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By Root 381 0

regional, and urban-rural), the growing tensions between the ruling elite and the masses, the erosion of values, and the simultaneous consolidation of an elite-based exclusivist ruling coalition and the increasing marginalization of weak groups, such as workers, peasants, and migrant laborers.60 Because of these imbalances, some Chinese social scientists warn that enormous risks have built up in Chinese society. Citing rising public dissatisfaction, growing unemployment, and increasing inequality, Wang Shaoguang, Hu Angang, and Ding Yuanzhu argue that China has entered a new period of social instability. 61 Sun Liping, a sociologist, has identified such imbalances as contributing to destabilizing social divisions in Chinese society.62 Unavoidably, such imbalances are reflected in rising tensions in state-society relations. Both aggregate-level data and press reports indicate a sharp rise in the number of incidents of collective protests, violent confrontations, and various forms of defiance and resistance against state authorities.63

Obviously, as expressions of social discontent, such acts of protest are likely the product of the hardships suffered by groups hurt by economic transition, such as peasants and urban SOE workers. (Indeed, protests from these two social groups account for the majority of collective riots.) The rising frequency, scale, and intensity of collective protest and individual resistance also reveal the flaws in the Chinese political institutions that give rise to the buildup of such stress during transition. The breakdown of the system of political accountability governing agents of the state is likely one of the key causes of rising state-society tensions in the Chinese context. State agents who routinely abuse their power and perpetrate acts of petty despotism create victims every day, personify state predation, and bring ordinary citizens into direct contact with state oppression. Private grievances accumulated in such a system are more likely to find violent expressions when institutional mechanisms for resolving them—such as the courts, the press, and government bureaucracies—are unresponsive, inadequate, or dysfunctional.

Additionally, the CCP’s resistance to democratic reforms results in the lack of effective channels for political participation and interest representation, creating an environment in which groups unable to defend their interests are forced to take high-risk options of collective protest to voice their demands and hope for compensatory policies. The totality of such institutional flaws contributes to a systemic propensity toward violent collective protests even in the absence of organized social interests.64 The accumulation and increase of state-society tensions bode ill for political stability in China, especially because the dynamics that generate such tensions trap the ruling CCP in an almost hopeless dilemma. As the CCP’s initial resistance to political reform has aggravated state-society tensions, rising tensions increase the risks that any such reform could get out of control, thus deterring the CCP from undertaking it. This political paralysis further fuels state-society tensions as individual and collective grievances continue to accumulate, compounding risks of future reform.

These difficult challenges and deeply embedded structural problems in China’s closed political system and partially reformed economy further cast into doubt whether China can sustain its dynamic economic modernization. To address this question in this book, I will first explore, at the theoretical level, the causes and dynamics of a trapped transition. The theoretical framework developed will then guide the four empirical chapters that examine the pathologies created by partial political and economic reforms in China.

In developing this framework in Chapter 1, I will draw on the theories on the relationship between economic development and democratization, economic transitions from state-socialism, and the predatory state. Chapter 2 analyzes the ruling elite’s conception of and approach to