State and Dissent: Structure and Agency in the Development of Contemporary Chinese NVA

Abstract

With the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party concluded on 15th November 2012 and the birth of a new Politburo Standing Committee, the Party thus completed its second orderly hand-over of power in more than six decades of its rule over this most populous country in the world, and now, the world's second largest economic entity. However, also mark the year 2012 are various other poignant events that further strain State-civil society relations in this vast country: the suicide of Zha Weilin, the mysterious death of Li Wangyang, the daring escape of Chen Guangcheng from captivity in Shandong, the Victoria Park commemoration of June Fourth with a record attendance, intensification of public protests – mainly related to forced demolition and relocation, industrial pollution and official corruption – apparently emboldened by the solution to late 2011’s Siege of Wukan and the continuing self-immolation of Tibetans since 2009. This paper explores the arduous development of contemporary Chinese nonviolent action (NVA) movements against the backdrop of these events. Seeing contemporary Chinese NVA not as a multiattribute concept, but a multiconcept construct covering a spectrum of civil actions with different ideological and strategic orientations, the paper analyzes the Chinese State-civil society relations with particular emphasis along the pathway of a State domination-NVA assertion nexus with due attention paid to its macro-micro linkages in particular from the interpretive perspective, taking into consideration the problem of structure and agency, taking cognizance of the central role played by individual political actors in giving existence to the system, and the inability for the causal powers of systems and structures to exist without the mediation through the Archerian human agency whose causal powers, in turn, are indeducible from or irreducible to the causal powers of society.

Keywords: Party-State, dissent, nonviolent action (NVA), racketeer State, democracy movement, weiquan, weiwen, domination, assertion, constraints and enablements, structure and agency, reflexivity and reflexives, morphogenesis and morphostasis

JEL Classification: H11, H12, K49, Z18