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Stability maintenance at the grassroots: China’s weiwen apparatus as a form of conflict resolution
(2013)
This working paper explores the history and potential of “stability maintenance” (weiwen) as a form of conflict resolution in China. Its emphasis on conflict resolution is novel. Previous examinations of the weiwen apparatus have concentrated on its political function, namely to manage resistance within society and maintain the authority of the party-state. This avenue of investigation has proved fruitful as a means of characterising the political motivation and the higher-level strategies involved in stability maintenance. Nonetheless, there remain significant conceptual and empirical gaps relating to how stability maintenance offices and processes actually function, particularly out of larger cities and at local levels. The research described in this paper aims to consider the effectiveness of stability maintenance as a part of the “market” for conflict resolution in local China, and to test the hypothesis that conflict resolution as facilitated by weiwen is the most pragmatic and effective means of actually resolving conflicts in the current Chinese political context, notwithstanding the closeness of the stability maintenance discourse to state authority and its relative distance from rule of law-based methods of dispute resolution...
After more than a decade of post-socialist transition, transition theories are increasingly criticised for their inability to grasp the new post-socialist reality. However, even in the light of political, economic, social and cultural restructuring processes taking place on a global scale, the structural legacies of socialist and pre-socialist development are not erased. On the contrary, they continue to play an important role by filtering the impact of global tendencies upon post-socialist societies. With reference to a case study from the Romanian city of Timisoara I will address in the following the ambivalencies connected to the efforts of local elites in the process of implementing global-level requirements in a post-socialist environment.