China-4E: Eviction, Ethnicity, Environment and Economy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Research has for long warned for an "endgame" of the Communist Party-state in China due to a rise in social conflict ranging from farmers' protests to labor strikes. Contrarily, the Party-state's grip over society has only grown; even more so, since the Xi administration's rise to power. There are overriding socio-economic and geo-political reasons to study the stability of the Chinese Party-state and its institutions. Yet, this research is hampered by two factors. For one, research has been slowed by a lack of integrated tools to measure contention. Moreover, the topic itself poses considerable challenges to ethnographic fieldwork and data collection. China-4E addresses this shortfall through a crucial question: What is the credibility of the Chinese Party-state and how does that relate to the likelihood of its collapse? The question will be pursued in a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary manner: First, by marrying approaches from the contemporary China Studies with development sociology, geography, anthropology and economics to examine the "4 E's" or key arenas of conflict, i.e. Evictions, Ethnicity, Environment, and Economy. Second, by assessing the credibility of the Party-state with the use of the new Conflict Analysis Model (CAM) and the Formal, Actual and Targeted (FAT) Institutional Framework, which assesses divergences between what the state professes its institutions do versus what these actually do, and what people believe they ought to do. Both novel analytical tools - developed by the PI with ERC support - have been widely field-tested, although not yet been applied to assess, monitor, and forecast the credibility of the Party-state. As such they are expected to yield significant, new insights. By using China as an empirical case, the findings of this project will have relevance for the study and understanding of political regimes around the world, their ascendance, collapse, and at times, paradoxical persistence.