Designing Contentious Politics in Post-1989 China

Abstract

This article proposes a new approach to studying China’s contentious politics in the post-1989 era. This approach treats China’s central government as an institutional designer whose policies on social conflicts shape popular contention. This approach offers four insights. First, protests can provide useful information to the state about citizen grievances, but only if they are costly enough to ensure that only serious claimants engage in them. Second, protesters routinely forego strategies that would give them a stronger bargaining position because the state benefits from maintaining a consistent policy of rewarding only protests that pursue weaker strategies. Third, the contradictory “safety valve” and “single spark” metaphors for protest can be reconciled by distinguishing between the vertical flow of information from citizens to state and the horizontal flow of information from citizen to citizen. Finally, the article suggests why protests have been tolerated when apparently safer information-gathering institutions exist.