The Impact of Contemporary Chinese Contentious Politics

Abstract

This book has analyzed the cause, the driving force, and the system of contemporary Chinese rural contention politics in the previous chapters. In this chapter, we will examine the impacts of these rural contentious politics. In the study of Western contentious politics, the analysis on the impact of contentions is relatively lacking. The main difficulty in such an analysis lies in the simultaneous effects caused by the power of contentions and the targets of the contentions. Thus, it is hard to determine which effect is responsible for which result (O’Brien and Li 2009). The existing research on this problem follows two ideas: one is to attempt to isolate the direct result of contentions from the whole result and to figure out the possible result without contentions. This method allows us to control for other variables in order to determine causality. Another method is to emphasize the fact that the contentions are caused by the interaction between the contention participants and the contention targets. Thus, the focus of the analysis should not be on the impact of contention participants and contention targets but rather on the given outcome formed by the combined effects of social forces (O’Brien and Li 2009). In this chapter we will adopt the latter method in order to examine the consequences of contentious politics through interactions between participants and the government.