"Strangers Assaulting the Gate": Exploring Environmental Protests in Contemporary China

Abstract

This research investigates the paradoxical phenomenon of the large-scale environmental protests taking place within China’s restrictive sociopolitical context. It addresses two research questions: First, why and how did these large-scale environmental protests take place in the authoritarian context of China? Second, why and how did the episodes of environmental contention take divergent trajectories towards different outcomes? The Western literature on social movements has mostly built on the presumption of a pluralist model of state and society and conceives protesters as “strangers at the gate” playing over a permeable boundary of institutional politics. Research on political contention in China has imported and adapted theoretical insights and conceptual tools from the Western social movements to the Chinese context. However, there has been an insufficient discussion on the distinct nature and operating logic of contention in authoritarian settings and their connection to the broad structural context of the state and society in non-democratic contexts. This research contributes to filling in the gap by bringing back the analysis of the state-society relations to the studies of political contention and proposes the mass society theory as a starting point from which to understand popular protests in China. The thesis addresses the two research questions inductively through the grounded theory approach. It embraces a dynamic approach to contention and then combines the mechanism-based explanation with macrosociology. Three recent anti-PX protests in Maoming (2014), Chengdu (2013) and Kunming (2013) were selected as cases for empirical study. The research exploits qualitative methods drawing data from both first and secondary sources including interviews, participatory observation and documentary analysis.

The thesis identifies and compares a set of dynamics and mechanisms that drove each episode of contention along divergent trajectories towards different outcomes. In doing so, it presents a case-specific and mechanism-based explanation for the research questions. In the case of Maoming, the research highlights the intense grievances of the local citizens, the brutal government response to the protest actions and the highly riotous nature of the contention. It identifies a series of mechanisms of riots that dominated the episode of the contention leading to injuries and deaths. In the case of Chengdu, the research reveals the prominence of the local opinion leaders in shaping the local contention and the local government’s pre-emptive and well-deployed repression. It finds out that the government managed to stifle the unrest in Chengdu before the protests were taken to the streets through a diverse “toolkit” consisting of both soft and hard forms of repression. The case in Kunming is found to feature the deep involvement of the environmental NGOs that had not only empowered the citizen-protesters but also drove the contention towards an institutional outcome. The comparative analysis of the three cases demonstrates their shared pattern of the Internet gestation and similar dynamics in the protest actions while locating the differences at the initial conditions, combinations and sequences where the mechanisms operate.

The thesis points out the distinct nature and operating logic of contention in China’s authoritarian settings. It disproves the depiction of “strangers at the gate” in social movement theories that entails a neo-pluralist presumption of state and society. Instead, it argues that the protesters in the authoritarian context appear to be more like “strangers assaulting the gate”, those who are shut outside the gate of institutionalized politics and struggle to influence the government decisions by “making chaos” that threaten social stability. Therefore, it advocates re-conceptualizing political opportunity as a theoretical tool within the Chinese context with a focus on the repressive capacity of the state as well as the interest divisions within the state. The research also attempts to link the mechanisms and processes of the contention to the structural configuration of the state-society relations. With insights from the mass society theory, it proposes to understand the varying trajectories of environmental contention with reference to the unevenly rising pluralism in mass societies.

Date of Award	30 Jan 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Ngai Ming YIP (Supervisor) & Thomas Richard JOHNSON (Supervisor)