Chinese Journal of Sociology

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Resources of Legitimacy and Chinese Workers’ Activism: Restudying Shanghai Workers’ Strike in 1957

Author: Lin Chaochao, Department of History, Fudan University.   

  1. Author: Lin Chaochao, Department of History, Fudan University.
  • Online:2012-01-20 Published:2012-01-20
  • Contact: Lin Chaochao, Department of History, Fudan University. E-mail:lcc86211@gmail.com
  • About author:Lin Chaochao, Department of History, Fudan University

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Abstract:

In the mid1950s, a strike wave rolled across the city of Shanghai on an unprecedented scale. Elizabeth J. Perry wrote an article on it to stress the positive correlation of intraworkingclass divisions with labor activism. While recognizing the fragmentation among the workers, this paper furthers the investigation to the area of mobilization mechanism of Chinese workers' activism, emphasizing the importance of the institutional environment of the state to the study of the demands and expressions of Chinese workers' protests in contemporary China. With China’s actual conditions taken into consideration, the resource mobilization theory and the political process model are adopted to reexamine Shanghai's strike wave of 1957 with a focus on the interaction between the participants, resources, mobilization networks and the institutional environment of the state. The author holds that the Chinese workers in the 1950s were gradually forming the farreaching tradition of activism that was characterized of the actors’ dependency upon and attainment of the external resources of legitimacy (including the ideology of the state, top leaders' statements, official opinions, etc.). These external resources of legitimacy, as well as the elite, identification, and networks, are the elements of the mobilization mechanism of activism. However, the Chinese workers’ activism since the 1950s has been unsuccessful to obtain legitimate support for its action in the absence of the aforementioned external resources of legitimacy, resulting in the ineffectiveness of the action by the minority elite in mobilization on a large scale.

Key words: Chinese Workers’ Activism, , Shanghai’s Strike Wave, , Collective Action, , Resources for Legitimacy, , Elite Mobilization