Xing Ying - Petitions and Power: A Story of the Migrants of a Dam in China (China Perspectives)

Xing Ying is a professor in the School of Sociology, China University of Political Science and Law. His research interests lie in historical sociology, political sociology, social movements, etc.

Petitions and Power

A Story of the Migrants of a Dam in China

Xing Ying

The Living Conditions and Succor Mechanism of the Urban Underclass in China

Zhu Li, Mao Feifei

Contemporary Chinas Social Structure and Hierarchy

Lu Xueyi

Contemporary Chinas Social Construction and Development

Lu Xueyi

The Relationship between Social Capital and Trust in Urban China

Yuchun Zou

The Way to a Great Country

A Macroscopic View on Chinese Population in the 21st Century

Tian Xueyuan

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Xing Ying

First published in English 2018

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2018 Xing Ying

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ISBN: 978-1-138-61328-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-46454-6 (ebk)

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Since the publication of A Story of the Migrants of the Dahe Dam (Chinese edition of this book) through the book series of SDX & Harvard-Yenching Academic Library in 2001, I have finished Morality and Politics of the History of Trails in the Villages in China (Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House, 2009) and Emotions and Contentious Politics in Contemporary Rural China (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2011; English version: A Study of the Stability of Contemporary Rural Chinese Society, Springer, 2013) successively. Starting with a prehistory of the Dahe dams migrants, the former book narrated the political history of a core inhabited village of the Dahe dams migrants from 1951 to 1976. The latter compared the protest movements of the Dahe dams migrants, who became the resettlers in the Three Gorges Dam Project, with the peasants of three other regions, and showed the development of contentious politics in rural China since the 1990s. By reading my trilogy of Chinese rural politics, the readers might comprehend the entangled political relations in rural China during the collective and reform periods.

My favorite is A Story of the Migrants of the Dahe Dam among the three books. On the one hand, an explosive story happened in the Dahe dams migration area. All kinds of characters, intertwining contradictions, and entangling relations gathered on both sides of the Dahe riverbanks. For so many times when I groped through the jungle of files and recalling statements of the people concerned, I had a feeling of thrilling without the knife glittering and sword flashing. On the other hand, I tried to outgrow the traditional practice of editing the empirical materials with the theoretical concept of state-society, but to imbed the theories in a story presentation. Meanwhile, I tried to transcend the moral opposition between the unruly people and corrupt officials and put the opposing parties in the framework of social structure and social mechanisms and to understand their helplessness in such a social structure and their respective cunning and obstinate actions. In the fieldwork, sometimes I felt blood-burning indignation and sometimes blood-freezing disappointment. However, in my book I suppressed these strong emotions with calm statements in the spirit of Max Webers academic asceticism. Just like Baruch de Spinoza said, I took great pains not to laugh at human actions, or mourn them, or curse them, but only to understand them (Curley, 2016: 505).

For the publication of this English version, I have done a thorough revision according to the requirements of English readers. While keeping the major contents of the story, I have rearranged the book title, chapters, and headings, added an elaborate introduction, and reedited the narration and notes. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Daiqing, Li Heming, and Kelly Haggart, who organized the online translation of the Chinese edition on