| Why has social protest risen dramatically and become routinized in China since the 1990s? Why does an authoritarian regime authorize or even facilitate social protest? This dissertation seeks to describe and explain the changing patterns of state-society interactions in Reform Era China. Based on extensive fieldwork in Hunan Province, this dissertation has conducted a comparative historical study on both petitioning activities and the Party-state's strategies and institutions for coping with them.; Specifically, three factors are identified as shaping the emergence of a bargaining relationship between the Party-state and ordinary people. First, the Party-state's special ideological and institutional legacies, which emphasize using citizen complaints and appeals to enhance political responsiveness and accountability, has strongly constrained its response strategies, and therefore contributed to the authorization and facilitation of many popular collective actions. Second, state-society interactions in the Reform Era have largely shifted from the work-unit type, which features a high level of dependency on authority and intensive transactions between ordinary people and state agents in closed settings, to the government-subject type, in which ordinary people directly make claims on the government about a few specific issues. Finally, also as consequences of the Economic Reforms, bureaucratic differentiation within the Party-state apparatus has increased both horizontally and vertically, and therefore created new patterns of coalitions regarding political contention.; Besides identifying these structural factors, this study emphasizes the role of strategic interactions between the Party-state and petitioners. It argues that both of them have adapted their behavior patterns to each other. The state has developed a new repertoire of strategies: preventive repression, expedient concessions, practical persuasion, and procrastination. Similarly, Chinese petitioners have begun to employ a set of "troublemaking tactics" in an "opportunistic" manner.; This study thus illustrates how a regime's deliberate expansion of political space for participation can help resist a dramatic transition to liberal democracy. It applies historical institutional analysis to the study of contentious politics, and also introduces a fresh perspective on the relationship between state transformation, legitimation, and social mobilization. |
