Environmental Protests And State-Society Interactions During China’s Transition

Since the economic reform initiated at the beginning of the 1980s, China’s economy has experienced an astonishing transformation. While such rapid growth has led to serious environment pollution. However, such a serious consequence may not necessarily lead to the occurrence of large-scale protests., public concerns over potential pollution sometimes result in intense protests. This research will answer why at times of pollution the public choose to protest or not. In introducing an analytical framework of state-society relations and localization analysis for interaction, this study investigates strategies, processes, mechanisms and logics in environmental protests among various actors:local governments, enterprises, mass media and non-governmental environmental protection organizations in order to find a more comprehensive, systematic and, processual explanation. This study analyses in a comparative angle how various elements of state power and social forces interact in environmental protests, to understand in what ways state-society relations are reconfigured. China is characterized with a "strong state weak society" model, but because such elements evolve in varying degrees in different places and these places experience various stages of economic development, state and society interact in multiple dimensions and manners at a local level. As a result, environmental protests take place in multiple forms. Therefore, this study will show how the transformations in the economic field and institutional structure are informed by the diversity in state-society interactions, which is embedded in the imbalance in regional economic development and local culture and previous social actions.