A Research On China’s Social Protest From A Local-State Perspective

Transitional China has surprised the world with spectacular economic success, which did change the life of Chinese people and seems to have changed the stereotype on the relationship between liberty, democracy and economic development as well. However, this "win-win" success is not reached without any cost. Certain groups such as laid-off SOE employees, landless peasants and migrant workers are deprived their jobs, home and legal rights even though economic success has been a huge benefit to Chinese people as a whole. When the fledging legal system could not offer the protection they need, those "deprived" people are left no choice but letting out their grievance and discontent in public in order to get noticed, and these social protests are what this research aims to study.This dissertation begins with a brief review on theories and paradigm shift of social movement. From Durkheim to Robert Snow, researchers have been offering their intelligence by studying collective behavior from various perspectives. This research puts "state" at the center of the following study because structural perspective still dominates contentious theory and that China’s party-state plays an indispensible part in political, economical and social arena. Instead of analyze "state" as a whole, this research pays extra attention to the active behavior and unique hierarchical location of local government, and discovers that even if economic decentralization has extended their autonomy considerably, local governments are "held together" by the nomenklatura system of CCP. Besides, the party-state takes a rather practical strategy with potential autonomy forces, including both the "winner" and the "sufferer" of economic reform, both of whom are cooperated into existing system.Since the state plays as both an active agent and a set of institutional structure, it offers political opportunities to contentious people and shapes their behavior through the interaction between state and society during social protest at the same time. Based on various theoretical analytic and emperial observations, the author suggetsts that social protests in China displays a kind of "decentrarlized" structural character, a kind of "responsive" rather than "aggressive" feature of behavior patterns, and a mixture of "right consciousness" and "rule consciouness" of repertoire, and its framing and narrative process is weaved with values, emotions, ideas and strategies, which has to do with their collective memories, shared experiences and ideological hegemony of the party-state. A sketchy landscape of contemporary China’s social protest is that contentious activities are highly decentralized, weakly organized, economic interest, instead of political or social appeals based behaviors, and the state plays a significant part in shaping this behavior by providing political opportunities that distinctively set apart encouragable and unencouragable protest behaviors and even by shaping protestors or possible protesters’values, congitions and interpretations that mirrors themselves in the framing process of "the outside world".As in local-state level, a kind of "adaptive policy style" has been adopted by local government. For example, the informal deployment of formal institutions, and the utarian switch between populism and professionalism policy instruments in local experience, as well as a mixture of bribing-punishing strategy applied when dealing with petitioners. All of them reflects a separation between policy objection and policy instruments, and a distinctive "result-oriented" rationality of local government or its agencies.