Study On The Contentious Mobilization In Contemporary China

Ding Xueliang, a famous scholar of the book “Debating the Chinese Model”,wrote:"Over the past twenty years, the evolution and development of all the’maintenance of stability’ in China, based on a basic judgment: an attempt tooverthrow this regime, individuals and organizations too diverse, too complex, toostubborn, too subtle, too have the resources, too capable, too times, too should not beunderestimated. Therefore, the ’maintenance of stability’ institutions must at all timesready to fight back, it is best to pre-emptive strike." Is this judgment true? Is thegovernment’s response effective? We need assessment and analyze the mobilizationcapacity of protestors. The purpose of my study is to analyze the mobilization ofpubic protests.In the contentious politics theory, we research the mobilization ability mainlythrough the analysis of "mobilizing structures". By mobilizing structures we meanthose collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilizeand engage in collective action."Mobilization" is a process to create a mobilizationstructure, as well as the preparation and execution of the protest action, the visiblemovement of the outcome of the process to convey to the performers of the movementand the public. Mobilization needs resources, such as manpower, money, knowledge,framing, techniques, and timely information about the movement progressinformation in order to influence others.I mainly use the contentious politics theory to study mobilize protests, as well asanalyze the existing field research cases in some academic literatures. I divide thepresent type of public protests into "value-orientation" and "non-value-orientation”.The standard is if the protestors are the stakeholders. If they are the same people, it isa non-value-oriented collective action, if not; it’s a value-oriented collective action. Inorder to further express the connotation of the “non-value-orientation”, I use theconcept "interest-orientation" to replace it. Specifically, if a target of protests is tofight for their own interests (material interests), such as requiring more landcompensation, or asking not to build garbage dump near their residence, or requiretheir livelihood safeguard, this protest is the "interest-orientation". If a protest’s targetis to fight for social justice, ask the Government’s fair treatment, or some of theuniversal values such as freedom, human right, democracy, this protest action is the "value orientation". But in some cases, there are both interest-oriented andvalue-oriented participants; therefore, I further classify protests into four kinds, that is,pure interest-oriented protest, pure value-oriented protest, interest-oriented protestinvolved the valued-oriented participants, and value-oriented protest involved theinterest-oriented participants.I select some typical cases and analyze mainly in the perspectives of themobilizing structures, the mobilized subject, mobilization strategies, mobilizationmechanisms. The main conclusions are:First, mobilizing structures of interest-oriented protest is a "circle", close andnarrow; at the same time, mobilizing structure of the value-oriented protest is a"mesh", evacuation and broad;Second, both the interest-oriented and value-oriented protests’ mobilized subjecthave the character of secret to some extent, and both launched mainly by activists tomobilize, but the value-oriented protests reflect more obvious.Third, on the mobilization strategies, interest-oriented protests aim at solving theproblem; and value-oriented protests aim at mobilize more people to participate intothe movement. Protest of the interest-oriented of interest have an advantage to acquirehuman resources, while value-oriented has more advantages in access to mediaresources. Whether human resources, or media resources, facilitate access to eachother resources when a large enough number of.Last, on mobilization mechanism, interest-oriented public protests have moreattention to focus on the rational mechanism; while the value-oriented public protestshave more attention to focus on the emotional mechanism.