Pen Shaft and Knife Handle: Bureaucratic Co-operation on Human Rights Policies in the Chinese Party-state
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Yu, Cheng-Ya
Abstract
The delicate and sensitive nature of human rights issue sets its roots historically and politically, thus a more systematic approach must be applied in order to support the common-seen case-by-case inspections on human rights in China. This paper is innovated both in its approach and its methodology. For the new approach, this paper rather not to deploy International Regime theories on Chinese human rights issues, but to examine and provide explanations with the Fragmented Authoritarianism model (hereafter referred to as “FA”) --a theory in the realm of Comparative politics. Through the lens of FA, this paper is able to scrutinize the making of human rights policies at the bureaucracy level. This paper argues that: the Chinese central government does take up an inordinate amount of power when making human rights-related policies; however, when there comes a chance as a rather neutral stand posed by the power center, there comes a room for deploying bureaucracy politics. In order to validate this paper’s assertion, we will examine the co-operation relationships between the propaganda (宣傳) and political-legal (政法) systems on two issues: the freedom of press and the Internet, and the Letters and Visits system (信訪). In order to best utilize limited Chinese official resources for verifiable results, this paper applies a new methodology called Digital Humanities to study key words from three representative newspapers from year 2000 to 2008: People’s Daily (人民日報), Legal Daily (法制日報), and Guangming Daily (光明日報). Each newspapers defends viewpoints from the central government, the political-legal system, and the propaganda system. Results show that when the center government takes strong position on certain issue, such as the freedom of press and the Internet, there comes no room for bureaucracy politics; however, when the center government decides to take a weaker stand, such as the issue of Letters and Visits system, there is indeed a room for co-operation between departments at the bureaucracy level.
Subjects
China
Human rights
Fragmented Authoritarianism
Propaganda
Political–Legal
Freedom of press and the Internet
Letters and Visits system
Digital Humanities
Type
thesis
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