I have fallen a bit behind in posting.  Yesterday, the combination of my class schedule (I had one regular class and then two tutorial sessions back to back to back) and some family issues (my aunt is back in the nursing home for some physical therapy) kept me from the blog.  And then I skipped town.  I just finished watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from the window of my hotel room in sunny and warm LA.

    I am here to give a talk – actually I will give the same talk twice – on political change in China to a group, a fairly large group, of alumni from Williams College.  There are several other faculty members here with me to give other talks.  It will be quite a circus of academic performance!  It all lasts one day, tomorrow, but should be pleasantly intense. 

     Here are some of the thoughts I will toss out tomorrow. 

     China has obviously changed a great deal in the past 25 years.  But Chinese politics still remains repressive and authoritarian.  There is little prospect for something like democratization any time soon (I am not expecting it, at least), but that does not mean that politics is not changing, and perhaps in important ways.

     I will suggest three categories to analyze political change in China:

     1) Institutions – this has changed the least.  The CCP is still very much in power; it dominates recruitment and promotion of virtually all significant political actors.  It does not tolerate political organization, even on a the most modest levels of civil society.  And it is resistant to change.  Indeed, as Minxin Pei argues (I assigned this article of his for my "classes" tomorrow), partial economic reform has created a neo-Leninist amalgam of party-state apparatus and economic entities (State owned enterprises, etc.) that is even more resistant to change, because party members use their positions to reap wealth from the country’s economic growth, than might have been the case in, say, 1980.   

    2) Consciousness/Identity – I draw this idea from Merle Goldman’s book, From Comrade to Citizen (I gave tomorrow’s "students" a chapter from this as well) where she discusses the rise of "rights consciousness" in recent years.  She is not pollyannish; she recognizes the institutional obstacles that prevent the realization of political and civil rights. But she documents the ways in which more and more people are claiming their rights, and this is a significant change.  People conceive of themselves politically as individuals who have a certain standing and capacity.

    3) Practice/Behavior – by this I mean what people do, in their daily routines and in their political actions.  In recent years there has been an increase in protest behavior, people acting upon their new found rights consciousness.  There is also a great deal of popular cultural behavior that expresses individuality. 

      So, the question for tomorrow, and maybe for any of you who want to chime in here, is: can the institutional stasis continue to limit the growth of rights consciousness and the increase in individualizing political and cultural behavior that presses against regime restrictions?

     There will be a quiz…