Contentious politics and political stability in contemporary China: an institutionalist explanation

The Communist regime in China survived the collapse of the Soviet Communist Bloc in the early 1990s. Since then, China has sustained rapid economic growth with an annual growth rate of 8%. However, in recent years, we have witnessed increasing social protests in Chinese cities and rural areas. The increasing contentious politics and a stable authoritarian regime puzzles theorists on authoritarian regime and political transition. This dissertation seeks to answer the question, why or how China's authoritarian regime has remained politically stable with increasing social protest. It adopts an institutionalist approach to explore the interaction between contentious politics and political institutional arrangements. It argues that the multilevel reasonability structure is the key to understanding political stability in China. This structure not only can absorb exogenous shock, but also can prevent endogenous subversion and can avoid power disequilibrium.

CONTENTIOUS POLITICS AND POLITICAL STABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA: AN INSTITUTIONALIST EXPLANATION by Shaohua Lei A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science The University of Utah August 2013 Copyright © Shaohua Lei 2013 All Rights Reserved The Univers i ty of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Shaohua Lei has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Yanqi Tong , Chair April 16, 2013 Date Approved M. Hakan Yavuz , Member April 16, 2013 Date Approved Richard T. Green , Member April 16, 2013 Date Approved Steven Lobell , Member April 16, 2013 Date Approved Stephen E. Reynolds , Member April 16, 2013 Date Approved and by James J. Gosling , Chair of the Department of Political Science and by Donna M. White, Interim Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT The Communist regime in China survived the collapse of the Soviet Communist Bloc in the early 1990s. Since then, China has sustained rapid economic growth with an annual growth rate of 8%. However, in recent years, we have witnessed increasing social protests in Chinese cities and rural areas. The increasing contentious politics and a stable authoritarian regime puzzles theorists on authoritarian regime and political transition. This dissertation seeks to answer the question, why or how China's authoritarian regime has remained politically stable with increasing social protest. It adopts an institutionalist approach to explore the interaction between contentious politics and political institutional arrangements. It argues that the multilevel reasonability structure is the key to understanding political stability in China. This structure not only can absorb exogenous shock, but also can prevent endogenous subversion and can avoid power disequilibrium. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..iii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………...vi LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………....vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………….viii Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION….……………………………………………………….....…......1 The Puzzle……………………….……………………………………………….......2 The Research Questions and Definitions of Key Variables……………………….....4 Main Arguments………………………………………………………….………....11 Organization of the Dissertation……………………………………...……………..15 2 LITERATURE REVIEW……….………………………………………………..…17 China's Political Structure and the Stability of an Authoritarian Regime…............18 Contentious Politics in Contemporary China…………………………………..…..33 China's Authoritarian Regime and Contentious Politics…………….......................39 Conclusion………………………………………….................................................49 3 POLITICAL STABILITY…………………………………………………………..51 The Conceptual Framework of The Multilevel Responsibility Structure……..……52 Causal Argument and Hypotheses………………………………………...………...70 Data, Method, and Research Design…...………………………………………........71 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..........73 4 THE EVOLUTION OF THE MULTILEVEL RESPONSIBILITY STRUCTURE………………………………………………………………………75 The Legacies of Power Structure and the State-Society Relations in China………..76 The State-Society Relations and Contentious Politics after Mao…………...……....88 v The Evolution of the Multilevel Responsibility Structure…………………………..91 Conclusion……………..……………………………………………………….…..100 5 POLITICAL RESILIENCE………………...…………………….…….…….….…102 The Strategies of Blaming-avoidance……………………………………………….102 Contentious Politics and Political Resilience………………………………….…….111 Changing Government Responses………...……………………..…………...……...121 Conclusion…...………………………………………………………………...….....124 6 POLITICAL ADAPTABILITY………..……………………………………..…….129 Political Adaptability and Policy Adjustment……………………………....…..…130 "Throwing Good Money after Bad" and Policy Adjustment…………….……......135 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………......…..152 7 FIRE ALARM MONITOR…………………….……………..……………….……156 The Problem of Oversight in Traditional China's Authoritarian Regime…….…....157 The Legacies of Society's Check and Balance…………………………….…..…..162 Fire Alarm Monitoring………………………………………………………..…....167 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..……...182 8 POLITICAL EQUILIBRIUM....................................................................................186 Administrative Compliance and Guerrilla Government…………………………..187 Guerilla Governance, Contentious Politics, and Audience Costs …………....…...196 Conclusion....………………… ……………...........................................................211 9 CONCLUSION…….……………………………………………………………….214 BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF FIGURES 3.1 Blame Avoidance Structure……………………...…………………………..…….74 5.1 Frequencies of Large-scale Social Protest by Year (2003-2010)……...….……...126 5.2 Frequencies of Large-scale Social Protests by Type (2003-2010)……….………127 5.3 Distributions of Types of Social Protest Tolerated by the Government…..……...127 5.4 Distributions of the Types of Social Protests Suppressed by the Government…………………………………………………………...………128 5.5 Distribution of the Types of Social Protests Ended with Disciplinary Measures Against Officials……………………………………………………………...128 6.1 Distribution of the Types of Social Protests where the Government Makes Concessions…………………………………………………………………..155 8.1 Frequencies of Large-Scale Social Protests by Type (2003-2010)……………….213 8.2 Chicken Games………………………………………………...………………....213 8.3 Asymmetric Bargains………………………………………………………..........213 LIST OF TABLES 5.1 Government Responses to Large-scale Social Protests……….…………………..126 5.2 Government Responses to Social Protest……...…………………………….........126 6.1 Government Responses to Large-scale Social Protests…………,……….….........155 7.1 Disturbances in Dazhu Weng'an, Dongfang, and Shishou. Differences in GDP Per Capita…………………...………………………………………………...185 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the guidance of my committee members, help from friends, and support from my family and wife. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor, Professor Yanqi Tong, for her excellent advising, guidance, and caring. I would like to thank Professor Hakan Yavuz, Professor Steven Lobell, Professor Stephen Reynolds, and Professor Ben Judkins, for their patience in the face of numerous obstacles and their great help for seven years. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Rick Green. A big thank you also goes to Ms. Mary Ann Underwood for her excellent job. Special thanks go to Xu Bing, Pan Wei, Shang Ying, Zhang Xiaojin, Jing Yuejin, and other scholars, friends, and institutions during my fieldwork trips. I am deeply grateful to my brothers, Lei Guanfeng and Lei Baohua, for taking care of my parents while I study in the United States. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Lu Chenyuan, for taking care of my son, Lei Jingyou, and for standing beside me throughout writing this dissertation and my completion of my Ph.D. degree. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The communist regime in China survived the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in the early 1990s. Since then, as the largest authoritarian polity in the world, China's fate and future has drawn both academic and news media's enthusiastic attention. China has sustained rapid economic growth with an annual growth rate of 8 percent for over 20 years and became the number one U.S. bondholder. In recent years, we have witnessed increasing social protests in Chinese cities and rural areas. According to various sources and calculations, the collective protest incidents had increased from 8,700 in 1994, to 90,000 in 2006, and to an unconfirmed number of 127,000 in 2008.1 This number would have fluctuated between 150,000 and 200,000 since 2009.2 The types of contentious politics range from tax riots to land and labor disputes, and from environmental protests to ethnic clashes. The modes vary from striking, demonstrating, collective petitioning, blocking public transportation, attacking state 1 The figure for 2008 was an "estimate" reported by Andrew Jacobs, "Dragons, Dancing Ones, Set-off a Riot in China," New York Times (February 10, 2009). In another news report, an estimate of 90,000 such incidents annually for 2007, 2008, and 2009 was quoted from a Chinese insider by John Garnaut, "China Insider Sees Revolution Brewing," Sidney Morning Herald (March 2, 2010). 2 This is an unofficial estimation by a staff member from the Ministry of Public Security. Personal interview. 2 agencies, and burning of government buildings. The frictions between the ruler and the ruled have generated speculations about political instabilities in China. The Puzzle According to The Political Instability Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit (a research institution affiliated to The Economist), 3 China ranks number 124 of a total of 165 countries and political entities in 2007. It shows that, among 165 countries, there are 123 countries that are more vulnerable than China in 2007. China ranks in the top 50 stable countries. China's ranking and political instability score is lower than those of the United States and France (at number 110, the U.S and France are in the same ranking). It means that China is more stable than the U.S. and France. In the Political Stability Assessment Index,4 China's score is 8. The U.S. is 9.5.5 China ranks in the top stable countries. "Trust in Institution" is one of the indicators for this Political Instability Index. One of the sources of this indictor is from the World Value Survey. Supporters and trust rate associates with political stability, although they are in different dimensions. For an authoritarian polity, the central government's supporting rate is more sensitive than a 3 The Political Instability Index shows the level of threat posed to governments by social protest. The index scores are derived by combining measures of economic distress and underlying vulnerability to unrest. The index covers the period 2009/10, and scores are compared with results for 2007. The overall index on a scale of 0 (no vulnerability) to 10 (highest vulnerability) has two component indexes-an index of underlying vulnerability and an economic distress index. The overall index is a simple average of the two component indexes. There are 15 indicators in all-12 for the underlying and 3 for the economic distress index. (http://viewswire.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=social_unrest_table&page=noads) 4 The Political Stability Assessment Index is made by CountryWatch, Inc, an American think tank. (http://www.countrywatch.com) 5 This index measures the dynamic between the quality of a country's government and the threats that can compromise and undermine stability. Scores are assigned from 0-10 using the aforementioned criteria. A score of 0 marks the lowest level of political stability, while a score of 10 marks the highest level of political stability, according to this proprietary index. 3 democratic one. The supporting rate of the central government is an important indicator of political stability. Chinese people's higher supporting rate of the central government in an authoritarian regime means more legitimacy. Therefore, this regime is more stable. According to World Value Survey, in response to the question "how much confidence do you have in the national government?" 97 percent Chinese respondents claimed that they had either "quite a lot of confidence" or "a great deal of confidence." Only 3.2 percent Chinese respondents claimed that they had either "Not very much confidence" or "no confidence at all." 6 In rural areas of China, according to Li Lianjiang's survey, 80.7 percent of the 1,259 respondents thought that the central government enjoyed a high level of trust, and only 3.5 percent respondents thought that the Center deserved a low level of trust.7 The two independent survey results are roughly matched. More interestingly, Wang Zhengxu found that "Chinese citizens hold high trust in the abstract government, but are less satisfied with the agencies that carry out the real functions of the state." Wang argues that this distinction can be explained in terms of national leaders constituting an "imagined state," while local government agencies represent the "real state," where citizens' perceptions are based on actual experiences.8 Chen Jie also had the same conclusion that "people in China seem to separate more or less their interest and assessment of local affairs from their diffuse feelings about the political system as a whole."9 Similarly, Li Lianjiang noted that some Chinese villagers believe that there are substantial differences between the central and local governments. 6 http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/publication_494 7 Li Lianjiang, "Political Trust in Rural China," Modern China, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April, 2004), p. 234 8 Wang Zhengxu, "Before the Emergence of Critical Citizens: Economic Development and Political Trust in China," International Review of Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 1, (March, 2005), pp. 155-171 9 Chen Jie, Popular Political Support in Urban China, (CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 113 4 Among those who perceive a divided state, most appear to have more trust in higher levels than at lower levels and have a clear distinction between the intent and the capacity of the central government. They trust that the Center's intent is benevolent but distrust its capacity to ensure faithful implementation of its policies.10 This apparent paradox-the high supporting rate of China's central government and dramatic increase in social unrest- has generated research interests from many students of comparative politics and international relations. In the context of tremendous economic development, China threat theory and China collapse theory come from two opposite voices that have sparked debates on the prediction of China's future. The increasing contentious politics and a stable authoritarian regime puzzles theorists on authoritarian regime and political transition. In addition, in the Western democracies, like the U.S., people trust the local governments more than they trust the federal government.11 However, China's story is the opposite, as people trust the central government more than they trust the local government. As Li Liangjiang's survey shows, the lower the level of government, the lower the trust among the people. The increasing contentious politics and widespread support for China's central government has puzzled theorists on authoritarian regimes and political transition. The Research Questions and Definitions of Key Variables This dissertation seeks to answer the question of why or how China's authoritarian regime has remained politically stable with increasing social protest. In order to do this, 10 Li Lianjiang, ibid, p. 228 11 Zhou Li'an, Local Government in Transformation, (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Publisher, 2008), p. 72 5 this dissertation will consider not only contemporary contentious politics, but also political institutional arrangements. Furthermore, it will explore the interaction between contentious politics and political institutional arrangements. This dissertation aims to investigate how political institutional arrangement ensures political stability, that is, how this institutional arrangement absorbs the challenge from exogenous shocks and endogenous subversions. This section will clarify the definitions of the key variables in this dissertation. First, The term "contentious politics" needs to be clearly defined, since terms in this academic circle are ambiguous and confuses readers. This section presents a simple review of the evolution of the term. Second, "political stability" is a key term in comparative politics. Since this dissertation will assert the condition of political stability in China, measurable indicators must be applied to the definition of political stability. As a social, historical, and political phenomenon, contentious politics has been explored in comparative politics literature. This is because contentious politics has always triggered political and social instability. The field of contentious politics, however, faces terminological problems when addressing this phenomenon. Contentious politics studies as an academic subject lack uniform terms. This phenomenon (contention) has variable names, for instance, social protest, social unrest, riot, resistance, collective petition, uprising, disturbance, revolt, rebellion, collective actions, social movement, and so on. In Chinese official documents, the Chinese government defines it as a "mass-incident" and it also artificially defined as a "large-scale mass incident," which means that a social protest has over 500 hundred 6 participants.12 Scholars in this field use those terms interchangeably and they are randomly chosen either by personal preference or by the contentions' nature, size, and degree of violence for their own research convenience. However, the lack of uniform terms in an academic subject will confuse some readers and will make this subject look disorganized. After the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in the early 1990s, rebellion, revolt and revolution are hard to be found nowadays in world politics. Especially, mainstream scholars paid most of their attention to long-standing popular contentions in Western countries. Students in this field, therefore, adopted "social movement" to define this subject and it has dominated this field. In recent years, political scientist rethought the term "social movement" in the study of popular contention and social conflict. They found that "social movement research has too often been cut off from the study of other forms of contention…many subjects in contentious politics do not reduce to classical social movement organization." Therefore, they argue to adopt the term "contentious politics" as a common framework which is broader than social movements but narrower than all of politics. 13 By the term "contentious politics," it means "episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants."14 12 Chen Jinsheng, Report on Mass Incidents (internal edition), (Beijing: Mass Press, 2004), p. 32 13 Sidney Tarrow, "Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics: Introduction," in Ronald Aminzade et al. Ed. Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 6-7 14 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, (Cambridge University Press 2004), p. 5 7 This term focuses on the fact that some interaction adopts noninstitutional forms and government serves as a mediator, target, or claimant. 15 This term has a more comprehensive assumption to emphasize "interaction" between makers of a claim and their opponents. It also underscores interests and benefits of the two sides. Especially, it takes government as a claimant. This is an important theoretical development that is heightened by the unspoken assumption that government can also use contentious politics as a tool to reach its goals. According to the definition, contentious politics falls into the area of political expression tolerated by the regime, and under specifiable circumstances adopts forms of action the regime forbids. Prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden identifies three modes of governmental connection with the various forms of contentious politics. "Contentious politics" focuses on the more common mechanisms and processes that are nested within different environmental conditions.16 The term brings non-Western politics back to this academic subject and explores a common mechanism of popular contentions in different regime types. Contentious politics in nonwestern countries is a neutral political phenomenon, as those in the West. This definition makes this subject more value-free in purposes of study. This dissertation adopts Sidney Tarrow's definition of "contentious politics." Although cases in this dissertation rely mainly on what the Chinese government calls a "large-scale mass incident," or "small-scale mass incident," other definitions will be included in this study as well, such as individual petition, anger in the Internet, and other forms of contention. This dissertation takes contentious politics as exogenous challenges and examines the regime's political resilience and adaptability. Only by using specific 15 Tarrow, ibid, p. 7 16 ibid, p. 7 8 cases to prove arguments in this dissertation, it will adopt terms like social protest, riot, or disturbance according to their nature and size. Contentious politics is associated with political instability or is associated with political transformation. In the 1970s comparative politics circle, political stability was one of the main topics. Particularly, scholars in general argue that the role of political instability is the beginning of political transformation in a nondemocratic regime and contentious politics trigger the process. In his book, Political Order in Changing Society, Samuel Huntington uses "political order" rather than political (in)stability to argue that rapid socioeconomic revolution would undermine the ‘traditional' political order which in turn would lead to the monarchy's fall. 17 However, "order" or "disorder" was originally a concept linked to the ancient regime. Scholars have preferred to think of the objective in terms of "stability" rather than "order."18 In the article "A Definition of Political Stability," Claude Ake defines political stability as "the regularity of the flow of political exchange. The more regular the flow of political exchange, the more stable."19 Ake argues that there is political stability to the extent that members of society restrict themselves to the behavior patterns that fall within the limits imposed by political role expectations. Any act that deviates from these limits is an instance of political instability.20 Ake's definition is widely cited in articles but it is very pedantic, because a measurement and its indicators are ambiguous, if following this definition. More 17 Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Society, (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2006) 18 Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy, (Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 262 19 Claude Ake, "A definition of political stability," Comparative Politics, Vol. 7, No. 2, (January, 1975), p. 273 20 ibid. p. 273 9 scholars have made an effort to provide clearer measurable indicators to define political stability or instability in order to be applied by multivariate statistical analysis. David Sanders identifies two major dimensions of political instability: regime change and government change. Regime change is the changes in regime norms, changes in types of party system, and changes in military-civilian status, while government change is changes in the effective executive or cabinet.21 Similarly, Alberto Alesina et al. define it as the propensity of a government collapse, that is the propensity of a change in the executive, either by "constitutional" or "unconstitutional" means. 22 Ben Shepherd provides a set of indicators: the rule of law, strong institutions rather than powerful individuals, a responsive and efficient bureaucracy, low corruption, and a business climate that is conducive to investment.23 Although these scholars offer unique definitions, measurable indicators of political stability are still ambiguous. Leon Hurwitz presents five approaches to define political stability: (a) the absence of violence; (b) governmental longevity/duration; (c) the existence of a legitimate constitutional regime; (d) the absence of structural change; and (e) a multifaceted societal attribute.24 Compared with those academic definitions, some think tanks have provided a sort of political stability index: peaceful transitions of power, ability of a government to stay in office and carry out its policies vis-a-vis credible risks 21 David Sanders, Patterns of Political Instability, (New York: St Martin's Press, 1981) 22 Alberto Alesina et al., "Political Instability and Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Growth Vol. 1, No. 2 (1996), pp. 189-211 23 Ben Shepherd, "Political Stability Crucial for Growth" http://www2.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publications/reports/pdf/SU004/shepherd.pdf 24 Leon Hurwitz, "Contemporary Approaches to Political Stability," Comparative Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3, Special Issue on Revolution and Social Change (April., 1973), p. 449 10 of government collapse. Threats include coups, domestic violence and instability, terrorism, etc.25 According to the definitions, the common assumption is that the core of political stability is a stable central government. As Huntington argues, the most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.26 Therefore, on the basis of all definitions mentioned above, this dissertation defines political stability as: "a durable polity, whereby the central government in the polity has the capability to restrict or control endogenous subversions and to absorb exogenous challenges." Political stability is defined this way because this dissertation asserts that the political institutional arrangement (the multilevel responsibility structure) ensures a stable authoritarian regime in China. Political stability is a state of equilibrium. This definition accepts continuous politics as a routinized political interaction between the state and society. It also accepts violence as an episodic political activity. A working definition of political stability needs to capture the essence of the capacity of the central government. The impact of contentious politics to political stability does not depend on whether there is contentious politics or not, but depends on the ability of the regime's resilience and adaptability. It means that any polity can prevent contentious politics from occurring. The vital factor is this regime's or institution's absorption capacity in dealing with those exogenous challenges. Furthermore, this definition includes endogenous subversions such as the split of elites, corruption, and administrative incompliance which includes peaceful transitions of power, the ability of a government to stay in office, a responsive and 25 From CountryWatch, Inc. The same index is also applied by some other think tanks, for example, Economist Intelligence Unit (a research institution affiliated to The Economist) 26 Huntington, ibid, p. 1 11 efficient bureaucracy, and political equilibrium between the Center and local/state authorities. Lastly, political stability also associates with a degree of social trust in the central government, which can be measured by support ratings. This definition, therefore, captures the interplay of the state, society, and inter-government relations. Accordingly, four vital factors secure a regime's political stability: resilience, adaptability, interinstitutional monitoring and power equilibrium. This dissertation explores the relations between political institutional arrangements and contentious politics as reflected by these four factors. Main Arguments This dissertation adopts on institutionalist approach to answer the research question. This dissertation argues that the multilevel responsibility structure is the key to understand political stability in China. This dissertation is divided into two dimensions in discussing the multilevel responsibility structure and political stability. The first dimension is the multilevel responsibility structure and exogenous shock, while the second dimension is the multilevel responsibility structure and endogenous subversion. In the first dimension, the role of contentious politics is as an exogenous challenge. It illuminates the multilevel responsibility structure and exogenous shock. On the one hand, this is the multilevel responsibility structure's capability of political resilience. Political resilience is a vital life-or-death factor for any regime type. The multilevel responsibility structure reduces the uncertainties and the hazard for the central government. The local authorities have become a buffer zone to protect the central government. In order to absorb the exogenous shock, the multilevel responsibility 12 structure entails three strategies: 1) establishing a responsibility system, 2) playing good cop and bad cop, and 3) passing the blame to lower levels. The responsibility system consists of a comprehensive annual evaluation system with detailed criteria. This annual evaluation system determines local heads' personal political life and future, such as promotion, discipline, or dismissal. Through this evaluation system, it is local governments' responsibility to prevent large-scale popular contention. The upper level government would support the protesters if they had become politically popular and deflect responsibility by blaming lower level government.27 The multilevel responsibility structure is per se a blame-avoidance structure. It is the local governments' responsibility to use coercive force to repress popular contention. The central government could decide to ignore or to intervene. The upper level government can use the local governments as a scapegoat. Upper level governments can discipline the local officials, and issue huge compensation to the victims to alleviate social pressures. The multilevel responsibility structure provides an effective solution to the dilemma of an authoritarian regime repressing popular uprising by force and damaging its legitimacy. Moreover, political adaptability can facilitate the institution's continual adjustment to absorb exogenous challenges. In the multilevel responsibility structure, an upper level government cannot pass blame to lower level governments indefinitely. When the lower level governments face ever-increasing social pressures, the upper level government has to find ways to alleviate such pressures. The multilevel responsibility structure's political adaptability is sustained by adopting "throwing good money after bad" strategies. 27 Kent Weaver, "The Politics of Blame Avoidance," Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 6 No. 4, (1986), p. 385 13 "Throwing good money after bad" has three methods: adjusting policy, making concessions, and jumping on the bandwagon. First, the capacity for quick policy adjustment after large-scale popular contention is an important characteristic and advantage of the multilevel responsibility structure. The multilevel responsibility structure creates space for the central government to stay away from the whirlpool of popular contention, thereby giving the central government enough time to adjust policies. Second, if the popular contention is triggered by loss of interest, such as relocation for the construction of hydroelectric dam, the upper level government could throw more resources to eliminate the cause of popular contention, such as compensating protesters who suffer from state-owned enterprise reform. The Center would thereby gain credit and avoid blame. Third, the authoritarian regime excludes citizen's participation in public policy decision-making process; therefore, the public would not understand or support the policy. As a result, the public would blame the government. In order to settle the popular contention caused by a public policy, the government would switch from its original position to support the popular alternative. Usually, if this public policy were made by the central government, the policy would end up with nothing definite. If popular contentions occurred from a policy made by local governments, upper governments would either cease implementation of the policy or adopt a "good cop and bad cop" strategy to discipline some officials and calm down public outrage. The central government can either avoid further blame or gain credits. In the second dimension, the role of contention politics is a fire alarm monitor to check and balance local governments. Meanwhile, lower level government can use contentious politics as leverage to strengthen its bargaining power with upper level 14 governments. This part addresses the multilevel responsibility structure and endogenous subversion. First, misconduct by local officials and collusion in organizations are forms of endogenous subversion that erode the institution from inside. They damage political stability in the long run. Routine surveillance by a formal institutional procedure is costly and inefficient. Sometimes, it does not work in less developed regions. However, government officials' misbehavior in those regions usually is rampant. Citizens have better information about local governments and officials. Popular contention in those regions usually is triggered by government officials' misconduct and poor quality of governance. Once a popular contention occurs, local government can no longer cover it up. Local government officials are then disciplined. Contentious politics in the multilevel responsibility structure then serves as this informal oversight mechanism. Meanwhile, for fear of contentious politics and disciplining, local government officials have to restrain themselves from any misbehavior. Contentious politics serve as a tool for the institutional self-enforcing mechanism. With the self-restraint mechanism, the multilevel responsibility structure could prevent endogenous subversion. Second, a robust institution is a self-enforcing equilibrium structure. The central government controls the overwhelming fiscal power and cadre appointment system. Without fiscal and personnel power, local governments are in an extreme asymmetric position to bargain with the upper government. Such a disequilibrated power structure would destroy local autonomy and subvert political stability in the long run. The multilevel responsibility structure has a "hidden contract," in which the central government "rewards" the local government to take blame for its policy error. Lower 15 level government can use contentious politics as leverage to strengthen its bargaining power with upper level governments. Those exogenous challenges and endogenous pressures will force the central government to transfer resources to local governments in order to avoid severe power disequilibrium. The structure may not achieve a perfect political equilibrium, but can avoid political disequilibrium. If there is no political disequilibrium, the political system is stable. Organization of the Dissertation This dissertation is divided into eight chapters which elaborate these arguments. Chapter 2 reviews the existing literature on China's authoritarian power structure, contentious politics in contemporary China, and the relationship between contentious politics and political stability. Chapter 3 presents causal arguments for the relationship between the multilevel responsibility structure and political stability. Chapter 4 describes the evolution of the multilevel responsibility structure. Chapter 5 and chapter 6 discuss the multilevel responsibility structure and exogenous challenges. Chapter 5 argues that the multilevel responsibility structure creates space for the central government to distance itself from local contentious politics and allows local governments to absorb the shock. Chapter 6 argues that the multilevel responsibility structure provides a mechanism for the political adaptability. Through this mechanism, the structure can facilitate continual adjustment to absorb exogenous challenges. Chapter 7 and chapter 8 discuss the multilevel responsibility structure and endogenous subversion. Chapter 7 argues that the multilevel responsibility structure provides an informal mechanism for the central government to monitor local 16 governments. Contentious politics plays the role of a fire alarm. It triggers a society's check and balance mechanism. Chapter 8 argues that the multilevel responsibility structure can avoid power disequilibrium. Lower level governments can use contentious politics as leverage to strengthen their bargaining power with upper level governments. Chapter 9 concludes this dissertation and provides suggestions for future studies. This dissertation argues that contentious politics in the multilevel responsibility structure provides a way to absorb exogenous shocks and an informal mechanism to restrict endogenous subversion. This dissertation mainly adopts qualitative methods to test the hypothesis through making use of small and medium-N approaches. For cases studies, this dissertation relies on a first-hand database, personal interviews, and observations. It will mainly consider contemporary popular contention cases and my personal interviews and field observations. Most of the cases are what the Chinese government defines as "large-scale social protest," that is a collective action involving more than 500 participants. This dissertation also adopts game theory to discuss political equilibrium. Those methods may illuminate characteristics that show how the multilevel responsibility structure ensures political stability. Linking these cases back to the relationship between the Center and localities will illustrate how the multilevel power structure ensures the stability of China's authoritarian regime. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW The 1989 Tiananmen Incident and the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in the early 1990s was the most important milestone in world politics at the end of the 20th Century. It was not only the end of the Cold War, but also "the end of history": capitalism triumphed over communism and the destiny of nondemocracies would be democracy. 28 According to this assertion, although the Chinese communist regime survived this wave of regime collapse, it would soon crumble. The Chinese communist party has abandoned communist dogmas and has established a market-orientation economy. However, China's authoritarian regime has not transformed. As the largest authoritarian polity in the world, China's fate and future has drawn both academic and news media's enthusiastic attention. In recent years, we have witnessed increasing popular contention in China. The frictions between the ruler and the ruled have generated speculation about political instability. Students in the field of China studies have produced a rich body of literature on China's authoritarian regime and contentious politics. This chapter aims to review the literature to understand relations between China's authoritarian regime and contentious 28 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (Reprint edition), (NY: Free Press, 2006) 18 politics. It reviews literature on power structure, the relations between contentious politics and political stability. This chapter divides existing literature on contentious politics and China's authoritarian regime into two broad camps. The first camp is the study of China's regime and political stability. The second camp is contentious politics in China and its salient political transformation goals. Based on reviewing this body of literature, this chapter outlines three existing explanatory approaches on the relationship between contentious politics and the stability of China's authoritarian regime. It discusses their strengths and limits, and then it explains why the institutionalist approach is appropriate to study China's authoritarian regime, contentious politics, and political stability. China's Political Structure and the Stability of an Authoritarian Regime Literature on China's authoritarian regime can be divided into two categories: the authoritarian regime power structure and political stability. First, much attention has been paid to the power structure. Most notably, there is a wide body of literature on the Center and local relations. There are also works that consider the role of contentious politics in the political transformation. These works are important for understanding contentious politics and China's authoritarian regime relations. The economic reforms have profoundly changed the relationship between the central and local governments. For example, one of the most important reforms is the 1994 fiscal and tax-sharing system reform. The Center has gained more revenue and locals have more autonomy after the reform. In order to study the particular power structure in China, there are three 19 categories: 1) general authoritarian regime; 2) economic, state, and society structure; 3) fragmented authoritarianism, and 4) decentralized authoritarianism. The first category is general authoritarian regime and China's power structure. "Authoritarianism" is a popular term to label the communist regime in China. Authoritarianism is a system of a closely knitted relationship between state and society and between political and societal sources of power. It is based on a type of domination which is dependent on centralized executive control and coercion.29 When China's authoritarian regime survived the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet communist bloc in the early 1990s, "Is China stable?" is probably a pertinent question which attracts analysts from academic, political and business areas. Even some Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members themselves doubted again "how long can the red flag fly?"30 Some scholars argue that the survival of China's authoritarian regime in 1989 was only "luckily winning" and the "transition postponed."31 In recent years, we have witnessed increasing popular contention in Chinese cities and rural areas. Contentious politics, therefore, became an important indicator for predicting China's potential transition. However, just as all indicators that have been identified by a volcanologist or seismologist, analysts can never predict when and where the quake of political transition or instability exactly takes place in China. The regime type does matter for contentious politics. According to statistics, strikes, demonstrations, 29 Amos Perlmutter, Modern Authoritarianism: A Comparative Institutional Analysis, (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1981); Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, (Co: Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher), 2000. 30 CCP has three fatal crises in its history: KMT's surrounding and attacking at the beginning of the 1930s, the end of Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. Therefore, this question was asked three times at those crises. Lin Biao was the first person who asked the question in 1930. Mao Zedong responded to him by the article "A Single Spark Can Ignite a Prairie Fire." 31 Vivienne Shue, "China: Transition Postponed?" Problems of Communist, Vol. 41, (1992), pp. 157-168 20 riots, and other social unrests are several times as frequent in Western democracies as they are in authoritarian regimes,32 yet Western democracies somehow live with amounts of "social unrest" without any crisis of regime transition. The myth of China's stable authoritarian regime can be explained by exploring its political and social structure. The collapse of East European communism encouraged scholars to further the research of the role of contentious politics in communist countries. Although not all of the communist countries experienced large-scale protest, protest destabilized the regime and forced the collapse of the communist system. The major purpose of modern authoritarian regimes is to establish the domination of political elite over society by arresting, subverting, or destroying autonomous individual, collective, and institutional behavior and thus to enhance the power of authorities at the expense of individual autonomy.33 From this perspective, authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate competing procedures, institutions, and structures that secure political legitimacy in a more open society. Juan Linz defined authoritarianism as a style of rule characterized by limited political pluralism, little political mobilization, and few safeguards for individual rights. An authoritarian regime, sometimes called a dictatorship, is often contrasted with a democratic form of government. 34 This definition is a general picture about authoritarianism and describes a middle ground between democratic regimes and totalitarian regimes. Linz and Perlmutter explored a general concept and characteristics of authoritarianism. Their theories, however, do not explain contemporary China's 32 Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) 33 Perlmutter, ibid 34 Linz, ibid, 2000 21 authoritarianism well. China's economic reforms have led to a relaxation of party control over the economy, society, and ultimately over public discourse35 and the reforms successfully realized the transition from planned economy to a market-oriented system. Economic reforms accelerate Chinese economic development and consolidate the authoritarian regime. However, they triggered economic crisis and social instability in East European communist countries, because those regimes were born of "subversive institutions." The subversive institutions have three characteristics: an ideological commitment to rapid transformation, a fusion of politics and economics, and domination by a single and highly penetrative party. These systems featured an extraordinarily powerful party-state and a weak and dependent society. This institutional structure can undermine growth and deregulate the party's monopoly, because power was redistributed along with economic resources and the societies became more autonomous and powerful to bargain with the party state.36 The second category is economic, state, and society structure in China. China has the same subversive characteristics as the collapsed East European communist countries. However, unlike the Soviet Union's unitary hierarchical structure based on functional or specialization principles (the U-form), China's hierarchical economy has been the multi-layer- multiregional one mainly based on territorial principles (the M-form). Reforms have further decentralized the M-form economy along regional lines, which provided flexibility and opportunities for carrying out regional experiments, for the rise of nonstate 35 Tony Saich, Governance and Politics of China, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2001) 36 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 130-131 22 enterprises, and for the emergence of markets.37 China is an authoritarian regime, but it is also decentralized. China's central control over economic life was never as extensive or effective as it was in the USSR. China's local governments played a much stronger economic role than did their counterparts in the Soviet Union.38 Although some scholars would like to characterize China under Mao as a "Totalitarian system," "Mass Line" (or Mass Campaign) was the strong social power used to balance the subnational authorities. Totalitarianism came to refer not only to absolute power, but to the attempt to mobilize entire populations in the service of an "ideology."39 Ironically, mass movement can even physically destroy Police Bureaus, Procuratorates, and Courts (za lan gong jian fa) in the Cultural Revolution. China is not a system of the Center in the vertical integration of interests within society as a whole. Vivien Shue argues that the policy process approach contributes little to the study of Chinese politics and the power of the state vis-à-vis society. She shows that Chinese local society is a highly localized, highly segmented, cell-like pattern structure under Mao. The social life was by no means fully penetrated or effectively dominated by the revolutionary communist values of the party. In the honeycomb pattern of polity, local officials and cadres devised an array of ploys and strategies that served in part to protect their localities against intrusive central demands while also enhancing their own administrative power and their own room to maneuver within the system. China under 37 Qian Yingyi and Xu Cheng-Gang, "The M-form hierarchy and China's economic reform." European Economic Review, Vol. 37, (1993), pp. 541-548 38 Susan Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, (CA:University of California Press, 1993); Pierre Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 39 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publisher, 2004) 23 Mao contained numerous shifting, cross-cutting, competitive (even hostile) centers of power. The state almost never spoke to the people with one voice. Like Qian Yingyi and Xu Chenggang's M-form structure, local societies from the provincial down to the county level are a self-sufficiency system. Chinese central bureaucracy controlled and allocated fewer than 600 productions, whereas the Soviets had central control over as many as 5500 productions.40 Most of the manufacturing planning and the allocation of production decision-making authorities belong to Chinese subnational governments. Most provinces have their own independent agricultural, industrial, and social service system, such as food productions, light manufacturing, pharmaceutical factories, vehicle manufacturing, and even film and entertainment industries.41 The industrial systems at the provincial level are more complete and the decision-making authorities are more independent in China than in the U.S. Before the 1990s, every province in China was an independent-like realm. For example, I grew up in Shaanxi province, most of my family living materials, such as flour, soy bean oil, pork, washing powder, garments, towels, bathroom tissues, bicycles and so on, was made by local Shaanxi manufactories. Even when I was in middle school (beginning of the 1990s), I did not often see productions from outside of Shaanxi province. Intersubnational governments or cross-territorial industrial cooperation was rare. Shue's cellular model focused on the Chinese countryside. It can be extended to the entire provincial level. The local officials and cadres of any level obey their higher authorities' orders for their political survival on the one hand, and on the other hand, they 40 Shirk, ibid, 1993, p.13 41 Except Guizhou, Hainan, and Tibet, every province has its own film and entertainment factory that is often labeled by the province or capital city's name, such as Beijing Film Company, Shanghai Film Company, and Xi'an Film Company. 24 also protect any interests within their domains. This is what Shue called the defensive strategy. Lower level officials also compete for more allocation from state resource for their own localities versus their neighboring ones. According to Shue's argument, the lower the officials are, the more freedom and incentive they have. The cadre at the very bottom often enjoyed a freedom to speak out and bargain openly with the higher level.42 As a Chinese proverb says, "the man who has nothing fears nobody." Therefore, it is not strange that China's reform was a bottom-up process which initiated from a village in Anhui Province.43 Shue's honeycomb pattern structure of Chinese local polity refuses the argument that Chinese polity is a monolith. This argument focuses on the local autonomy, but here is a question: if local leaders had enjoyed considerable autonomy and authority in their domains, why does not Chinese local's autonomy threaten to weaken the political authority of the Center? Or, on the contrary to some media commentaries,44 why did not the state dismemberment, as in the Soviet Union, take place in China? Although the literature on comparative (post)-communism has been built largely on the theoretical premise that Leninist systems are inherently unreformable, a single-minded focus on regime failure does not explain why some Leninist systems endure.45 42 Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic. (CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). p. 140 43 One night in November 1978, the village chief and 17 other peasants of Xiaogang Village broke the law by signing a secret agreement to divide the land of the local People's Commune into family plots. They agreed to continue to deliver existing quotas of grain to the government and the commune, and keep any surplus for themselves. This is viewed as the starting point of China's reform. 44 Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China, (NY: Random House, 2000) 45 Landry, ibid 25 The third category is fragmented authoritarianism in China. Some China studies scholars construct a rational model to explore policy analysis in China.46 These scholars posit that policy outcomes are the result of an evaluation of choices by a coherent group with shared perceptions of the values to be maximized in response to a perceived problem.47 Harry Harding argues that because of the complexity of administrative problems, the effects of policy changes on the distribution of power and status, and the philosophical dilemma of whether the efficiency of modern bureaucracy, outweighs its social and political costs.48 Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg point out that due to the limited information about Chinese national leaders, this rational model cannot probe the real motivation of the decision makers.49 The two authors argue that the rationality model has insufficient explanatory power to understand China's policy-making process. Therefore, they explore the policy process from a structural perspective, rather than evaluating the decision-making group's choice. These scholars develop a fragmented authoritarianism approach. The fragmented authoritarianism approach defines China's authoritarianism as the "fragmented, segmented, and stratified structure of the state promotes a system of negotiations, bargaining, and the seeking of consensus among affected bureaucracies." The policy process in this sphere is "disjointed, protracted and incremental."50 Lieberthal 46 Doak Barentt, Uncertain Passage, (Washington: Brookings, 1974); Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1976, (CA: Stanford University Press, 1981); Dorothy Solinger, Chinese Business Under Socialism, (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984) 47 Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes, (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 11 48 Harry Harding, ibid 49 Lieberthal and Oksenberg, ibid, pp. 13-14 50 David, Lampton ed, Policy Implementation in Post-Mao China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, ibid; David Lampton, "China's Foreign and National Security Policy-making Process." In The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform, 1978-2000, David Lampton Ed., (CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Michel Oksenberg, 26 and Oksenberg have contended that China's central-provincial relations are neither central dominance nor provincial autonomy. Instead, they are characterized by intense bargaining, with neither capable of totally disregarding the interests and needs of the other. The changes in Center -provincial relations usually are marginal adjustments which typically affect the overall balance less dramatically than the publicity announcing the change suggests. Moreover, the national government differs greatly in the degree of control it exerts over different provinces, and provinces differ among themselves in their bargaining leverage over the Center, depending upon such factors as their wealth, strategic significance, and the personal connections, ambition, and acumen of their leaders. The fourth category is China's decentralized authoritarianism. Decentralization became a hot topic in the study of politics and economy. The decentralized authoritarianism approach explains the vertical power structure of China. Decentralized authoritarianism is an alternative perspective to explain the durability of the Chinese communist regime. Decentralization means the transfer of resources and responsibilities for public services, or decision-making power over those items away from the central government to either lower levels of government, dispersed central state agencies, or the private sector.51 According to World Development Report 2000, countries in North America and Western Europe began to decentralize in the late 1970s, after nearly two decades of "China's Political System: Challenges of the Twenty-First Century," The China Journal, No. 45, (January, 2001), pp. 21-35 51 David Leonard and Marshall Dale, "Institutions of Rural Development for the Poor: Decentralization and Organizational Linkages." (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Richard Baum, " China's Road to Soft Authoritarian Reform," US-China Relations and China's Integration with the World, Aspen Institute, 19 (2004), No. 1, pp. 15-20 27 governments' consolidating power and responsibility. The World Bank reports that by the early 1990s, all but twelve of the seventy-five countries with populations of more than five million had undertaken some form of decentralization, and by the end of the 1990s, about 95 percent of the countries with democratic political systems had created subnational units of administration or government.52 Decentralization is regarded as an essential element of democratic governance and is linked to democratization, with an emphasis on more voices of citizens, meeting basic human needs, growth with equity, and more local political accountability. In democratic governance, decentralization devolves power from the Center, involves the people more directly in the governance of their public affairs, increases the visibility of government operations, and quite likely reduces the return from rent-seeking behavior, because decentralization provides a channel for constituents to participate in local government, and it also provides local governments with the resources to provide goods and services to their constituents.53 "Decentralization," however, has prominently emerged as one of the key terms in describing political change in developing countries since the last decade.54 More and more developing countries make efforts on decentralization to reform their governance, in order to alleviate the risks of fiscal problems and the pressure of increasing demands 52 World Bank: World Development Report 2000 53 Marine-Vazquez and McNab, "China's Long March to Decentralization," Smoke, Paul, Decentralization in Asia and Latin America : Towards a Comparative Interdisciplinary Perspective, (MA : Edward Elgar, 2006) 54 William Ascher, and Dennis Rondinelli. "Restructuring the Administration of Service Delivery in Vietnam: Decentralization as Institution-Building." in Jennie Litvack and Dennis Rondinelli, ed Market Reform in Vietnam, Westport, (CT: Quorum Books, 1999), pp. 132-152; Diana Conyers, "Decentralization in Zimbabwe: A Local Perspective." Public Administration and Development Vol. 23, (2003), pp. 115- 124; Paul Frances and James Robert, "Balancing Rural Poverty Reduction and Citizen Participation: The Contradictions of Uganda's Decentralization Program." World Development Vol. 31 (2003), pp. 325-338; Max Turner, "Whatever Happened to Deconcentration? Recent Initiatives in Cambodia." Public Administration and Development Vol. 22, (2002), pp. 353-364; Landry, ibid, 2003; Smoke, et al., ibid. 28 on political rights and social equity. Recent empirical evidence has proved that decentralization is not an essential element of democratic governance, because China's successful fiscal decentralization provides a counterexample to show that decentralization and authoritarianism are compatible. Landry found that "China's observed level of decentralization is consistent with the behavior of a federal democracy."55 Some scholars even have argued that China is a "de facto federalism."56 Zheng Yongnian argues that with deepening reform and openness, China's political system in terms of central-local relations is functioning more and more like federalism. China's "de facto federalism" can resolve interest conflicts between governments at different levels. Federalism is widely regarded as a means for resolving conflict in a fragmented society and for reducing the burden of the central government.57 The political consequences of decentralization, however, could corrode an authoritarian regime. Although China's experience with decentralization in the reform era is different from Soviet communist bloc, there are two political hazards which will undermine China's authoritarian regime. The first is that decentralization corrodes authoritarianism by creating loci of power that can gradually develop into a source of political opposition. Decentralization is risky, because it breeds contestation as well as local demands for further decentralization. The second is that decentralization may stimulate economic development, but development, in turn, corrodes authoritarianism.58 55 Landry, ibid, p. 9 56 Gabriella Montinola, Qian Yingyi, and Barry Weingast, "Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success," World Politics, Vol. 48, No.1, (1996), pp. 50-81; Qian Yingyi, and Barry Weingast, "Federalism as a Commitment to Preserving Market Incentives," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 11, No. 4, (Fall 1997), pp. 83-92; Zheng Yongnian, "Explaining the Sources of de facto Federalism in Reform China: Intergovernmental Decentralization, Globalization, and Central-Local Relations," Japanese Journal of Political Science Vol. 7, No.2 (2006), pp. 101-126 57 Zheng, ibid 58 Landry, ibid 29 In addition, China's increasing unrest results from "imperfect political structures" that provide inadequate avenues for voicing, aggregating, and balancing this surge in popular demands. Lacking proper channels to voice their demands, citizens often express them through "improper channels such as illegal assemblies, marches, and demonstrations."59 Zheng Yongnian suggests that with no effective institutional constraints, localism or regionalism often became uncontrollable and posed a serious challenge to central power. 60 Decentralization could even be fatal to a communist regime. Similarly, Martinez-Vasquez and McNab show that fiscal decentralization would be captured by local interest groups. Capture occurs when local interests group seize the benefits of local public goods and, in turn, ultimately control local government politics. Capture creates a series of problems, including overstatement of the cost of provision of local public goods, corruption, and diversion of local public goods to unintended groups.61 Therefore, as Kenneth Lieberthal argues, the Chinese system can be seen as a nested system of territorial administrations, with substantial policy initiative at each territorial level: the township, county, city, province, and the Center. At each level, there is much attention to garnering resources and striking deals that will benefit the locality governed by the level of state administration.62 Moreover, the national government differs greatly in the degree of control it exerts over different provinces, and provinces differ among themselves in their bargaining leverage over the Center, depending upon such factors as 59 Tanner, 2004, ibid 60 Zheng, ibid 61 Martinez-Vasquez and McNab, ibid 62 Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform, (NY:W.W.Norton &Company, Inc, 1995) 30 their wealth, strategic significance, and the personal connections, ambition, and acumen of their leaders.63 Consequently, some provincial governments achieved a high capacity to lead local development and improve local residents' living standards, while others did not. Due to local diversity, the national government often failed to implement unified policies to lead and constrain local governments, and local officials could easily nullify central policies. The national government was thus unable to bring local governments in line with the national interest.64 However, we can see policies like "targeted assistance" (dui kou zhi yuan) are effective in balancing the unequal development. For example, wealthy provinces are expected to help poor ones. Under the Center's arrangement, a wealthy province must help its poor partner province with finance, experts, and other resources. China's decentralized authoritarianism can make the balance between central dominance and local autonomy. Indeed, the contradiction of the compatibility between decentralization and authoritarianism per se is the Center -local relationship. Lieberthal and Oksenberg contend that China's central-provincial relations are neither central dominance nor provincial autonomy. Instead, they are characterized by intense bargaining, with neither capable of totally disregarding the interests and needs of the other. The changes in the Center -provincial relations usually are marginal adjustments which typically affect the overall balance less dramatically than the publicity announcing the change suggests. The national government differs greatly in the degree of control it exerts over different provinces, and provinces differ among themselves in their bargaining leverage over the Center, depending upon such factors as their wealth, 63 Lieberthal and Oksenberg, ibid 64 Zheng, ibid 31 strategic significance, and the personal connections, ambition, and acumen of their leaders.65 This bargaining structure negatively impacts the relationship among the Center and subordinates. Lieberthal summarizes that the Chinese political system faces four potentially severe problems: overload at the top, as lower level officials avoid responsibility by pushing decision "up" the system; gridlock from the fragmentation of power into different functional bureaucracies and territorial fiefdoms; lack of accurate information because of the distortions created by multiple layers of bureaucracy and because the CCP has not allowed any truly independent sources of information, such as a free press, to develop; and corruption and dictatorship as officials at each level have the opportunities and incentives to violate rules and cover up their transgressions.66 Although those severe problems obsess the Chinese political system and increasing social unrest, the Chinese political system keeps stability. In order to explain the relationship between the endurance of authoritarian regime and decentralization in China, Pierre Landry argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.67 Landry contends that economic decentralization took place in conjunction with institutional and political reforms. Political reform, however, does not imply democratization or radical 65 Lieberthal and Oksenberg, ibid 66 Lieberthal, ibid 67 Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and. Political Power in Communist China. (New. York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard and Zheng Yongnian, ed., Bringing the Party Back in: How China is Governed, (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic Publisher, 2004); John Burns: "Strengthening Central CCP Control of. Leadership Selection," The China Quarterly, (1994), p. 138; pp. 458-491. Lee Hong Yun, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Landry, ibid 32 regime transformation, but entails devising institutional mechanisms that minimize the odds that the Party will lose control over local elites. Chinese leaders must balance the need to ensure economic efficiency through a decentralized "socialist market economy" with the goal of the preservation of Party rule, including the all-important monopoly over cadre affairs.68 White also argues that local officials are being forced by administrative fiat to pursue growth to meet central-level targets.69 These theoretical approaches and arguments are helpful in understanding China's authoritarian power structure. Landry gives a convincing argument about the enduring authoritarianism in China. His argument is based on the top-down domination, that is, the appointment personnel system can control localities by rewarding and punishing local cadres. Landry's argument supposes that the local cadres have an incentive to be promoted. Not all the local cadres, however, want to get promotion, because carders in rich places can gain more personal benefits from the local booming economy, and then Landry overlooked the local autonomy with which local officials depart dramatically from different patterns of behaviors. Not all the local-level officials have spearheaded to meet the higher governments with enthusiasm. Compliance with central directives in China's authoritarian regime cannot be assumed. As a part of the "state," local governments act as part of the administrative apparatus, but they are distinct entities apart from the central state and society, with their own agendas, and increasingly with their own resources.70 68 Landry, ibid 69 Tyrene White, "Political Reform and Rural Government," In Deborah Davis and Ezra Vogel, eds., Chinese Society on the Eva of Tiananmen, The Impact of Reform. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990) 70 Jean Oi, Rural China Takes Off, Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 33 Lieberthal, Oksenberg, and Landry focus on the state bureaucratic power structure but do not study the role of social force. Although the general concept about authoritarianism argues that the state dominates society, and the Chinese state plays a central role in controlling the growth and development of societal actors,71 the economic changes have redefined the social structure and are changing the distribution of power between state and society, which have altered the principles on which society is organized and the ways in which it interacts with the state apparatus.72 Decentralization not only changes power distribution within the bureaucratic system, but also provided local governments with greater economic incentives to promote economic growth and improve people's living standards changes.73 As a result, the process will influence social behaviors, available resources, and ideology. Contentious politics, for example, is becoming an important social power to compete benefits from the state in China. Contentious Politics in Contemporary China In recent years, contentious politics has challenged state power in China, which ranges from prodemocracy movements to labor disputes and ethnic clashes, from tax riots to land dispute. McAdam et al. define that "the study of contentious politics includes all situations in which actors make collective claims on other actors, claims which, if realized would affect the actors' interests, when some government is somehow party to 71 Gallagher, Mary, "China: the Limits of Civil Society in a Late Leninist State," in Muthiah Alagappa, eds. Civil Society and Political Change in Asia, (CA, Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 419-443 72 Saich, ibid, 2001 73 Zheng, ibid, 2006 34 the claims.74 Existing scholarship on contentious politics in contemporary China can be grouped into four categories: 1) the causes of contentious politics; 2) the rise of the consciousnesses of individual rights; 3) the repertoire of contentious politics; and 4) governmental responses to the contentious politics. The first group focuses on causes of protests, which mainly attributed them to the excessive exploitation by local governments or private corporations. Generally, the most important reason that leads to the contentions in China is the dramatic socioeconomic reform. The state-led reform caused political crisis which triggered the 1989 Tiananmen democratic movement.75 Diverse conflicts and protests are directly attributable to the reforms.76 The failure to meet the livelihood, pension, and severance payment demands of state-sector workers in the Northeast spawned radical reactions and in the process economic grievances were transformed into political ones. 77 For example, in cities, the reform of state-owned enterprises directly threatens the workers income, security, and prestige. In rural areas, it is taxation and land disputes that posed great economic and moral pressure for villagers. In recent years, Chinese political scholars find that not only class, but also gender, ethnicity, generation, and regional location constitute powerful sources of conflict and 74 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, "Towards an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution," Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, ed., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 75 Zhao Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen: State-society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 76 Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, ed., Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, (London : Routledge, 2000) 77 Ching Kwan Lee, "Pathways of Labor Insurgency," in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, Perry and Selden, ed., (2000), p. 80; William Hurst, "Understanding Contentious Collective Action by Chinese Laid-Off Workers: The Importance of Regional Political Economy," Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 39, No. 2, (Summer 2004), pp. 94-120; Dorothy Solinger, "Labor Market Reform and the Plight of the Laid-off Proletariat," The China Quarterly, Vol. 170, (2002), pp. 304-326; Chen Feng, "Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labor Protests in China." The China Journal, Vol. 44, (2000), pp. 41-63 35 spurs to resistance in the reform era.78 There is a significant correlation between Falun Gong membership and elderly and laid-off workers.79 A young generation of migrant workers leads China in the volume of arbitrated labor disputes. The relationship between reform and contentious politics is due to heightened labor antagonism towards state officials, managers, and capitalist.80 In rural areas, long-standing village and lineage loyalties continue to shape insurgent identities in rural China as social movements draw on themes and images sanctified by tradition and the consequences of reform.81 Violent law enforcement on the one-child policy led to farmers' resistance. Resistance to the one-child policy are popular in rural China, because children were the only guarantee of old-age support and the traditional emphasis on bearing sons to carry on the ancestral line remained deeply entrenched in the rural areas.82 With the development of economy, the demand for land use and environment issues trigger contentions. Local governments have frequently sought to deny the land ownership rights of the natural village altogether. Land disputes have replaced tax protests as the primary trigger of collective action.83 In environmental protest, organizers 78 Perry and Selden, ibid 79 Patrick Thornton, "The New Cybersects: Resistance and Repress in the Reform Era", in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, Perry and Selden, ed., (2000), p. 247; Chung, Jae Ho, Hongyi Lai, and Ming Xia. "Mounting Challenges to Governance in China; Surveying Collective Protestors, Religious Sects and Criminal Organizations." The China Journal, No. 56 (2006), pp. 1-32. 80 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, (University of California Press, 2007) 81 Jing Jun, "Environmental Protests in Rural China"; Peter Ho, "Contesting Rural Spaces: Land Dispute, Customary Tenure and the State"; David Zweig, "To the Courts or to the Barricades: Can New Political Institutions Manage Rural Conlfict?" in Perry and Selden, ed., ibid. 82 Tyrene White, "Domination, Resistance and Accommodation in China's One-Child Campaign," in Perry and Selden, ed, ibid 83 Peter Ho, "Who Owns China's Land," The China Quarterly, No. 166, (June, 2001), pp. 394-442; Guo Xiaolin, "Land Expropriation and Rural Conflict in China," The China Quarterly, No. 166, (June 2001), pp. 422-439. Lucien Bianco, Peasants without the Party: Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China, (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2001) 36 not only appear highly aware of the country's environmental laws, they also know the importance of taking advantage of fissures within the government to find allies or at least sympathizers among the leadership. Villagers in rural China are capable of launching well-organized and forceful protests against environmental abuses.84 The second group emphasizes the relationship between the emerging consciousness of individual rights and contentious politics. This group focuses on how people use the weapon of contentious politics to obtain their political rights and economic interests and the relationship between contentious politics and political liberalization in China. "Rightful" has been a popular term to combine with political contentions. The notion of being a citizen is seeping into popular discourse and urges that people should not underestimate the implications of rising rights consciousness. China's current political and social dilemma confront between an emerging ‘rights conscious peasantry' and rapacious or entrepreneurial bureaucrats. They have held that rightful resistance is a hardy perennial that can sprout wherever leaders make commitments they cannot keep. So long as a gap exists between rights promised and rights delivered, there is always room for rightful resistance to emerge.85 Many scholars pay attention to the relationship between the emerging consciousness of individual rights and political change. They contend that the growing rights consciousness in China may contribute to significant political changes. Particularly, one of the major changes in the last two decades of the twentieth century was a growing sense 84 Jun Jing, ibid; Yanqi Tong, "Environmental Movements in Transitional Societies: A Comparative Study of Taiwan and Mainland China," Comparative Politics, (January 2005), pp. 167-188; "China's Growing Concern over Its Environmental Problems," in Wang Guangwu and Zheng Yongnian, eds., Reform, Legitimacy, and Dilemmas: China's Politics and Society (London and Singapore: World Scientific and Singapore University Press, 2000), pp. 251-276. 85 O'Brien, Kevin, Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Zweig, ibid 37 of rights consciousness on political rights among the Chinese population at large. They even argue "the popular discourse of ‘rights' observable in recent protests indicates a newfound claim to citizenship that poses a fundamental challenge to state authority to produce in China changes as profound as those that occurred earlier in Eastern Europe."86 The emerging consciousness of individual rights is based on Western political tradition. Therefore, some scholars doubt whether these Western concepts can be applied to China's politics. Chinese conceptions of "rights," as reflected in the ethical discourses of philosophers, political leaders, and protesters, provides the basis for questioning prevailing assumptions about the fragility of the Chinese political order. Viewed in historical context, China's contemporary "rights" protests seem less politically threatening. As a result, widespread popular protest in China points neither to an indigenous moral vacuum nor toward an epochal clash with state authority."87 The third group studies the repertoire of contentious politics in China. This body of literature focuses on strategies and tactics protesters used. Contentious politics associates with disruption, such as blocking roads, burning buildings, attacking governmental agencies. Those are very typical tactics in China's contentious politics, and it is widely regarded as an important source of protest efficacy. 88 In order to draw more attention, petitioners in China sometimes exert pressure on government officials via symbolic tactics such as kneeling down, self-mutilation, and 86 Maria Heimer and Stiģ Thøgersen, Doing Fieldwork in China, (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Pei Minxin, ibid; Merle Goldman, China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent, (Harvard University Press, 1981) Goldman, Merle Goldman. Political Rights in Post-Mao China, (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2007) 87 Elizabeth Perry, "Chinese Conceptions of "Rights": From Mencius to Mao-and Now," Perspective on Politics 6, (2008), pp. 37-50 88 Chen Xi, "Between Defiance and Obedience: Protest Opportunism in China", in Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, Elizabeth Perry and Merle Goldman Ed., (Mass: Harvard University Press 2007), pp. 253-281 38 self-immolation, displaying symbols of grief, singing revolutionary songs, and displaying honorary symbols such as military medals. Those symbolic tactics could stir elites and general public sympathies, which can put pressures on the government.89 Tactics of mobilization can employ both traditional lineage and modern technology. In rural areas, popular religion and folk ideologies play pivotal roles in the mobilization process, with the beliefs and rituals surrounding local temples, churches, deities, spiritual masters, ancestral halls, and festivals often providing inspiration for collective mobilization.90 The rapid development of the Internet in China has become an important communication method to mobilize some protests. Mobile phones, text messages, instant messaging, and public forums in the Internet play a vital role to mobilize collective actions. For example, Falun Gong protests used cyber technology. Students' anti- Japanese protests used the Internet and text messages to mobilize.91 The fourth group focuses on how the government deals with contentious politics. Generally, as long as protesters' actions are not political-oriented but self-limiting to purely economic and livelihood demands limited to a single factory, the state tends towards tolerance and limited concessions. However, arrest and imprisonment of labor activists have continued to send a powerful message concerning what the state designates as a most forbidden path of resistance -organized political dissent.92 Although the Chinese authoritarian regime survived the Tiananmen Incident, many analysts argue that it signified a "transition postponed" and the Chinese communist 89 ibid 90 Thornton, Madsen and Jing, ibid 91 Thornton, ibid; Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower, (Oxford University Press, 2007) 92 Ching Kwan Lee, "Is Labor a Political Force in China?" Perry and Goldman, ibid 39 regime would still be in transition someday.93 In those scholars' viewpoints, increasing large-scale social unrest in China is the serious domestic threat to a "fragile superpower."94 Chinese officials are recognizing that the old strategy of deterring and demonizing protest movements is failing. Preventing large-scale organized opposition or violence is essential to the regime's survival. 95 The anticipated regime transition, however, has not taken place. Despite a plethora of strikes, protest, and everyday resistance, no large-scale political movements have challenged party rule.96 Although the protests in China could result in social instability, even regime change, adept state leaders could also manage them. The state is able to regulate social conflicts, including political challenges mounted by social movements. Contemporary China's political order reality, however, is neither as vulnerable nor in a mess as those scholars have predicated. China's Authoritarian Regime and Contentious Politics No government likes contentious politics. Even before the 1970s, scholars took social protest as irrational social threat.97 Traditionally, the central problem in the field had been explaining individual participation in social movements, such as mass society theory, relative deprivation, and collective behavior theory. With the emergence of resource mobilization theory and the political process model after the 1970s, students of contentious politics see those political phenomena as a rational process. The timing and 93 Vivienne Shue,"Legitimacy Crisis in China?" in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen, eds. State and Society in 21st-Century China. (London, Routledge Curzon, 2004), pp. 24-49 94 Shirk, ibid 95 Murray Tanner, 2004, "China Rethinks Unrest," The Washington Quarterly, (Summer 2004), pp. 137- 155 96 Perry, 2000, ibid 97 Neil Smelser, Theory of collective behavior, (NY: Free Press, 1965); Davis Graham and Ted Gurr, Violence in America: Historical & Comparative Perspectives, (University of California Press, 1979); Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, (re-print), (Macmillan, 1979) 40 fate of movements largely dependent upon the opportunity afforded insurgents by the shifting institutional structure and ideological disposition of those in power.98 The regime type does matter for contentious politics. According to statistics, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other social unrest are several times as frequent in Western democracies as they are in authoritarian regimes,99 yet Western democracies somehow live with those "political contentions" without any crisis of regime transition. Przeworski et al. argues that political upheavals are endogenous to the two political regimes and affect them differently. The type of political regime could also shape political leaders calculations on contentious politics. Political leaders in authoritarian regimes, although there is no pressure of elections, are more sensitive to popular resistances,100 because the economic crisis and social unrest usually trigger regime transitions.101 The collapse of East European communists encourages scholars to further the research of the relationship between contentious politics in communist states. Although not all of the communist states experienced large-scale protest, protest destabilized the regime and forced the collapse of the communist system.102 Compared with the regime transitions in Eastern European communists, the reality of the relatively stable communist 98 McAdam, Doug, Tarrow, Sidney, Tilly, Charles, "Toward an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution", in Comparative politics: rationality, culture, and structure, edited by Mark Irving Lichbach, Alan S. Zuckerman. (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, How Social Movements Matter, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 99 Przeworski et al., (2000), ibid, 100 Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly, ‘Threat (and Opportunity): Popular Action and State Response in the Dynamics of Contentious Action', in Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell Jr, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilley, eds, Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 101 Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), Przeworski, (2000), ibid 102 Misztal, Bronislaw and Jenkins Craig, "Starting From Scratch is Not Always the Same", in The Politics of Social Protest, (Minnesota University Press, 1997) 41 regime in China attracts scholars to develop more explanation to understand China's authoritarianism. China's reform is the most important political and socioeconomic trend within China today. This reform was a process that overlaps "state-rebuilding" which means, first, the efforts of recentralization, especially fiscal recentralization, by the central government to strengthen central power, and, second, the efforts to transform China's enterprise system from a socialist-oriented to a capitalist-oriented one. 103 Contentious politics in contemporary China, therefore, can be seen as political consequence of state-rebuilding. As Tocqueville pointes out, differences in patterns of state building produced differences in the opportunity structure of social movements. Centralized states aggrandized themselves by destroying intermediate bodies and reducing local autonomy. This discouraged institutional participation and meant that when confrontations did break out, they were violent and likely to lead to despotism.104 The Tiananmen democratic movement in 1989 was the most important political contention after 1978, the year of China's reform beginning. Market-oriented economic reform leads to inflation, corruption, and the consciousness of political rights. This state-rebuilding process and an ally from inside state authority provided political opportunity for the formation of a social movement. However, without support from peasants and the working class, this movement was crushed by strong state power. Although the state power was recentralized and political reform was suspended after 1989, the state-rebuilding process did stop. The suspension of political reform prohibits any opportunity of the pursuit of political rights. The contentious politics therefore was channeled to the 103 Zheng, (2002), ibid 104 Tarrow, Sidney, Power in Movement. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 58 42 pursuit of interest-based claims. The 1994 taxation reform and the deep reform of state-owned enterprises created new opportunity structures in China. Although existing literature is of various causes of contentious politics which this dissertation has reviewed, all these causes can be attributed to state rebuilding. Zheng argues that contentious politics in an era of capitalistic development in China can be explained in the context of state rebuilding.105All fuses of contentious politics, such as income disparities, social grievance, corruption, political distrust, taxation reforms, rural burdens, capitalism, and unemployment are the side effects of state rebuilding. As this dissertation has discussed, the process of market-oriented economic reform overlaps decentralization in China. China's decentralized power structure, on the one hand, provides an opportunity structure for emerging movements. Perry even found that so long as these protests remain localized and do not challenge central authority, the government has even endorsed and encouraged some single-issue protests.106 Therefore, except when Falun Gong members surrounded Zhongnanhai in 1999, there is no one political contentions point at the Center directly after 1989. Although popular contentions constantly occur in Beijing, Beijing local governments or headquarters of enterprise are targets instead of the central government. China's administrative institutional design provides new kinds of opportunity for contentious politics. In the Chinese administrative system, there is a unique department called the "Office of Petition" (or the Office of Letters and Visiting, xinfang). All administrative layers from the Center down to provinces and counties have the agencies. 105 Zheng, 2002, ibid 106 Perry, 2000, ibid; Peter Hayes, and Stanley Rosen,"Introduction: Popular Protest and State Legitimation in 21st­Century China." in Peter Hayes Gries and Stanley Rosen ed., State and Society in 21st-Century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation (London: Routledge, 2004). pp. 1-23 43 This system was originally designed as a mechanism of ordinary people's political participation. Ordinary people can propose any policy suggestion or appeal personal grievances to the offices through letter or visit. As a mechanism for controlled participation, after the mid-1990s, however, this system began to create strong incentives for collective action, to exert tremendous pressure on local officials to promptly deal with protest, and to increase the costs of repression. Although disruptive actions do not take place everyday, petitions have become a routine contentious politics in China. Therefore, the petition institutions fall into a dilemma: designed to serve the party-state, it can come to be used for popular mobilization.107 Most conventional political science theories on the relationship between regime type and contentious politics have adopted an assumption that contentious politics and an authoritarian regime is incompatible. Juan Linz argues that low and limited political mobilization is a common characteristic of authoritarian regimes.108 Samuel Huntington argues that social force is indefinitely excluded from political roles in a one-party authoritarian polity.109 Adam Przeworski points out that in order to maintain political stability, authoritarian regimes' major strategy tends to prevent collective challenges.110 This explanation framework has developed a cluster of literature on the "dilemmas" of authoritarian regime and contentious politics. The political opportunity structure in China is defined as a "fear of repression" structure. Nondemocratic governments tend to 107 Chen Xi, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 108 Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, Co: Lynn Rienner, 2000), p. 269. 109 Samuel Huntington, Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society, (NY: Basic Books Inc. 1970), p. 17 110 Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1991), pp. 58-59 44 use force to repress social protests.111 Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly propose a "concession-repression" dilemma for authoritarian government that "making concessions tends to trigger more resistance or even the collapse of the regime, but reliance on repression damages the regime's legitimacy when they face social protests.112 Authoritarian regimes are therefore likely to swing between token concessions and repression. Such regimes also run the risk of becoming habituated to repression as a preferred response to protest; if their repressive capacity should ever fall, they are then vulnerable to a massive eruption of protest. Stemmed from this incompatibility logic, political transition theories are trapped in a dichotomous system category (communism or capitalism, authoritarianism or democracy, federalism or unitary). Most scholars are optimistic that the contentious politics will trigger transition of authoritarian polity.113 However, China stands as a "Black Swan" challenge to social scientists.114 Contrary to these incompatibility assumptions, this research finds that the Chinese communist regime did not apply force in the majority of the cases and most social protests organizers and participants were not arrested, despite the fact that all the social protests would be deemed illegal by law. 115 Instead of suppressing the social protests, the Chinese government seems more willing to ignore, accommodate, negotiate, or pay off most of the protesters. The reality of contemporary China's political order is not as vulnerable as 111 Kurt Schock: Unarmed Insurrections : People Power Movements In Nondemocracies (MN: University of Minnesota Press,2005); Teresa Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China's Reform Era, (CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) 112 Goldstone and Tilly, (2001), ibid 113 Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, (1986), ibid; Przeworski, et al., (2002), ibid, Tanner, (2004), ibid 114 Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), p. 4 115 Law of the People's Republic of China on Assembles Processions and Demonstrations, cited from Yang Dehe, The Research on Collective Actions, (Beijing: Chinese People's Public Security University Press, 2002), pp. 275-281 45 those scholars have predicted. In a nutshell, the study of contentious politics and political stability has been a hot topic in the field of China politics and has generated plenty of literature on it. Most available studies confine themselves to the assumption that the authoritarian regime is incompatible with contentious politics. Some studies focus on possible conditions that may trigger political transition by contentious politics.116 This growing literature covers how the contentious politics undermines regime legitimacy,117 how rights consciousness breaks through state-society relations, 118 and how people use the weapon of contentious politics to oppose the government and fight for their political rights and economic interests.119 Those researchers took China's authoritarian regime as a passive target, in which either the state exhaustedly struggles to tackle contentious politics or participants fight for and obtain their rights and benefit. Those studies, in essence, aim to explain contentious politics and political instability rather than stability. In attempting to answer how the Chinese government tackles this "repression-concession paradox," China political observers study it through examining how Chinese governments make policy choice. For example, Cai Yongshun contends that in China, decentralization helps to protect the legitimacy of the central government and the regime in two ways. First, the decentralized power structure allows the central government to distance itself from blame-generating situations when local governments use repression, which is a basic method of avoiding blame or protecting legitimacy. 116 Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden,ed., (2000), ibid; David Shambaugh Ed. Is China Unstable? (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000) 117 Zhao, 1994, ibid; Zweig, 2003, ibid 118 Pei, 2000, ibid; O'Brien& Li, 2006, ibid 119 O'Brien& Li, ibid, 2006; Cai Yongshun, Collective Resistance in China, (CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) 46 Second, given that local governments assume considerable power and autonomy, there can be variation in their treatment towards ways of policy implementation. Such variation may reduce citizens' blame of the political system, and citizens' perceptions of the regime's legitimacy may vary across the country. 120 Therefore, according to Bernstein and Lü Xiaobo, popular resistance in China has not only helped to force the central government to strengthen the implementation of policies favoring citizens but has also contributed to the adjustment of national policies disfavoring citizens.121 Undoubtedly, China remains an authoritarian system. No matter how much autonomy the local governments have obtained, they have never gained crucial control over personnel appointment which is retained by the Center. In addition, after the tax-sharing reform in 1994, the central government seized most of the revenue and then recontrolled budgetary power. Therefore, the concept of "decentralization power structure" or "multilevel power structure" is too vague to reflect the nature of the local autonomy. Although those scholars contribute much knowledge on regime type and contentious politics and possible political transition in China, the role of contentious politics and political stability has not been adequately examined. Fortunately, there is a cluster of literature that addresses this topic. This dissertation categorizes this literature into three explanations: political tradition, political process, and institutionalist explanations. The political tradition explanation tends to apply Chinese conceptions of "rights" and Chinese benevolent governance tradition to understand contentious politics and political 120 Cai Yongshun, ibid 121 Bernstein,Thomas and Lü Xiaobo, Taxation without representation in rural China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ray Yep, "Can ‘tax-for-free' reform reduce rural tension in China?" The China Quarterly, Vol. 177, (2004), pp. 42-70 47 stability. Perry argues that Chinese conceptions of "rights" are different from that of the West's. According to Perry, China's contemporary "rights" protests seem less politically threatening. The Chinese polity appears neither as vacuous nor as vulnerable as it is sometimes assumed to be.122 It is a political philosophy explanation and is hard to test by empirical study. Yanqi Tong and Shaohua Lei conducted research on the relationship between legitimacy and Chinese benevolent governance. They argue that regime legitimacy in China is not based solely on economic performance or physical coercion. It is a moral bonding between the state and society.123 The stability of the regime depends to a large extent on the moral function of the state and the moral quality of its officials. Social protests may be related to regime stability, but do not strengthen the factors that would contribute to democratization-elite division, international influence, and civil society.124 Chinese government gains credits rather than being blamed if social protests were handled through benevolent governance tradition. The political process explanation focuses on political opportunities structure and how the state facilitates contentious politics in the structure. Chen Xi's research explores why there has been a dramatic rise in social protests in China since the early 1990s.125 It is the "Letter and Visiting system "126 that encourages citizens to band together to present petitions. This explanation argues that it is the Chinese party-state that facilitates popular contention. It underscores the contradictions, conflicts, and ambiguities within the state 122 Elizabeth Perry, "Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights'". Perspective on Politics 6 (2008), p. 37 123 Yanqi Tong and Shaohua Lei, Social Protests in Contemporary China: Transitional Pains and legitimacy, (London: Routledge, 2013), chapter 1 124 ibid, chapter 8 125 Chen Xi, 2012, ibid, p. 5 126 Or called the Xinfang System in Chinese. It is a system in which the state welcomes and invites citizens to bring their complaints and grievances to governments to be helped. 48 rather than the decline of its capacity. This approach proposes an empirical study on the political stability and contentious politics. It breaks out of the stereotype that an authoritarian regime is incompatible with contentious politics. However, the Letter and Visiting System is a mechanism to link the state and society. It is not a political opportunities structure, and collective petition is only one type of China's contentions. Compared to the large number of other types of contentions, Chen's research has not provided a strong causal relationship between political stability and contentious politics. The institutionalist explanation focuses on political resilience and adaptability of the institution. This explanation framework examines 1) the capacity of China's authoritarian regime to absorb shocks from contentious politics, 2) the capacity to facilitate contentious politics to future resilience by formal institutions or informal norms. The main body of literature of this approach is on the study of 1) public administrative organizations and institutions, such as people's congress, administrative interaction; 127 2) Chinese Communist Party;128 3) Personnel system;129 4) The Center -local relationship;130 and 5) informal institutions and norms, such as the recurrence of lineage.131 However, this cluster of literature provides grand pictures about the political resilience of China's authoritarianism. Contentious politics is only a minor variable to test their arguments. In recent literature, Cai Yongshun conducts research on the complex relations between political resilience and contentious politics. Cai categorizes government responses to show the outcome of each type of popular protests and under 127 Andrew Nathan, "Authoritarian Resilience," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3, (2003), pp. 13-15 128 Zheng Yongnian, The Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor, (London: Routledge, 2010) 129 Landary, 2008 130 Wang Zhengxu, ibid 131 Lily Tsai, Accountability Without Democracy: Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 49 what circumstance government makes concession or repression. Cai's research differentiates benefit and loss between the central government and local authorities as well as citizens' perceptions on those state authorities. A closer examination of Cai's study, however, shows that this study has not adequately examined the institutional change and political stability. The institutional explanation approach initiates a new phase on the study of regime type and contentious politics, which does not confine itself to the stereotype of the incompatibility of authoritarian regime and contentious politics, and the dichotomous system of political transition. The institutional explanation focuses on more detailed institutional changes rather than a revolutionary grand regime transition, which will understand China's authoritarian regime more appropriately. Conclusion This chapter presented three critical points to the study of contentious politics and China's authoritarianism political stability. First, the definition of contentious politics needs to be taken seriously as a uniform term that can organize the field of political contentions. The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to present theories on the conditions under which contentious politics become involved political transformation. Second, in order to construct theories, this dissertation defined the concept of political stability as "A durable polity, the central government in the polity has capability to challenge endogenous subversions and exogenous shocks." This chapter reviewed existing literature on China's authoritarian power structure, contentious politics in contemporary China, and the relationship between contentious 50 politics and political stability. Despite this rich literature on the topic of contentious politics and China's authoritarian regime, few theories can explain contentious politics and China's political stability. Most of these studies aim to explore contentious politics and political instability rather than stability. On the basis of available explanations to the relationship between contentious politics and political stability, this dissertation will apply the theory of historical institutionalism. Historical institutionalists analyze organizational and institutional configurations where others look at particular settings in isolation; they also pay attention to critical junctures and long-term processes where others look only at slices of time or short-term maneuvers. Researching important issues in this way, historical institutionalists make visible and understandable the overarching contexts and interacting processes that shape and reshape states, politics, and public policymaking. 132 The institutional explanation focuses on more detailed institutional changes rather than a revolutionary grand regime transition, which will understand China's authoritarian regime more accurately. In the next chapter, this dissertation will present causal arguments for the relationship between the multilevel responsibility structure and political stability in China. 132 Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, "Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science," Ira Katznelson and H. Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 693 CHAPTER 3 POLITICAL STABILITY Contentious politics has been correlated to a wide variety of political transformations and instability. However, the contradiction of increasing popular contentions and a stable authoritarian regime puzzles theorists on authoritarian regime and political transition. Scholars have offered few theories that explain how and under what conditions an authoritarian regime keeps stability under the circumstance of increasing popular contention. In particular, it is necessary to construct more systematic theories aimed at explaining the relationship between political institutional arrangement and political stability. This chapter proposes an assumption: the Chinese government sustains political stability through the multilevel responsibility structure. In particular, it will consider four factors that sustain the regime's political stability: political resilience, adaptability, surveillance and monitoring mechanism, and political equilibrium. These four factors will be discussed through case studies to determine if they can explain the multilevel responsibility structure undergirding the regime. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the conceptual framework of multilevel responsibility structure. The second section presents four 52 hypotheses (causal arguments) for multilevel responsibility structure and political stability and the mechanism of how the multilevel responsibility structure maintains political stability. The third section explains data and research in this dissertation. The fourth section ends with the conclusion. The Conceptual Framework of the Multilevel Responsibility Structure A New Conceptual Framework: the Multilevel Responsibility Structure As Chapter 1 argues, if popular contention is the trigger of political transformation, or as Bunce argues that the communist power structure is a subversive institution, then we can anticipate that political instability would occur in China under the increasing popular contention circumstance. However, no literature provides an explanation for the research question in this dissertation. Decentralization literature shows a new institutional change in China; however, the China central government has more and more ultimate power to dominate local/state authorities, a matter which will be discussed in Chapter 6. This variation between contentious politics and political stability suggests that there are factors other than decentralized power structure or political opportunities structure that sustain the regime's stability. The previous main body of literature also assumes that contentious politics is incompatible with China's authoritarian regime. Therefore, in order to understand the relationship between contentious politics and political stability, it is necessary to explore a new framework. In his article "Power Structure and Regime Resilience," Cai Yongshun points out that the state's response to contentious politics is shaped by political arrangements. Unlike the 53 situation where there is only a single authority, Cai argues that the existence of multiple authorities implies that the state's policies toward protesters are inconsistent when the interests of those state authorities differ.133 It is true that local governments have gained more autonomy during the reform era and developed different interests. Even Zheng Yongnian argues that China is de-facto federalism.134 I would like to propose a different perspective-the multilevel responsibility structure-to analyze the contentious politics, state response, and political stability. Following the institutional approach, this dissertation focuses on the institutional arrangement. This dissertation analyzes China's political institutional arrangement through the lens of responsibility, not power. In contemporary public administration, Kent Weaver argues, successful government policies always strike a balance between "credit claiming" and "blame avoiding."135According to Weaver, authoritarian states are less able to avoid blame because of the concentration of power in the hands of the government, which also means the concentration of responsibility and blame.136 In general, the multilevel governance system tends to blur the lines of responsibility and blame. If policy responsibility is shared between different levels of authorities, individuals may not know which government is more responsible for a particular outcome. 137 Complexity allows 133 Cai Yongshun, "Power Structure and Regime Resilience," British Journal of Political Science, 34, (2008), p. 414 134 Zheng Yongnian, "Explaining the Sources of de facto Federalism in Reform China: Intergovernmental Decentralization, Globalization, and Central-Local Relations," Japanese Journal of Political Science Vol. 7, No. 2 (2006), pp. 101-126 135 Kent Weaver, "The Politics of Blame Avoidance," Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 6, No. 4, (1986), pp. 317-398 136 ibid, p. 373 137 Kevin Arceneaux and Robert Stein, "Who is Held Responsible When Disaster Strikes? The Attribution of Responsibility for a Natural Disaster in an Urban Election." Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 28, No.1 (2006), pp. 43-53 54 governments to claim credit for successful policies and shirk blame for undesirable outcomes. According to the classification by Herbert Hart, there are two types of responsibility. One is the functional responsibility which refers to the role and tasks for which the government is responsible, i.e. the areas over which it has policy-making duties. The other is the causal responsibility which refers to the influence an actor had on bringing about a specific outcome. Perceptions of causal responsibility can lead to attributions of credit for positive outcomes and blame for negative results.138 In the context of my analysis, the concept of responsibility refers to what Hart has defined as causal responsibility, i.e. credit/blame for certain outcomes. With the deepening of the reform and rapid economic growth, alongside the rising living standard of the people, came the inequality between different regions and different social groups. Various social grievances emerged. People blamed government much more than they praised the government. In a transitional society, individuals are more sensitive to their losses than their gains. While individual gains usually do not automatically translate into government credits, individual losses would immediately become a governmental responsibility. As the Chinese government is going after credit claiming, people are continuously blaming the government based on their own calculation of personal losses. Within such a context, there emerged the demands for democracy, and reverse racism (i.e., whatever China does is bad).139 The 1989 Tiananmen Incident， therefore, was the result of this social blame. 138 L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law, (Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 214. 139 The concept of "reverse racism" was originally raised in opposition to the Affirmative Action in the United States. Chinese scholar Wang Xiaodong introduced the concept to China and argued that some 55 The 1994 tax-sharing reform changed the Chinese political arrangements. The central government delegated more power to the local government for economic development, and tied the economic performance to the promotion of local leaders. While the local governments obtained more autonomy, they also have to shoulder more responsibility for maintaining local political and social stability. This is a salient institutional change. As a result, this dissertation argues that a structure of multilevel responsibility has developed. While the shifting of responsibility and blame to local governments may not be the intention of the taxation reform, it nonetheless strengthened the layer of local government in the political structure. Consequently, the reform made local government an ideal entity to take responsibility for the Center. The multilevel responsibility structure subsequently leads to the changes in the state-society relations in China. Local governments emerged as distinctive layers in the structure, which replaced work units and collectives as the buffer zone between society and the central government. Local governments became the targets of all the interest conflict because of their economic responsibility. During social protests, lower level governments have to serve as the cushion for the upper level government (see Figure 3.1). Even when some of the social instability was caused by the central government policy, it was local governments that had to take the blame. For example, the 1998 SOE reform has led to large-scale workers' protest. That was the central policy. Yet the local governments in Northeast China had to face the brunt of the workers' protests. As Figure 3.1 shows, the Center can pass blame to provincial government, and provincial Chinese have suffered a "reverse racism" syndrome that is these people believe that whatever is related to China is inferior. See Wong Xiaodong, China is Unhappy, (Nanjing: Jiangsu People's Press, 2009) 56 government can pass blame to county/city government. Higher-level governments pass blame to lower level governments level-by-level. Township, county/city, and provincial government then become the central government's cushions to absorb waves of contentious politics and blame. Thus, it is a multilevel responsibility structure, not a simple divided power structure or multilevel power structure. Prior to the multilevel responsibility structure was a structure of chain-ganging.140 In other words, the central government and local government were chained together, sharing both glories and failures. The multilevel responsibility structure is a structure of blame-avoidance per se. It localizes and stratifies any contentious politics. The central government would stay away from those contentious politics. The shock waves of political contentions would be absorbed by levels of local governments, therefore reducing the shock to the Center. Except for the Falun Gong protest in 1999, there has been no large-scale social protest targeted at the central government since 1989. All the social protests were under the jurisdiction of the provincial government or individual functional ministries. The multilevel responsibility structure also fits well with the Chinese political tradition. In the US, people trust local governments more than they trust federal 140 In the paper, I borrow the concept "chain-ganging and buck-passing" to describe the Chinese authoritarianism power structure. Chain-ganging and buck-passing are important concepts in the field of international relations. Kenneth Waltz argued that a state will either feel so dependent on its allies for security that it allows itself to be drawn into ("chain-ganged") wars in which it has no interest, or be so complacent as to avoid conflict ("pass the buck") even when a new hegemon is rising and threatening its alliance (Waltz, 1979). In short, as one member of the chain gang stumbles off the precipice, the other must follow. In the face of a rising threat, balancing alignments fail to form in a timely fashion because some states try to ride free on other states' balancing efforts. They may do this because they wish to avoid bearing unnecessary costs or because they expect their relative position to be strengthened by standing aloof from the mutual bloodletting of the other powers. (Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks, International Organization, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 137-168) 57 government.141 In China, it is the opposite. People trust the central government more then they trust local governments.142 One of the political legacies is that people only oppose the corrupt officials but never the emperor. This is the core of the large-scale social protest, including peasant riots. In contemporary contentious politics, paying a visit to the upper level government has been one of the major means for redressing grievances. In the eyes of the ordinary people, only the central government could solve their problems. There are crowds of such visitors every day in front of all the major institutions in the central government, such as the Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice, and State Council. During my interviews with local officials, from provincial level down to village level, without exception, all of them were unhappy about the active blame avoidance by the central government. For instance, a vice provincial level official put it bluntly, "the central government gets all the benefits and leaves all the blame to the local government."143 Another city mayor complained, "maintaining stability generates a lot of stress in daily work, yet in the end, we have to be the bad guys."144 Complaints from the local government do not necessarily indicate divisions inside the power structure. With the central government controlling the personnel power, the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. 145 Within the multilevel responsibility structure, the central and local governments in fact play the roles 141 Zhou Li'an, ibid, p. 72 142 Wang Zhengxu, ibid 143 The 1993 reforms allowed the central government to reclaim some of the lost ground in revenue collection. Today, while localities allocate 70 percent of expenditures, they collect only 51 percent of revenues, 60.2 percent if we take extra-budgetary inlays into account. (Pierre Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2008), p. 14) 144 Personal interview 145 Pierre Landry, (2008), ibid, "Introduction" 58 of good cop and bad cop.146 In essence, both are cops. The good cop/bad cop method provides institutional flexibility for the government in dealing with large-scale social protests. The multilevel responsibility structure is the central framework to explain the relationship between contentious politics and political stability in China. This dissertation argues that the multilevel responsibility structure provides an institutional arrangement, in which contentious politics undergird rather than undermine China's authoritarian regime. The core of political stability is a solidary central government. The multilevel responsibility structure ensures the central government gains credits while passing blame to lower level authorities. This dissertation posits that the higher the government is, the less those governments will be blamed. As a resultant effect, the multilevel responsibility structure is the "hard core" of this research project. In the next section, I will discuss how the multilevel responsibility structure works, that is, the hard core's auxiliary hypothesis in this dissertation. A robust institution needs to tackle two challenges: exogenous shock and endogenous subversion. Accordingly, this dissertation will discuss the two challenges of the multilevel responsibility structure in two parts. Part one is the multilevel responsibility structure's capability of political resilience and adaptability. Part two is the multilevel 146 Good cop/bad cop, also called joint questioning and friend and foe, is a psychological tactic used for interrogation. "Good cop/bad cop" tactics involves a team of two interrogators who take apparently opposing approaches to the subject. The interrogators may interview the subject alternately or may confront the su