the cost–​benefit analysis of one TAN will not apply to all. There may, however, be similarities across issue areas. For example, activists in many areas of human rights might find it easier to stand by their principles, since their hopes of accessing or influencing the state are usually very low to begin with, and thus the opportunities to compromise on their values are relatively few. On the other hand, some environmental activists find the costs of renegotiating their principles to be low, since the compromise required by the state is simply a different path to a very tolerable

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Conclusion: state power as reality   167 or desirable goal. In these instances, the temptation to alter or abandon an objective becomes even greater when outcomes are not conceived of in a zero-​sum fashion. Because ‘each life matters’, human rights activists may consider a single instance of torture to be one too many, or injustice for even a single individual to be injustice for all. By contrast, even a small improvement in China’s CO2 levels was a step in the right direction for many green groups. Their endorsement of Beijing’s plans was the best option for activists whose cause might otherwise have had no hope at all. One activist’s purity of heart is another’s naivety. The word ‘collaboration’ has ugly connotations, and needs to be reclaimed. For one thing, working with the state rather than against it is necessary for building the kinds of interpersonal ties that can prove beneficial in the future. There is wisdom in the refusal to burn bridges, and much good can come from partnering with a target government. Under limited conditions, TAN–​state partnerships can also help to develop domestic institutional capabilities where they do not exist. Upfront investment in such a relationship can pay dividends later even if it requires ideological sacrifice. Such was the case in the HIV/​AIDS campaign, where foreign activists and NGOs succeeded in strengthening the capacities of the domestic NGO community and ultimately improved the responses of the Chinese health-​ care system to the epidemic. Given the lack of reliable domestic partners many foreign NGOs confront in China, any chance to play a stronger role in training, coaching, or otherwise professionalizing China’s NGO sector is well worth it, even if the returns ultimately flow to others in the global activist community. Advocates that do elect to compromise their agenda are often cagey about the fact. Many depend financially on public fundraising drives, and this type of outreach is more effective if donors can be convinced that activists believe in their cause, and that the dollars they raise are put to effective use. None want to be viewed as spineless jellyfish, or worse, as lackeys of an authoritarian government with a dubious rights record. Decisions to adopt greater flexibility in mission and message are seldom viewed by activists as ‘selling out’, but simply as doing the best they can with what they have to work with, and preferring some positive results to none at all. Since so much is beyond their power, it is important that activists work to control what they can. This means acknowledging the realities of operating within an institutional environment in China that was not built to handle them, and is only slowly adapting to accommodate their presence. The best strategy is for foreign NGOs and activists to engage targets like China with their eyes open, know the domestic regulatory environment, and learn to operate within it. They may not be able to promote change independently

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168  The advocacy trap from the outside, but may be able to assist the state in reforming itself. Just as China has increasingly relied on a charm offensive to strengthen its image internationally, foreign activists approaching China should recognize that little good ever comes from embarrassing China’s leaders. It is often better to help them meet their existing priorities, instead of telling them what their priorities should be. Above all, taking the state seriously means recognizing the limits of what is achievable through transnational advocacy, as well as the reflexive limits of moral constitution within activist networks, and the fuzzy definition of success itself. However tempting the perks of self-​censorship might be, knowing how far is too far is every bit as crucial as understanding that progress often comes at a price. A change in philosophy can open doors, but can be counter-​productive in the long run if it sparks an internal war for the soul of a movement. Already separated by geography, there is little left to unite actors in a transnational campaign when common identification with core values is lost. What some advocates see as wise others will perceive as a conflict of interest. When common ground between the two cannot be found, siding with pragmatism over principles is tantamount to pushing the self-​destruct button. Evaluating the efforts of TAN campaigns is not as simple as success or failure, as even the smallest gain needs to be weighed in full view of what was given up to accomplish it. A final word: to engage or not to engage? Just because advocacy in China is accompanied by certain risks does not mean that it should not be done. Foreign activists and NGOs need not withdraw from China, and the governments that support them should not shy away from it either. Pretending as if new world powers did not exist or untangling the connections built with China over the last three-​and-​a-​half decades is not only impossible but likely to be counter-​productive, especially considering the significance it will continue to have in almost all areas of global governance. As I have documented here, there are definite upsides to forging strong relationships in China at all levels, both inside and outside the halls of power. Yet advocacy of change in China is not all roses. Foreign activists and their allies within the world’s governments and international organizations should approach their task with humility and sobriety, and go to China with their eyes open and mindful of the potential hazards. Activism from abroad is likely to have little substantive impact on policy, even if favourable changes are seen to occur, and the likelihood of effecting regime change is even more remote. In the worst-​case scenario, aid given to activists and

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Conclusion: state power as reality   169 NGOs under the aegis of democracy assistance may inadvertently bolster authoritarian resilience when the organizations to whom funding or technical assistance was provided engage in service delivery for a legitimacy-​ seeking dictatorship. The promotion of ‘good governance’ becomes the enemy of democratization in such cases. Most of all, even the most fervent of believers in their cause should not discount the possibility that their interactions in China may force them to confront some uncomfortable truths about their campaign and its mission, and prepare themselves for some honest soul-​searching.

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192

Index authoritarian vi, 1–​2, 12–​13, 16, 18, 22–​3, 26, 30–​1, 33–​4, 126, 136, 155, 165, 167, 169 consultative 161 fragmented 29 capital punishment 71, 88–​90, 96–​103, 142, 164–​5 abolition 3, 14, 86, 91, 100, 102, 139–​40, 146, 150–​2, 157, 166 see also death penalty; human rights; ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ carbon emissions 2–​3, 11, 105, 122, 132, 137, 164 cap 120, 159 see also climate change; global warming charities 6, 32, 35, 83 charity law 24 civil society vii, 4–​5, 10–​12, 21–​4, 35, 75, 125–​7, 164 global 11, 55, 162–​3 transnational 2, 7–​8, 11, 17, 19–​20, 26, 30–​1, 155 climate change 15, 105, 119–​35, 139–​40, 142, 144, 146–​51, 158 Jintao, Hu 124 Xi 124 see also carbon emissions; global warming; Kyoto Protocol Cold War 1, 11, 20, 108, 117, 162–​3 collective mobilization 13, 19 communism 29, 43, 45, 48–​9, 51–​2, 64, 91–​3, 106–​8, 110–​11, 113–​14, 118, 162, 164 leadership 2, 138 principles 115 regimes 22, 158 constructivism 13, 17–​18, 25, 134, 147

corruption 8, 30, 88, 93–​4, 98, 100, 103, 153–​4 penalties 92 Dalai Lama 12, 15, 54, 104–​6, 109, 111–​13, 115–​19, 133, 148, 158 Dalai Clique 117, 147 see also human rights; Tibet death penalty 14, 86–​8, 92–​103, 154, 157 abolition 70–​1, 89, 90–​1, 96, 139, 141–​3, 166 Xiaoping, Deng 92–​4 see also capital punishment; human rights; ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ democratization 7, 29, 91, 169 dictatorship 2, 22, 162, 169 domestic actors 34, 147 elections 23, 153, 165–​6 environment 6, 11, 15, 34, 54, 105, 114, 119–​21, 123–​6, 130–​5, 137, 149–​51, 154, 158, 160–​1, 165 NGOs 126–​9, 152 protection vi, 7 Five-​Year Plan 73, 144 Eleventh 124 Second 84, 94 Tenth 124 Thirteenth 120 global warming 3, 11, 104–​5, 119–​22, 124, 127, 129–​31, 134, 137, 140–​3, 156, 158, 160–​1, 164 see also carbon emissions; climate change; greenhouse gasses globalization 11, 31, 155, 159, 163 GONGOs 82, 126–​7, 132

193

Index  193 Gong, Falun 14, 38–​55, 62, 67–​8, 70, 101, 137–​52, 155–​6, 158–​9, 161 United States 41, 47, 50, 53–​4 Zemin, Jiang 3, 43–​4, 160 see also capital punishment; Hongzhi, Li; human rights greenhouse gasses 3, 15, 119–​20, 122, 125, 132, 139, 159 see also carbon emissions; climate change; global warming

liberalism 13, 15, 18–​19, 21–​2, 25, 30, 32–​3, 67, 85, 91, 98, 101–​2, 123, 133, 162

healthcare 167 HIV/​AIDS vi, 3, 14, 70–​86, 101–​2, 139–​40, 142–​4, 146–​9, 152, 154, 157, 160, 167 Henan 78, 137 NGOs 73–​7, 82–​3 Hongzhi, Li 42–​4, 50–​1, 53–​5, 147 see also Gong, Falun human rights 2, 7, 11, 14, 28, 33, 39–​40, 44, 71, 84, 86–​90, 94–​8, 100, 106, 128, 139, 150 Gong, Falun 41–​2, 47–​8, 52, 55, 68, 138, 150, 160, 162, 166–​7 Tibet 108–​9, 113–​15, 117–​18, 150 see also capital punishment; death penalty; ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 108, 110–​11 Politburo 40, 43–​4

internet 21, 31, 68, 128 campaigns 32 Japan 30, 35, 47, 54, 91, 110, 145, 151 Jiabo, Wen 80, 124, 144, 151 Jinping, Xi 8, 81, 124 Tibet 114 see also climate change Jintao, Hu 8, 65, 73, 80, 85–​6, 115, 119, 120, 124, 144, 157 Tibet 113–​14, 117 see also climate change ‘kill fewer, kill carefully’ 71, 86–​8, 94, 97, 99, 151, 157 Kuomintang (KMT) 110 Kyoto Protocol 121, 132, 158 legitimacy 14–​15, 22–​5, 43, 59, 65, 88, 111–​12, 136–​8, 152–​4, 157, 163–​5, 169

military 21, 35, 45, 91, 107–​8, 110–​11, 145 nationalism 5, 25, 133, 151 Occupy movement 31

realist theory 7, 13, 15, 18–​21, 25, 27, 56, 133, 155, 161, 163 Re-​Education-​Through-​Labour 41 repression 12, 21, 30, 53, 83, 143, 149, 156 rule of law 15, 52, 56, 65, 71, 88, 100, 151, 154, 157, 165 SARS 78, 80 security 24, 29, 34, 41, 44, 50, 63, 75–​6, 80, 90, 93–​4, 136, 149, 164 domestic 21, 39, 145 soft power 8–​9, 11, 161 surveillance 21, 31, 49, 145 Taiwan 28, 47 Tiananmen 25, 29, 41, 93, 114, 127, 143, 153, 165 Tibet 3, 15, 104–​35, 139–​52, 155–​6, 158–​60, 165 United Nations 108–​9 see also Dalai Lama; human rights; Jintao, Hu; Jinping, Xi totalitarianism 88 regimes 90–​1 United Nations (UN) 57, 72, 75–​6, 89, 107, 121 see also Tibet United States 2, 4, 27, 41, 47, 49–​50, 58–​9, 63–​4, 89, 122, 139–​40, 162 capital punishment 89, 91, 139 Tibet 108, 115–​16, 140 see also Gong, Falun

194

194  Index Xiaoping, Deng 1, 29, 56, 65, 113, 126, 153 see also death penalty Zedong, Mao vi, 21, 29, 44, 51, 65–​6, 91–​2, 111, 113, 123, 153

Maoism 44 Zemin, Jiang 3, 39–​40, 43–​4, 49, 86, 93–​4, 144, 156, 160 see also Gong, Falun