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The rising level of automation has increasingly attracted scholars' attention. On the other hand, there are many studies of the consequences of social movements, but relatively fewer studies focus on their economic consequences, and even fewer studies have examined their consequences on automation. This article bridges the gap between the two literatures by hypothesizing that a rising number of labor protests will lead to a higher level of automation. We argue that political economy factors influence the adoption of more automation. Protests anticipate higher wages and labor costs; contest for social power with employers and the state, and, in extreme cases, pose a public relations challenge to employers, which will likely push employers to replace human workers with robots. We empirically test the relationship by using two protest event datasets in China, the China Labor Bulletin and Collective Action from Social Media and robot data from the International Federation of Robotics. Statistical analysis shows that provinces and industries that have more protests also tend to concentrate more robots, and the results are robust to most specifications and placebo tests. The findings have implications for both understanding the mechanism explaining rising automation and the consequences of social protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following essay, I offer and explain the concept of wild public networks as a tool for social movement scholars interested in taking a network approach to contemporary protests via poststructuralism. Wild public networks offer scholars a means of approaching social movements that moves past binaries to productively incorporate affect. In so doing, the concept of wild public networks advances an ontological shift for social movement scholars that also alters what we examine and how. Wild public networks consider how the movement of the social can be witnessed in changes to relationships between actants and the configurations of networks. To explicate this new concept, I turn to contemporary environmental protests in Maoming, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late on June 3, 1989, and into the next day Chinese soldiers brought to an abrupt end the 7-week standoff between the Chinese state and students and citizens of Beijing. It has been common to see balance of power considerations as bringing China and the United States together in 1972 to balance against the Soviet Union, and it has been equally common to see the end of what Kissinger called the Sino-American 'tacit alliance' (1972-1989) to be, naturally, the end of the Cold War and/or the breakup of the Soviet Union. Borrowing from Hopf's societal constructivism (2012) and Wendt's 'cultures of anarchy' (1999) here applied at the second level of analysis, the following study concludes that June 4 was actually key to the end of the Sino-American 'tacit alliance,' leading to a major shift in mutual perceptions, which caused a shift in the Sino-American dyadic culture, from that of trusted friends to that of distrusted adversaries for a season, effectively ending the 'tacit alliance' between the US and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a 1995 national survey of 2,870 Chinese private entrepreneurs, this article examines collaboration between private business and government in times of economic transition. Much as in the late 18th century situation in France as described by Tocqueville, special moments occur when a newly emerging business class offers monetary payments for charity and for honorary offices. In exchange, the government, desperate for new sources of revenue, provides social recognition and political access. The data suggest that into at least the 19905 Chinese private entrepreneurs donated generously to government welfare projects, and in exchange gained political access and social status via appointment to political councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop a quadripartite classification of social movement participants based on the participants' levels of interest in a movement goal and the amount of resources that the participants contribute to the movement. We use the latent class model to determine the percentage of participants in each of the four categories in our classification system for the case of the 1999 anti-U.S. student demonstrations in Beijing in the aftermath of the Belgrade Embassy bombing. Finally, we apply the multinomial logit regression to investigate the mechanisms behind the mobilization of different types of participants during the anti-U.S. demonstrations. Our analysis and empirical findings not only show the importance of studying movement mobilization based on a classification of movement participants, but also reveal much about the nature of the 1999 anti-U.S. demonstrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a secondary analysis of a survey involving more than 2,500 urban working residents in China, this study tests several individual-level causes of protest behavior suggested by the research on protest in the West. The timing of the survey, just three months before the 1989 massive upheaval in China, makes the study especially valuable. Results from path analysis show that age, education, and Communist Party membership have both direct and indirect impacts on protest, in an expected way. Income has only an indirect effect, whereas the impact of gender is not significant because the direct and indirect effects counter each other. Occupation does not make a difference. In addition, discontent with economic reforms, distrust in the government, aspirations for Western democracy, and disillusionment with Communist ideology all significantly enhance protest behavior. Postmaterialist values, which contribute positively to political protest in the West, play a suppressor role in China's contest, which offers interesting implications for comparative research on public opinion and political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]