The Ecological Politics of Peasants' Resistance and Workers' Strike——Based on Analysis of Elizabeth Perry's Two Representative Books

From the perspective of ecology and using the method of case study, Elizabeth Perry deeply analyzed the peasants' resistance movement in north China from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century and the workers' strikes in Shanghai from the 1920s to the 1940s. In her eyes, the violence tradition of the peasants in north China was essentially a kind of survival strategy responding to the abominable ecological environment they faced. The workers in shanghai differed from each other in their origins, gender, education, mastery of skills, and adaptability to urban life, and these differences would affect their ways of protest and their political orientations. This is the so-called ecological politics of peasants' resistance and workers' strike. From the methodology point of view, her findings should be better regarded as being approximate to the interpretation tradition, which focuses on the presentation of real things, rather than the explanation tradition, which is intended to disclose the causal relationship among things. Through the recent years, scholars have attempted to establish an integrated analytical framework for political behavior, advocated the combination of macro structural analysis with micro action analysis, and emphasized the role of state-society relationship in explaining human being's sociopolitical behavior. Besides, the revival of cultural and psychological analysis in the field of politics since the 1980s also implies another feasible approach to establish such a framework.