A new form of grassroots activism in East Asia is not only challenging the region’s states, but our very notion of politics, writes JAMES GIGGACHER.

Change is coming to East Asia. A new dawn in the lives of the region’s many peoples is shedding light on a form of activism that has not been seen before.

Far away from the hustle and bustle of Beijing, local farmers and artists in rural China plan to create their own ‘microstate’ based on their own vision of welfare. From the ashes of Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown, Japanese landholders rise up to conduct their own radiation experiments, testing crops and selling what is safe. And in North Korea, one of the most oppressive states in the modern world, housewives find ways to smuggle essential goods across the border and cultivate secret private crops for sale, making essential life-saving supplies available to a desperate population in need. We are often told that the personal is political, but this is different. It’s the politics of survival.

This is how Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki sees the grassroots movements, as well as the many more like them, starting to spontaneously shoot up across the region. They are what the historian based in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific calls “informal life politics”.

“Informal life politics are very local forms of action through which ordinary people work together to protect their wellbeing in the face of rapid environmental, economic and social change,” explains Morris-Suzuki.

“They take the form of action by individuals or local groups which reject state policies, and which sometimes breach the law, in order to protect their own health and livelihood from failures or threats coming from state policy or action.

“And they’re not just happening in places like China and North Korea which have relatively authoritarian governments, but in Japan for example. After the earthquake and the nuclear accident there, in a lot of the local communities that were affected by the disaster people have found that the state is not providing what they need. And in quite similar ways they are starting to take things into their own hands.”

Morris-Suzuki has just won a five-year Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship worth A$2.7 million to examine this emerging phenomenon. She and her research team will specifically look at movements which have arisen as a result of environmental challenges and the removal of state support.

“A lot of these movements are in response to the environmental fallout of major development projects, and there are many examples of that in China, or a challenge like Fukushima with its radiation leaks from the power plant. You get quite similar issues in Taiwan which has a number of nuclear power plants,” say Morris-Suzuki.

“Another example is situations where the state has been providing assistance to groups of people in the past, for example the elderly. But, with economic changes and liberalisation the amount of support the state can provide is being reduced, so people have found it necessary to take that area of survival into their own hands. You certainly get that in China where support for the elderly and people with chronic illnesses is greatly diminished.”

Morris-Suzuki says that it isn’t just changes to peoples’ daily experiences that are giving rise to the region’s grassroots movements.  According to her, they are coming at a time of momentous change in the region.

“The laureate project comes out of a sense that things in the region are really changing – there are really important changes going on. A lot of them are at the high level of politics. For example we’ve got new leadership in China, South Korea, North Korea, and an important election coming up in Japan.

“But more broadly, the region as a whole is moving from a Cold War framework into a new framework which is still undefined; we still don’t know where it is going. Within that framework what seems to be happening is that there are all sorts of interesting ideas and criticisms of politics that are bubbling up from underneath.

“East Asia’s transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold War order is proving much more prolonged and uncertain than the creation of a post-Cold War order in Europe. Its outcome will have profound implications for the peace, stability and prosperity of the entire Asia Pacific region, and of the world as a whole. Therefore understanding what forms of grassroots action are accompanying this transition, and what impact they are likely to have on the region’s emerging political order is absolutely critical.”

And like the ideologies which characterised the silent superpower slugfest that was once the Cold War, our traditional ideas of politics are being challenged, and possibly even superseded, by these new grassroots movements.

“These movements, while a reaction to the state, are not necessarily criticisms of politics that we have thought of in the conventional way or in the European context,” explains Morris-Suzuki. “For example, when the Cold War came to an end in Europe there were a whole range of dissident movements in Eastern Europe that led the change to the post-Cold War order.

“What I suggest, and what I am hoping to explore in the laureate, is that these movements in some ways resemble what people talk about when they talk about civil society; but they don’t quite fit into the conventional framework of civil society. This is because the notion of civil society – which is something that has very much come out of the European experience – tends to assume that movements are relatively consciously political; it tends to assume that they are quite articulate in putting forward their views and that they develop a public sphere in which they promote political debate.

“But, I think that a lot of the grassroots movements that are coming out of East Asia are not necessarily like that. They may be quite un-political in some ways, they may not be interested in promoting widespread political debate, they’re much more hands-on and concerned with local, nitty-gritty material issues.” 

And for Morris-Suzuki it is not just a matter of watching this space, but also a case of watch and learn. She believes that the West, and in particular Australia, can learn a lot from these new political movements.

“So, what I am hoping that we can do in the project is that we can do some re-thinking about what politics is. I think in many areas of academia in Australia and other countries, we’ve come to have a rather static idea of politics as being focused on the state, focused on parliamentary politics, parties and so on. But, if we look at these grassroots movements it makes us think about politics as something that is really part of everyday life; everybody, and I mean everybody, is engaged in politics. And we can re-think how people from the bottom of society, rather than from the top try, to create spaces of autonomy; try to create their own forms of politics in everyday life.

“And I guess that’s one of the reasons why I love looking at grassroots politics, because when you look at high politics, particularly recently for example with the conflict over the islands in the East China Sea between Japan, China and South Korea, it can often be depressing; sometimes political leaders seem to do extraordinarily foolish things. But, when you look at grassroots movements it is surprising how much goodwill there is and how much eagerness to collaborate and eagerness to learn across the borders of the region.”

It’s even better than the personal as political; it’s as politics should be –for the people and by the people.