Executive Summary

Three years into the regime led by President Xi Jinping, China faces new challenges from both within the state apparatus and the society. As economic and some degree of political reforms continue, the state needs to manage resentment and criticism from both the winners and losers of the processes, ranging from the urban rich to the rural poor, from the social elites to the marginalised. New empirical research needs to examine and identify what remains unchanged (i.e. continuity) and what has significantly changed (i.e. innovation and disruption) in both the state’s social control and societal autonomy. The state has changed the ways in social control such as inviting leading businessmen and women to join local People’s Consultative Conference or even local Communist Party organs have proved to be effective in easing social contention. However, new types of mass based social resistance facilitated by new communication technologies and activism networks and other forms of social instability pose potentially fundamental challenges to Xi’s rule.

Against this backdrop, the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) organised a workshop on “Political Reform and Social Stability in China” on 8-9 January 2016 at the Nanyang Executive Centre, Singapore. The workshop discussed fresh data from the field and whether they might point at new directions of research in China studies. The substantive focus was on the dynamic interface between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state and the increasingly diversifying Chinese society. The papers each addressed the highly dynamic nature of state-society contention, cooptation and cooperation in respective fields, and identified the emerging and innovative mechanisms that are employed by either the state, or society, or both to introduce changes, and influence others.

Key messages of this workshop:

1. The incentives for local innovations arise more from local pressure; innovation serves to promote greater stability in governance and unlike in the U.S., geographic contagion effects little in terms of the spread of local policy innovation in China.
2. While the CCP tolerates policy (or even political) critique at times, the fact that China was approaching a fundamental ideological crisis in the late-Hu era has meant that it was crucial for Xi to clamp down on the critics. There are evidence that Xi has renovated some traditional methods of top-down social mobilization often used during revolutionary and Maoist periods to both deliver new policy messages and re-establish CCP popularity in the society. The “mass line” is a case in point.
3. Chinese private entrepreneurs dispose of considerable network power, before gradually developing a collective identity and exhibiting strategic agency via their individual networks on the one hand, and uncoordinated or partly-coordinated collective action to secure their group-specific interests on the other.
4. While party building has facilitated the CCP’s presence in private businesses, its gains has been in quantity and not in quality. Additionally, some of the party’s branches also show signs of morphing into ‘family clubs’ for owners, with the former not playing any substantial roles in the operations of private enterprises.
5. There is a growing but diversifying civil society in China, in terms of origins, background, working experiences, organisational scope, social networks, and linkages with the state and public intellectuals. And there appears to be a nascent collective social identity emerging – with a value neutral collective label – that reflects activist pragmatism.
6. The promotion of faith-based charities in China has augmented the public profile of religion, and legitimised religion as a social force. Significantly, it may have also served as a platform to facilitate its infusion into the practices of the atheist authoritarian party-state.
7. In ethnic minority regions (particularly Xinjiang), tension is rising both between state and society, but also within the society across fault lines. The transformation of Bintuan is meant by Beijing to strengthen its control of stability, but the implementation process will be shaped by its own institutional history.
8. Private wealth is accumulating in rural China as a result of continuous economic growth and reform. However, whether such wealth will bring in social autonomy to small villages and create socially rooted public goods remains to be seen. Complex power negotiations, as well as socio-cultural innovations, take place during the process of building up private welfare funds in rural areas.