Dealing with a Resurgent China. Interview with Jean-Louis Rocca and Camille Salgues

Jean-Louis Rocca and Camille Salgues discuss the aims and scope of the European project they are part of: Dealing with a Resurgent China (DWARC). DWARC (2022-2025) seeks to build a multidisciplinary analytical framework for understanding a multifaceted China under the Xi presidency. This project aims to explain social, political, economic, and foreign policy changes in China today. Jean-Louis Rocca, project coordinator at the CERI, and Camille Salgues give us a presentation of the project and the workpackage hosted at Sciences Po. This interview has been recorded. Listen to the audio version.

Jean-Louis Rocca (JR): I am Jean-Louis Rocca, professor of political science at Sciences Po and researcher at the Centre for International Research (CERI) at Sciences Po, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). I am in charge of one of the work packages of this new European project known as DWARC—Dealing with a Resurgent China.

Camille Salgues (CS): And I am Camille Salgues. I worked in China until recently when Jean-Louis asked me to return to France to work together with him as a postdoctoral researcher on the DWARC project.

CERI: Would you mind presenting the DWARC project, please?

JLR: To a certain extent, the project arises from a question asked by the European Union (EU) about China. Clearly, people in the EU feel that it is very difficult for them to understand what is going on in China right now. The EU has decided to finance a group of people, a consortium, to investigate what is going on in China, as well as different aspects of Chinese society, really focusing on the new China, the contemporary China, the present China, precisely to help them and to respond in some measure to the new challenges created by the development of Chinese society.
This group of people is called the China Horizon, but the formal name of the European project is an acronym: DWARC, which stands for Dealing with a Resurgent China.
The consortium’s objective is to deal with various aspects of Chinese society, including the economy, social relations, international relations, EU-China relations, politics, and the relationships between the Communist Party and the Chinese population.
The project entails work packages, all independent, but we have regular meetings to exchange ideas and to try to give a more general, larger view of China.
The consortium involves nine institutions, including both universities and think tanks. Concerning universities, we have Sciences Po, of course, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), the University of Social Sciences of Warsaw in Poland (SWPS), the Universita del Piemonte Orientale (UPO), the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and the Ruhr Universität Bochum (RUB). In terms of think tanks, we have Bruegel based in Brussels, Merics (Mercator Institute for China Studies), devoted to Chinese studies and based in Berlin, and finally, Asia Centre, a French institution.

CS: One interesting point, I think, is that we are at a new moment in the politics of knowledge about China. There was a kind of knowledge gap concerning China, both at the European level and at the national level in France, but right now there are lots of new things happening, and the China Horizon’s project is one of them. The politics of knowledge about China is changing now, both at the European and at the national level, for the better, I think.

JLR: We can explain by giving more details about the work package I am personally in charge of, with Camille. This part of the project, Work Package 2, is devoted to the dynamism of Chinese society.
Its starting point is the fact that usually Europeans view Chinese society very poorly. Many people—not only journalists and politicians, but also researchers—consider that China is not a democratic country, for sure, but even more that it is a sort of remote society, a dominated society, where the population is continuously and deeply influenced and controlled to a certain extent by a very strict and very repressive authoritarian rule. For some, China is a totalitarian society, or on its way of becoming one.
Of course, it is true that since the reign of Xi Jinping authoritarian rule has strengthened , but at the same time it is very important, from our point of view, to show that Chinese society has changed extensively during the last, I would say, 30 years, and that, for example, Chinese people now have opinions in the strongest sense of the term. It can seem a little bit strange to speak like that, but the idea is that, many Chinese are critical towards policies and propaganda but not dissidents, considering that, for example, the democratic system also has a certain number of flaws, and that maybe China could find a new path between the two extremes: authoritarian rule and representative democracy. The idea of this work package is to give voice, I would say, to these kinds of opinions, and to give some overview of precisely how the Chinese population, and the various social categories within it, are viewing China’s future or the kind of society they would like to see emerge in China in terms of equality, gender, education, work, etc.
The objective is to take the opinions of the Chinese population very seriously, and we try to do that using different channels, different means. First, and this is a point that is rarely dealt with, there are many social movements in China. There are a lot of social conflicts in the countryside, in the cities, many workers, peasants, middle-class people, etc., confronting the Communist Party and the local governments. And we are interested in precisely evaluating the kinds of opinions people in these movements have, the points of view they are defending in this kind of conflict.
Another means for understanding what is going on in China from Chinese people’s perspectives is to examine the opinion movements that are developing in China. One example is the Tangping movement, which started on social media networks. The Tangping movement is very interesting. It is a movement through which people are expressing the fact that they no longer want to participate in the existing society based on competition: you know, working hard, trying to get the best job they can, changing jobs regularly to get a better one, to try to get the maximum amount of money possible to spend on buying an apartment, two apartments, a car, a good education for a child, and so on. Now, in the new generation, a lot of people are saying, okay, we don't want to participate in this kind of society, we'd like to Tang Ping, meaning to lie down, to take a rest to a certain extent. They consider that “we can work for a while because we have to survive, of course, but we don't want to get married”, for example, “we don't want to have a child, we don't want to work too hard, and we just want to enjoy life”. And it's a relatively large movement of opinion in Chinese society today.
Of course, the emergence of a new opinion movement is very interesting for us because it’s precisely a way to better understand the way the Chinese population is viewing Chinese society outside politics as such.

Shanghai, China, July 2015. Copyright: Shutterstock

A third, and connected, element through which to explore Chinese public opinion is social media networks, because they have become very important in Chinese society now, especially because there is no democratic system in China. Social media networks are a good way for people to express their own views because, of course there is censorship, but usually censorship intervenes after a post is made, after an opinion is expressed on social media networks, and so during a certain period of time people can read these messages and discuss and further express their opinions.
Social media are very important for the government as well, because they are a way to track, to evaluate the state of society, to a certain extent. For the government, it is useful to acknowledge the fact that there is criticism about this or that, people really wanting to change a certain situation, people very critical about such and such policy, and so on.
The social media networks now in China are really very interesting to examine to gain more knowledge about precisely what members of the Chinese population think about certain points.

Finally, the last channel through which we are evaluating public opinion in China is interviews. Originally, the objective was to go to China and to interview people there, but because of the COVID pandemic this was not possible. Therefore, we were obliged to interview people in France. We identified two kinds of people who could be interesting from our point of view: students and migrants.

We conducted interviews in order to collect opinions directly from people. Very rapidly a few subjects emerged as very important in the discussions we had with Chinese migrants and students. First was their work and their attitudes to work and production. Do they want to work hard or would they like to have a different life? What judgments do they have about the way people work in China, which they left, and France, where they are living?
A second crucial topic that arose in conversations was gender relations, which are really changing now in China. In general, we are very interested in people’s expectations. What kind of expectations do they have for the near future? Would they like to go back to China or to stay in France? In terms of personal life as well, do they want to marry? Do they consider that getting married is an important step in their life or not?
Connected to these questions, attitudes toward having children also frequently came up, and are interesting to look at because the situation in China has recently changed completely with regard to population planning. Before 2015 there was the one-child policy, but now it is exactly the opposite. The Chinese government is trying to force people, or at least to incite people, to have several children. It is thus very important to collect information on the opinions of Chinese people about this point.
The work we have done since November 2022, and are continuing to do for two more years, on social movements, opinion movements, social media, and interviews with Chinese students and migrants in France, intersects, and often shares objectives, with the work of other work packages within the DWARC project. For example, researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid also explore public opinion on a variety of topics, but they focus more on subjects relating to feminism because their team has the expertise to do this kind of work and is developing a larger reflection on gender relations.
The team from the University of Social Sciences of Warsaw focuses on a distinct but not completely different subject. They are more interested in the situation of cultural institutions in China and cultural opinion to a certain extent, the cultural milieu, as we say. in particular, they examine the kinds of movies, dramas, and so on, that are developing in China. Their work is quite different than ours from this point of view because they are interested in a very different public—painters, writers, filmmakers, etc.—but in fact it’s not so different because in the end our objectives are basically the same: to gain a more precise idea of what is going on in Chinese society in terms of Chinese people’s opinions.

Chinese New Year's decorations in Paris, January 2023.
Copyright: EricBery for Shutterstock

CS: This is a very thorough presentation of the work package and what we are doing. I want to emphasise the unique approach of our work package, because usually, if you look at the newspapers, for example, when you deal with China, the information in Europe is always about what the government is doing, which is a very top-down approach. Of course, this is very important too, and some work packages within the DWARC project deal with politics, international relations, and related issues. What is very specific to our work package, dealing with society and culture, is that we adopt a mostly sociological and anthropological approach, maybe cultural studies can be referred to as well. Ours is a bottom-up approach, so to say.
And we give great importance to expectations, opinions, the expression of opinions, as Jean-Louis mentioned earlier, because society itself is very dynamic and it's not only that the government says something and then the people do what they are told to do.
We are now working on this question of opinion, and especially since we have limited access to doing fieldwork in China, we are exploring how to deal with, how to study, how to research this question of opinion.

CERI: So, Camille, can you tell us about your methodology? How do you work on opinion if you can't go into the field? And generally, how do you approach the work within this work package without being able to easily access China and the field in general?

CS: Yes, actually, there are maybe two levels on which to answer your question.
There is a very practical level regarding fieldwork, which was very difficult, if not impossible, during the COVID crisis, of course. Now the field is opening in China, but it's still not very clear if we can go there and what we can do there. It was already difficult before COVID, but now it is very unclear. Jean-Louis and I have thus started to do interviews with migrants in France, and also in Spain, because we are working together with our colleagues in Madrid on this. We mostly interview recent migrants and students to collect their opinions. You could think that since they are in France and Spain, they are not average Chinese people. And this is true. However, this does not mean their opinions are not useful: on the contrary. They have a certain distance from their country, so they have experience and opinions as insiders but can also, in a sense, see it from the outside. It's very revealing to see how they reflect on their own society through their experience as migrants or students abroad.
As Jean-Louis mentioned, another way to study Chinese society today is through social media networks on the Internet, because people are expressing a lot of things, despite there being censorship—which is a major question. They are very active and for us this is a major new source of data to study China.

JLR: could add that, contrary to what many people think, it’s not so difficult to know what is going on in China. Of course, there are still a lot of secrets about the way the Communist Party is organised and so on. But it’s relatively easy to get information about society. For example, I mentioned the fact that there are a lot of social conflicts in China, and we are well aware of where such social conflicts appear. We have a lot of information about what is going on, what the problem was, and the way the local government tried to negotiate with people. From this point of view, it’s relatively open precisely because social media networks are a very important way of gaining knowledge of what is going on in China.
Even during the pandemic, in fact, we knew a lot of things. For example, we knew that there was a riot in one region because people were not really happy about the way the local government was managing and implementing the health policy. And recently, in November 2022, there were demonstrations in the streets of Shanghai against the zero COVID policy. Immediately, we had information about that. And while we do not know everything, we have information with which we can work. And, thanks to this kind of information, we know more about the opinions of Chinese people.
It's similar concerning the movement of opinion in China. We have a lot of information, not only thanks to social media, but also because there are many Chinese researchers still working and writing about the subject. Contrary to what a lot of people think, researchers are still writing, sometimes criticising government policies, and not because they are heroes who take risks that might land them in jail, but because the government needs this kind of study. It’s vital for the government to know what is going on in Chinese society, because Communist Party leaders know that they don’t know everything, and that they need people to explain what is going on in their own country. For that reason, it’s very interesting to read reviews and articles in Chinese journals about Chinese society. There are a lot of very interesting analyses and a lot of crucial information about the state of society in China.

Wuhan, 2020. Copyright: Keitma for Shutterstock

Then, as Camille said about the fact that studying society is more interesting than studying the Chinese government, studies that we can get as information from China are more useful than always using the same rhetoric and the same analysis concerning China, which limit our understanding of the situation in China to that of a sort of confrontation between a society that would like to be free and democratic and an authoritarian state.
Of course, some people in China would like to change the system and to introduce a democratic society, but many people are also afraid of the consequences of this kind of reform on the stability of Chinese society and economic development. Maybe they are wrong, but in fact a lot of people are really cautious about the introduction of democratisation. Here I'm not speaking about freedom of expression or the fact that we could have freedom to create an association or even trade unions, for example. While a large majority of people are advocating for this kind of change, the big problem for many Chinese people is the idea of elections. The question they ask is whether an electoral system in China could really help the country to solve a certain number of problems and allow China to continue to develop economically and, of course, socially in the long run.Again, we would like to investigate the space between the two kinds of regimes China is supposed to be trapped with, between authoritarian rule and democratic rule.

Camille Salgues: Coming back to the question of opinion, as I said, there are two levels on which to answer the question of how we access public opinion, given restraints on fieldwork.
What Jean-Louis just said about freedom of expression connects with the more theoretical level, and this is something we are also very interested in, which is what exactly constitutes an opinion. There is often the idea that either you are free and you express what you think or you're not free and you don't express what you think. Obviously things are much more complicated than that. So we are working together on this question of the definition of the notion of opinion.

Isabelle Thireau, an anthropologist studying China, undertook research on people who gather in public places to dance, and while doing so, exchange ideas. This kind of exchange is not just about criticising the government; they exchange ideas on many topics. And this, of course, is crucial for understanding what is important for them, what they can say, why they exchange and how they inquire, for example, about the situation according to their neighbours and these kinds of things. So there is this question of what opinion is, and maybe dealing with a society which is different from our Western liberal democracies helps us to understand what opinion is in a wide range of expressions.

We are organising a very interesting seminar on this topic on 6 October here at Sciences Po. We have invited Isabelle Thireau, whom I just mentioned and is a prominent researcher in China Studies in France, and also one of the major figures of sociology in France, Laurent Thévenot, a major theoretician and former student of Pierre Bourdieu. We have invited them to speak about this question, what exactly an opinion is, and how people deal with that, in China and in other countries as well, not only Western or European countries.
We’re excited to continue to explore these questions during the seminar and throughout the DWARC project.

This interview has been recorded: listen to the audio version.

The authors:

Camille Salgues is a research associate at Ceri, Sciences Po. With Jean-Louis Rocca, he is currently working on the “Voices of China's society and culture” project within the China Horizon Project Dealing With A Resurgent China (DWARC). He is particularly interested in the opinions of Chinese migrants in Europe, especially young people and students. Recent publications include Liu W., Salgues C. “Repenser par le bas les échanges universitaires afro-chinois,” Revue internationale des études du développement , 252, 2023; Salgues C., “In the Midst of Rubble, Bordering the Wasteland: Landscapes of Ruins and Childhood Experiences in China,” China Perspectives(4) 2021: 31–40.

Jean-Louis Rocca, Professor at Sciences Po, researcher (CERI, Sciences po-CNRS). Recent publications include Rocca J.L, Blecher M., David SG Goodman, Yingjie Guo and Beibei Tang, Class and the Communist Party of China 1978-2021 , Routledge, 2022; Rocca J.L, “The Malaise of the Chinese Middle Class”, in Middle Class Identities and Social Crisis. Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Global Rebellion , Alejandro Grimson, Menara Guizardi and Silvina Merenson, Routledge, 2022, Chapter 10.

Register for the 6 October event here.