Process, Actors And Crisis Management

To construct a harmonious society is the most formidable task for contemporary China. The process of constructing harmonious society requires scientifically analyzing reasons for social paradoxes and problems which affect social harmony, and more actively and initiatively faces up with and eliminates these problems. Among all of these social problems, the increasingly numerous mass incidents since 1990s have been urgent challenges affecting social stability in China. Constructing harmonious society relies on how to deal with mass incidents, especially violent mass incidents which undermine social stability. Theoretically speaking, constructing a model to explain the evolving process from small issues to violence and the working mechanism of multiple factors is helpful to analyze social crisis under the social transformation of China. Practically speaking, framing evolving process and working mechanism of violent mass incidents can be consultative for Chinese government how to effectively handle with social conflicts in practice.Generally, mass incidents can be defined to be a mean of expressing and defending interests of conflicting social group members in transforming period of China. Structural imbalance of public policy and illegal governmental enforcement generate collective action in mass incidents. Organization-action reinforcing process specifies the evolving process of mass incidents from small issues to violent conflicts. Fuse issue touches off organization controlling imbalance which provokes violent attacks on antagonists. Three stages can be categorized of organization-action reinforcement: firstly, disperse individuals assemble into groups with common feelings and come into well-organized groups finally; secondly, individual actions combine into collective actions and forms confrontation between conflictual groups. The evolving process from small issues to violent conflicts results from organization-action reinforcement structure by multiple factors. Working factors of organizing in evolving process include public policy structure, space-aggregation of inhabitants, group identifications, social network and group selective excitation. The action in evolving process from disperse individual to collective action depends on institutional space, individual rationality, experience of collective action, goal transformation and government capability. One party's choice confines the other party's choice, which stimulates each other and leads to confrontation at last. This dissertation frames this process to be "Accelerating Model". The Accelerating Model manifests three key points during the evolving process of violent mass incidents: firstly, individual members aggregate into well-organized group, which enhances collective action capability of group members; secondly, success or failure in collective action generate group goal transformation, especially from material goals to value goals which more easily stimulate violent confrontation by minimizing the choice space of the other party; thirdly, organizational imbalance—sudden removing organizational leaders undermines the capability of controlling members which stimulates violence under fuse issue such as cracking, rumors and accidents. Based on the Accelerating Model, this dissertation draws up four key working mechanisms as follows: feeling excitement mechanism, space-network mechanism, institutions-legitimacy mechanism and goal transformation mechanism.The Accelerating Model insets into State-Society relationship, choice structure and regional knowledge which restricts the action logic of different actors. Commonly, the relationship between peasants and the State reflects the basic imbalance structure of "Strong State-Weak Society" in contemporary rural China, which polarizes the society into somewhat potentially-conflicting structure in which peasants and the State could involve into "face-to-face" confrontation because of the lack of cushioning region. Seeking for legitimacy encourages the State and the Party to handle with social crisis issues over-vigilantly and reactively. The Central government tries to reconstruct her legitimacy by calling for economic gross and grass-root democracy while local governments reacts rationally under the Pressurized-System as response to the superior governments and the society. The history, regulations and rules, power structure of the Party form crisis management process in which political consideration exceeds specifications and effectiveness. Without the potential space for negotiation and concession, any stimulus issue could lead to bigger conflict. Under the Path-dependence Effect of traditional practice and ideology, the crisis management process works as one stimulus factor to fuel more violent conflicts between governments and social groups. The power-interest network structure divides elites and ordinary people in rural China which generates organizational confrontation since reforming time. The effect of collective actions depends on how these groups turn to and apply the traditional resources such as family ties, bloodship and local identification as well as modern resources of the media, institutions and political opportunity. They behave rationally and randomly to achieve their strategy and goals.Constructing harmonious society calls for timely and effective response to the challenge of social crisis which undermines social stability. However, Chinese governmental crisis management is confined to the complexity of political process and structure inserted into the State-Society relationship, the Central-Local relationship and the Party-State relationship in contemporary China. Instead of specific requirements, political correctness becomes the basic criteria to enforce management, which turns the management process to be more personal and uninstitutionalized. For contemporary Chinese government, crisis management requires "New Thinking". The goal of managing crisis is to control and eliminate destruction, not to deteriorate it. Formal operation procedures and criteria in crisis management need to be institutionalized and generalized throughout all level governments. The effectiveness of crisis management depends on systematic institutions such as democratic decision-making process, power-balanced political structure, supervision system from the media and society, multi-resourced communications. Social crisis management has to go beyond the traditional Zero-sum Game conflict structure and turn to accept the idea of negotiation and compromise, which means to institutionalize the social conflicts into peaceful and legal process. The effectivity of social crisis management of the State depends on the capability of institutionalizing social conflicts. In a word, constructing harmonious society means a long march.