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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...
The influence and power of some OECD states is under threat but China appears to remain astonishingly flexible, economically potent, and politically strong. How accurate is this view? To answer this question, major aspects of Chinese economic regulation that were adopted in the country’s progress towards capitalist modernization are examined. The analysis requires a historical reconstruction of how China changed the way it intervenes economically and politically, especially with regard to the institutions of the central state. Such a reconstruction reveals that, since the 1990s, the central state has indeed increased its steering capacities. These capacities have a distinctive basis that includes acceptance of a state-centered approach, idiosyncratic innovation policies taking place in the "shadow" of the state’s hierarchy, and the ongoing influence of the communist party. An all-embracing controlling power is, however, not detectable. What does exist in China’s competition-driven system of “statecapitalist” regulation, is a set of limits on the state’s capacity to govern.
For more than two decades, the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (NPOPSS) has been managing official funding of social science research in China under the orbit of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) propaganda system. By focusing on “Major Projects”, the most prestigious and well-funded program initiated by the NPOPSS in 2004, this contribution outlines the political and institutional ramifications of this line of official funding and attempts to identify larger shifts during the past decade in the “ideologics” of official social science research funding – the changing ideological circumscriptions of research agendas in the more narrow sense of echoing party theory and rhetoric and – in the broader sense – of adapting to an increasingly dominant official discourse of cultural and national self-assertion. To conclude, this article offers reflections on the potential repercussions of these shifts for international academic collaboration.
Mobilizations in defence of ‘companion animals’ have become major sites of contestation in Chinese society in recent years. They often reject the existing ambiguity between the use of these animals as pets and as meat, demanding unambiguous respect for and protection of dogs. However, in a society where inequalities are as significant as in China, where the level of poverty, sickness, and environmental and industrial tragedies appears overwhelming, one may ask how pets’ destinies have become such a symbolic focus and source of occasional fury – for both Chinese and foreign audiences. Taking this question seriously, this article aims to examine such mobilizations in China – demanding the protection of dogs – as a starting point to theoretically unwrap the more general problem of how the perception of certain beings as ‘weak’ and as deserving the protection of society is socially constructed, and what the related choices imply. I argue that to better understand these mobilizations to protect dogs, we should not separate the focus of the calls for protection from the social web of relationships and oppositions in which they are entrenched.
China’s law to control international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) has sent shockwaves through international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society and expert communities as the epitome of a worldwide trend of closing civic spaces. Since the Overseas NGO Management Law was enacted in January 2017, its implementation has seen mixed effects and diverging patterns of adaptation among Chinese party-state actors at the central and local levels and among domestic NGOs and INGOs. To capture the formal and informal dynamics underlying their mutual interactions in the longer term, this article employs a theory of institutional change inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s distinction between rules-in-form versus rules-in-use and identifies four scenarios for international civil society in China – “no change,” “restraining,” “recalibrating” and “reorienting.” Based on interviews, participant observation and Chinese policy documents and secondary literature, the respective driving forces, plausibility, likelihood and longer-term implications of each scenario are assessed. It is found that INGOs’ activities are increasingly affected by the international ambitions of the Chinese party-state, which enmeshes both domestic NGOs and INGOs as agents in its diplomatic efforts to redefine civil society participation on a global scale.