China’s Environmental Contentions:Generic Analysis And Outcomes Interpretation

With the emerging of global environmental crisis, starting from a social problem, environmental issues have been gradually evolved into " multiple complex problems" concerning the politics, economics, culture, society and other aspects, and it has even touched upon the problem of human’s survival and development. In recent years, social protest events caused by environmental pollution and ecological destruction in our country have taken place more and more frequently, which becomes important issues of the social protest. From the two aspects of the generic analysis and the effect value, this paper analyzes the historical evolution of environmental protests in our country, which aims to show a microcosm of the China’s economic and social structure changes.First of all, this study elaborates the macroscopic structural background of our country environmental events. Based on it, this paper shows four stages of the environmental protests in China:the silence of the mass(1949-1972), the rudiments of environmental struggle consciousness (1972-1992), the rise of environmental protests (1992-2003), the thriving of the environmental contentions (2003-).The historical evolution of the environmental protests demonstrate the changes of the political opportunity structure make it possible that the environmental protests rise and develop, at the same time, the worsening ecological environment and increasing consciousness of environmental protection drive the development of the environmental protests. This paper shows that environmental protests with its highly-organized quality obviously has the social movement forms, although they are still in the pre-social movement.What’s more, this paper analyses the development and the basic characteristics of China’s environmental protests from the perspective of generic analysis and the quantitative data analysis. First, it pictures all the aspects of the China’s environmental protests, including protests issues, development models, action modes, the relationship between the conflicting parties, protest modes, protest subjects, protest subjects, the spatial distribution of the protest, mobilization mechanism, the appeals of the protest, the degree organization, the degree of violence and other aspects. Second, considering how the appeals of the protest draws the government’s attention, it dissects four performance models of environmental protests-the policy absorption,the administrative comprise, the interests of mediation,and out-the-government state. Third, with the SPSS statistical software, it analyzes the relationship among the protests consequences and the degree of the violence, the scale of the protests, the degree of the organization, elite or the social intervention.Last but not least, this paper explains the factors of different environmental contentions by Logistic Analysis and Ordinal Regression Analysis with the SPSS statistical software. Through the study of the country’s 120 protest events, it concludes that the higher the organization degree is, the larger the scale of the protests is, the lower the extent of violence is, the less elite or social organization intervention is, and the more beneficial to the appeals of the protests processing into the government, which affects the relevant government decisions and improves the environmental contentions efficiency.