China’s Political Mobilization Challenge

China’s aggressive pandemic lockdowns are firmly in the rearview mirror, but observers agree that public sentiment has undergone a tangible change. Amid continuing political tightening and an economy struggling to rebound, writers argue that China has entered an age of “malaise” or “stagnation” that lacks the optimism and excitement that defined the heady days of the reform era. New words and phrases now pepper daily conversation: some people are choosing to “run” for the exits, while others are opting to “lie flat” and give up on their ambitions.

In my own extended discussions with individuals across China on multiple trips over the past year, the most common descriptor is always juan, short for neijuan (内卷 or involution) – a term similar to “endless hustle” and repurposed from an anthropological concept to describe more and more work for less and less output. The “less” in today’s China is partially about money, as salaries are dropping; it also refers to less meaning, as people are working more but feeling alienated from why they are doing it.

In many ways, rising anomie and pessimism about the future are common sentiments across all modern societies, especially among youth. Yet the ubiquity of this sentiment from the top to bottom of Chinese society suggests that something significant has shifted among the Chinese public. Observers have identified the changing zeitgeist but struggled to make sense of what its political implications might be. While many commentators argue that rising disenchantment signals a threat to regime stability, there is no evidence to support the claim that the regime faces a fundamental legitimacy crisis. Even scholars who are keen to speculate about regime fragility acknowledge that the recent changes are unlikely to spur near-term collapse of either the economy or the political system, as leading market analysts have pointed out.

An alternate way of framing China’s new social normal is to think in terms of the costs of political mobilization. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has laid out an ambitious agenda to overcome the mounting challenges it faces: a sluggish economy, high levels of unemployment, technology and trade pressure, and a demographic cliff, to name just a few. These are challenges confronting numerous regimes, but they matter more for contemporary China. Not only has the CCP historically relied on mobilization to realize its political agenda, but the consolidation of political control and suppression of alternate forms of organization has left party-led mobilization as the only means for achieving these governance goals.

From tackling social issues such as reviving the dismally low birthrate to achieving “comprehensive security” in areas ranging from food to ideology, the CCP wants and needs an all-out effort from both bureaucrats and regular citizens. Yet the current mood in China suggests instead that mobilizing either of these groups is increasingly costly.

Throughout its modern history, the party has used mobilization as a key element of its political rule. It seeks not only to operate through standard bureaucratic channels, but also to encourage and motivate the participation of various groups to go above and beyond the normal limitations of institutional governance. At the apex of high socialism under Mao Zedong, politics revolved around mass mobilization: individuals had to attend public meetings, conduct collective criticisms and study sessions, and even read through the front pages of People’s Daily (a task so dry and difficult that author and Sinologist Simon Leys described “reading Communist literature” as “akin to munching rhinoceros sausage”). Even after reform and opening up, the CCP continued to rely on campaigns and other mobilizational tactics, rather than formal institutions, to achieve major governance goals.

Mobilization in the reform era inherited key features of its Maoist forebears, but it also took on new elements in a more liberalized society. The targets of this mobilization have often been cadres and bureaucrats, rather than regular citizens. “Maoist campaigns mobilized the masses into politics,” explained Zeng Qingjie in a study of poverty alleviation. “Reform-era campaigns, by contrast, entail a much lower degree of mass involvement. Instead, it is the bureaucrats who became the main targets of intense mobilization.”

Elizabeth Perry described these mobilization efforts as “managed campaigns,” which incorporate the framework of mass revolutionary campaigns but are more highly directed from the top and overlaid with technocratic terminology. These efforts include work teams, local councils, linking cadres or localities to other targeted areas, and more – all of which focus mobilization on groups of elites, rather than the masses.

In the face of massive economic and social challenges, the new era under Xi Jinping is not just marked by a shift toward enforcing party unity and cracking down on political dissension – it is also about the CCP running into the limits of the existing mobilization strategy.

The reliance on mobilizing bureaucrats and cadres to carry out the agenda has overextended them to the point where they cannot possibly keep up with the demands. With the party and state responsible for more governance tasks than ever before, and with strict and inflexible targets for completing these tasks, bureaucrats are overworked (and, with local government budgets in some areas collapsing, underpaid). As a result, bureaucrats frequently describe disillusionment and feelings of involution.

At the same time, realizing many of the goals for development and social order also requires buy-in from a broader swath of the population. In an environment of growing political apathy, however, these calls to mass action are more likely to be met with indifference or contempt. The more the public ignores these entreaties, the more that bureaucrats are being mobilized to try to overcome these limits. They are tasked with carrying out more responsibility with less support from the people on the receiving end of the policies, and with less room for flexibility than in the past.

As one example, the CCP has implemented a policy campaign to improve food security and reduce reliance on foreign imports by establishing a quota for arable land that can grow staple crops like grain. Local officials are mandated to achieve targets of land reclaimed from other uses, which often requires getting elderly farmers to use their land to grow unprofitable and labor-intensive grains rather than more profitable cash crops like tea or fruit. Already struggling under the weight of overwork, local officials spend fruitless months trying to convince citizens to get on board, often to no avail. The only plausible way to convince locals to agree to the program is to offer massive subsidies, and even then many citizens are still reluctant to change their farming strategy.

Nowhere is the challenge of dealing with disenchantment more obvious than in the case of the falling birthrate. No matter how many pro-natal policies the party and state put in place, the number of new children in China continues to decline year after year, and the overall population is now shrinking. After years of resisting calls to change the family planning system, leaders not only scrapped the one-child policy but are now scrambling to encourage young women to have two or even three children.

Population declines and lower fertility rates are now the norm across the modern world, especially in East Asia. A focus on careers, pressure to balance between individual goals and traditional family obligations, and the prohibitive costs of starting a family have all made marriage and child-rearing much less attractive to many young people. (As one of my friends in central China quipped, “Housing prices are the greatest contraceptive.”) Few, if any, policy solutions anywhere have made even a blip in birthrates. Facing a lack of policy solutions, Xi Jinping has called for party officials to actively promote a child-bearing culture and reshape young people’s views on marriage and family. Campaigns to encourage more births are underway.

Thus far, these attempts look like a fool’s errand. The response from women to these entreaties, as reporters have found, has been a resounding “no.” The stories in the media corroborate conversations I have had with young Chinese: the state’s attempts to mobilize, encourage, or cajole women and families to have more kids are met with a collective shrug. As these campaigns become more important, bureaucrats will have to spend more time trying to convince a reluctant population, and citizens will only become more reluctant in turn.

This is not to say that society-wide mobilization is impossible or that top-down mobilization is irrelevant. Instead, it is to point out that the costs of such mobilization are increasing in ways that limit the options available to a mobilization-oriented regime. China never officially made COVID-19 vaccination mandatory, but local officials – given strict instructions from their superiors – tried every possible way to pressure people to get vaccinated short of physically forcing them. Even then there was a significant percentage of the population, especially the elderly, who still refused. Studies show that more than a quarter of the oldest citizens (age 80-plus) and more than 10 percent of elderly (60-plus) had not been fully vaccinated when China abandoned its pandemic control policies – and local bureaucrats had to spend time and money trying to reach their targets.

Without effective mobilization over the long term, and with local officials facing impossible targets, the CCP is left only with the option for coercion – a last resort that is both extremely costly and threatens to inflict irreparable damage on both individuals and society at large. Reports of coercion in the face of intransigence have become so common in the case of arable land quotas that the national government had to reprimand local officials for going too far.

The rising costs of mobilization present an enormous challenge to China’s governance project. For China to be able to achieve its goals and fulfill what Xi and the leadership envision, they will have to overcome this mobilization challenge; so far, many citizens are responding to mobilization efforts by further retreating from politics, while bureaucrats are floundering under the limits of what they can do. Rather than focus on legitimacy crises or regime stability, observers would be well-served to focus their attention on the mobilization challenge. Whether China’s leaders can address this challenge will define where China is headed and whether it will be able to achieve its ambitious agenda.