Social mobilization in a changing China: A critical review of the literature

Introduction

In recent times, the world has witnessed a rapid economic expansion in China and many other important socio-political changes. China has not only transformed itself into a ‘rapidly urbanising industrial economy’ as defined by the OECD (2015: 33), but has also entered a new stage of economic development. In 2015, China’s service sector already accounted for over 50% of its GDP, about five percentage points higher than the GDP contribution of the manufacturing and construction sectors. The tertiary sector is now the single largest source of employment (42.4%), larger than the primary sector (28.3%) and the secondary sector (29.3%) (NBSC, 2016). All these rapid and far-reaching transformations in China have interested many researchers, resulting in a growing number of academic publications. However, the country’s rapid and incessant transformations, as well as their scale and complexity, tend to not only quickly outstrip much of our understandings of the country, but also to make research efforts too widely scattered to focus on some vital clues to understanding the changes and the characteristics of Chinese life.

Social mobilization is one of such key theoretical clues and characteristics, which has been so apparent over the past decades that some researchers have even coined China as a nation of mobilization; but studies on the topic are primarily characterized by scattered and fragmentary efforts. Such situations have resulted in misjudging the important role of social mobilization in introducing and implementing a series of new reform measures, such as reforms of old-age pensions, social security, health care, and the current push for rural urbanization. For that reason, the current research literature on various related issues, especially on China’s recent major reforms, social mobilization, and mass participation, is still rather incomplete and unsystematic, and research attention has been drawn away from the issues and characteristics that are vital for the understanding of social processes and dynamics operating in present-day China. The aim of this article is to critically review the literature on social mobilization and related studies, identifying the current state of research and problems, and calling attention to the importance of social mobilization as an analytical construct in understanding present-day China.

The research focus on social mobilization emerged in the 1960s when a new wave of socio-political activism was rising and spreading internationally, especially in the United States, China, and some European countries. The 1960s was a time of great socio-cultural changes, which were characterized by widespread and massive social mobilization. Karl Deutsch is regarded as one of the first scholars to respond to the changes of the 1960s and to reinitiate research on mobilizations. In his widely quoted article published in 1961, Deutsch called attention to the importance of social mobilization as a process of social change and as a perspective to consider social changes. He defined it as a process of change which ‘happens to substantial parts of the population in countries which are moving from traditional to modern ways of life’ (Deutsch, 1961: 493).

China became a subject of academic inquiry soon after the social mobilization thesis was put forward, although China closed its doors to the West in the 1960s. Despite this, there are few countries like China where social mobilization has been regularly used as a socio-political mechanism during its economic development – or modernization in Chinese official discourse. As one of the early group of researchers who applied the mobilization concept in China studies, Chalmers Johnson used it to study the resistance movement of the Chinese peasants against the invaders during the Second World War. Although his study is an analysis of mass nationalism, its importance lies in the extension of the concept to studying Chinese society, offering not only an explanation of peasant or rural mobilization in China during the war years, but also an outline of the characteristics of the resistance. In his study, he defines mobilization as a term ‘to describe the dynamic process … that causes populations to form political community’ (Johnson, 1962: 22). So many years have passed since Johnson’s study, and China has transformed itself from an underdeveloped agrarian country into a rapidly urbanizing industrial economy (OECD, 2015). A timely critical literature review is needed to learn what research work has been undertaken, and what has become known about social mobilization in China, especially since it entered its post-1978 era.

This article seeks to fulfill the need for a better understanding of how social mobilization works as a crucial socio-political and -economic mechanism in China now, and what aspects in the literature need to be studied further, among competing views of whether China’s state capacity has declined and what mass socio-political participation, if not using the term democracy, might mean, as often asked by analysts (Saich, 2011). Based on UNICEF’s generic definition of social mobilization, which defines it as a process that ‘engages and motivates a wide range of partners and allies at national and local levels to raise awareness of and demand for a particular development objective’ (2015: 1), this article reviews the literature published in recent decades on social mobilization in China. It is worth mentioning that there are many different types of social mobilization, and that they are differentiated by analytical perspectives, contexts of time and space, or by form and content. Therefore, social mobilization has also been considered in terms of whether it is top-down or bottom-up, spontaneous or evoked, confrontational or conciliatory, statist or non-statist, ideological or material, and so on. As an analysis of social mobilization in China, this article pays attention to whether it is part of revolutionary politics or part of non-unitary political orders in present-day China, under which the abovementioned other types will be incorporated in the analysis. The rest of this review will be conducted under three headings. Following this overview, this article continues with an analysis of what social mobilization-focused studies were undertaken in pre-1978 China, when social mobilization was used as part of China’s revolutionary politics, and what understandings have been gained from these studies. This is followed by a section that looks at other mobilization-related studies in the post-1978 period, which is increasingly characterized by non-unitary political orders. The article concludes with an analysis of the main issues in the field and suggestions for future research on the topic.

Social mobilization as revolutionary politics

There have, since the 1960s, been several studies on various forms of social mobilization in China, providing this review with a theoretical base. Scholars are correct that frequent social mobilizations characterize modern Chinese history, making many scholars believe that Chinese history, or its changes over the decades in the twentieth century, can only be explained from the mobilization perspective (Bennett, 1976; Schenk-Sandbergen, 1973). This shared understanding has resulted in the acceptance of social mobilization as an idea and an analytical construct, which is characterized by being part of China’s revolutionary politics driven first by ideology and later by centralized political power. However, all earlier studies before the late 1970s were conducted within two theoretical contexts.

First, in a broad theoretical context, many debates in the 1960s and 1970s centered on the expansion of Deutsch’s original narrow definition, by which the notion of social mobilization was updated for analyzing highly politicized social movements in China. In addition to Johnson’s study of China’s war with Japan, and Bernstein’s analysis of China’s collectivization campaign, which will be examined next, political scientist David Apter and sociologist Amitai Etzioni also considered Deutsch’s notion from each of their own perspectives. In his modernization view, Apter believes that there are two models of modernization: the mobilization system and the reconciliation system (Apter, 1965). Of course, many parts of his argument have been shown to be hypothetical, such as the point that social mobilizations are likely to be short-lived and ineffective. However, he did expand the idea to include more factors, such as ideology, goals and values, hierarchical power, and individuals. His attention on centralized power has laid the foundation for the top-down perspective on the issue, useful for analyzing some social mobilizations in China.

The new social mobilization concept also attracted the attention of sociologists, who tested the notion in sociological studies and identified crucial links between the state structure and the nature of political opportunities (Nettl, 1967). Just like other sociologists, Etzioni does not accept that social mobilization is the same as modernization, but believes it to be both a macro-sociological concept and a process in which a quick control of resources could be achieved. He argues that social mobilization as a social process can be applied to the control of other resources, such as social, economic, political, and psychological resources. Due to his structural-functionalist view, Etzioni seems to be more interested in the question of where the dynamism of social units comes from, and encourages attention to be paid to emergent properties of collectives rather than of individuals (Etzioni, 1968). He also believes that the features of social mobilizations vary, but offers no further explanations.

Among various criticisms of the Deutschian idea, David Cameron did it more carefully than others, through identifying some key inadequacies in the study (Cameron, 1974). Cameron emphasized three main problems: the failure to explain the mobilization process; the false link between mobilization and modernization; and the assumption of social determinism. His criticism is partly based on Huntington’s argument that macro changes need to be considered along with the changes in attitudes, aspirations, values, and behaviors of individuals and groups (Huntington, 1968). Cameron takes the idea one step further, challenging the view that individuals are passive in mobilization, and calling for attention to the mobilization process, organizations and activities of mobilizing agents, behavioral patterns, and the direction of mobilizations – ideas which still influence Chinese scholars (He and Fan, 2006; JQ Liu, 2010).

Second, in a narrow theoretical context, social mobilization is also applied to explain the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China, from which the research focus on ideology-driven social mobilizations has clearly emerged earlier than other viewpoints. Among early efforts, Chalmers Johnson considered it in regard to the war against the Japanese, arguing that the CCP’s victory is the outcome of its ability and the process by which a people become a nation, instead of the appeals of communism. The evidence used by Johnson is that the CCP failed to gain local support during the Jiangxi Soviet period (1927–1934), but achieved it when the Japanese invasion presented the peasantry with a threat (Johnson, 1962). Johnson’s theory is believed to be problematic by Schurmann as it lacks consideration of actual conditions in the villages, resulting in the overlooking of the dynamics that caused the success of the CCP in mobilizations. Schurmann notes that the CCP did not only use various strategies to penetrate local structures, but also adapted its ideology to the local conditions in China of the time (Schurmann, 1968). Of course, these studies are believed to have overlooked the role of mobilizing agents in favor of external social conditions (Cameron, 1974), but Cell maintains that it was before the Jiangxi period that ‘the Communist strategy of socialist transformation through mass mobilization was forged, tested and developed’ (1977: 13) – an argument which is shared by others in the field (Townsend, 1967).

It is within such theoretical contexts, and partly also driven by the need to understand China’s endless campaigns during the Mao era, that the social mobilizations in China had finally become a research topic outside of the country until the early 2000s, when Chinese researchers also started using it as a framework (Sun et al., 1999; Zheng, 2000). The historical circumstances that gave rise to this research topic, or precisely the political nature of many campaigns in China during the period, had inevitably affected the theoretical orientation and methodological approach employed in earlier studies. As noted, the earlier studies focus on the Chinese communist revolution (Perry, 2012), and therefore they are essentially about revolutionary mobilizations that are ‘based on the promise of either imperialist invasion or of exploitation by landlords’ (Shih, 2002: 11). This research focus was then extended beyond the ideologies of communism and nationalism to include centralized political structure and power, where more attention was given to the social mobilizations that took place in China in the so-called socialist construction period.

Centralized political power-oriented studies are also constrained by the time in which scholars lived, although both the pre- and the post-1949 periods are all characterized by numerous social mobilizations (Goodman, 1994). There were at least two constraints on such studies in the socialist transformation period or the post-revolutionary era. First, Chinese researchers were isolated from global debates, while non-Chinese researchers were also unable to do research in China except through organized visits (Richman, 1969). As a direct result of this fact, analyses are often made along the ‘art and prospects of mass mobilization’ that the CCP used before 1949 (Townsend, 1967: 45), though mobilization was ‘increasingly seen as relics of an earlier and simpler era’ (Harding, 1981: 82). Second, there were a series of political campaigns in the Mao period, but rigid Maoist political control made it impossible for ordinary Chinese, or even lower-level officials, to voice concerns or opinions, let alone systematically study participation in or resistance to many centrally directed campaigns. China went through a period of very frequent political campaigns before the Cultural Revolution, starting with the land reform of the late 1940s until the ‘Four Cleanups’ initiated in 1963 (Baum and Teiwes, 1968; Harding, 1981). In the cities, the CCP also made use of the experience gleaned from its rural campaigns, and mobilized its followers to partake in campaigns one after another not only in the early years when the CCP took over power, but also in the later stages (Gaulton, 1981). All the above campaigns gave rise to a narrow focus on various forms of political mobilization.

Based on the understanding that all mobilizations are politically determined, Schenk-Sandbergen identifies the function of two factors, the population base and resistance, in political mobilization (1973: 684). Unlike Schurmann’s focus on the ideological adaption to China’s socio-political conditions, Schenk-Sandbergen emphasizes the importance of ideology in mobilizations and considers class-consciousness, the CCP’s mass-line and the adaptability of man as three starting-points (Schenk-Sandbergen, 1973). Though other scholars consider ideology just as essential as economic and administrative means (Pye, 1968), too much attention has been dedicated to ideological and political aspects of social mobilization. That is, although analysts have examined almost all of the political campaigns, and identified a few new analytical clues in addition to the appeal of communism and nationalism, the statist top-down perspective and the use of the CCP’s mass-line have attracted more attention from researchers than other factors.

From the top-down perspective, researchers have analyzed China’s rural collectivization and industrialization in the 1950s, while efforts have also been made to analyze social mobilizations during the Cultural Revolution (Andreas, 2007; Bernstein, 1977). Leaving the latter aside because of its complexity, Barry Richman believes that like every country in the postwar years, China focused its efforts on economic development through industrialization, which ‘involves the coordination of human effort and material resources’ through a highly-centralized bureaucracy and a central planning system (Richman, 1969: 21). Franz Schurmann considers the formation of the People’s Commune in rural China in the 1950s as a category of political mobilization. Despite Schurmann’s focus on the link between ideology and organization, their connection with social mobilization was also established through the post-1949 new centralized political power base and system (Schurmann, 1968). Distribution of resources and material incentives are mentioned in several studies of social mobilization, but they are evidently considered to be less important than ideology and the top-down political power structure. This is partially because the CCP relied overly on its ability to organize campaigns when the rural collectivization and industrialization started to run into trouble. Therefore, aspects of resource mobilization have remained underexplored.

The early understanding of social mobilizations as top-down processes in post-1949 China reflects the political changes taking place in the country and the main approaches used by the CCP to run the new political system. As all researchers now know, the CCP’s transition from a revolutionary party to a ruling party was a long and difficult process. The first generation of CCP leaders led by Mao enjoyed their revolutionary experiences and chose to continue using the ideologies of communism and socialism to mobilize rural collectivization and industrialization. What was different from the pre-1949 revolutionary era is that the CCP now became a ruling party and held the centralized political power. The narrow focus on the top-down process is also a result of the research methodology used to undertake studies of social mobilization in China. From the mid-1970s, shortly before and after Mao’s death, researchers gained a fuller understanding of mobilizations in China than before, but China has since also become an experimental ground for testing existing theories. One such effort is Charles Cell’s study of dozens of campaigns from an apparently functionalist view (Cell, 1977). Despite being imperfect, Cell’s analysis challenges the then-dominant understanding that frequent and large-scale campaigns are counterproductive (Baum, 1978). Cell argues that many campaigns seem to flow from the problems at hand and could be broadly divided into three types: struggle, ideological, and economic. Measuring campaigns by their mobilization level, achievements, and limitations, Cell argues that different kinds of social mobilizations are an effective tool for promoting change. During the same period, a conflict perspective was also used and tested, including an analysis of the relation between China’s internal mobilization and articulated hostility to foreign powers (Liao, 1976).

The one-way top-down perspective was challenged from the late 1970s, when China started its reform and introduced its open-door policies. These significant changes provided non-Chinese researchers with opportunities to visit China, undertake fieldwork in certain Chinese regions, and collect data beyond official sources of information. The intellectual academic exchanges between non-Chinese and Chinese researchers have also helped turn attention to some unobserved aspects of social mobilization and new data accessible after the open-door policy. As will be discussed next, Lynn White’s study of the Shanghai region benefits from the change, permitting a focus on the role of local leaders, social groups, and individuals seizing the initiative from the weakening grip of the state (White, 1998). A range of local causes behind social responses would be identified, allowing a more theoretical bottom-up perspective to take shape.

On the surface, social mobilization was also considered from the perspective of mass participation in the state structure: for example, Townsend’s study of ‘how the workers, peasants and housewives of Communist China participate in politics’ (1967: 2). However, just like some other studies that mentioned the concept of mass participation, this aspect was only considered in respect of the so-called mass-line approach used by the CCP before its takeover of national political power. As a revolutionary political party, the CCP was rather adept at mobilizing poor peasants to partake in various forms of revolution, but the Maoist theory of continuing revolution prevented the CCP from modernizing its mass-line approach based on its ruling party status, and analytical efforts were simply directed to how the CCP’s mobilization techniques were developed in the post-1949 period and how mass support for the regime had been created.

More specifically, though the role of mass participation in the public life of post-1949 China is known, attention is narrowly focused on how to mobilize the masses for support of national objectives. Therefore, the roles and actions of lower-level establishments are not only regularly seen from the top-down perspective, but also subject to higher-level authorities (Townsend, 1967). From the top-down perspective, also based on the study of earlier campaigns, Julia Strauss notes that the political campaigns in China are always characterized by ‘control from above, mobilization from below, harsh terror’ (2002: 89). This view has resulted in a general lack of attention in the literature to the dynamics and institutional process, and analysts have simply believed China’s authoritarian system to have restrained mass participation in political life (Moore, 2014). This view has lately been challenged by new findings. Over the same period, attention was also paid to the consequences of unrestricted mass mobilization (Harding, 1981), which became apparent in the ‘Four Cleanups’ (Siqing) or the Socialist Education Campaign initiated in 1963 and which became worse in the Cultural Revolution (Baum and Teiwes, 1968). Such mobilizations were a typical reflection of the Maoist continuing revolution, which rendered China’s party-state system dysfunctional, due to the wholesale criticism of lower-level bureaucrats.

It is worth noting that comparative studies have helped expand the analytical scope of the study of mobilizations in China. One such example is Thomas Bernstein’s study of the Soviet and Chinese collectivization campaigns, which has identified some pertinent aspects for analyzing mobilization in rural China in the 1950s. Both the Soviet Union and China were in need of breakthroughs in agriculture, but their campaigns were found to have achieved different outcomes due to ‘the forces and pressures that each regime had set in motion’ (Bernstein, 1967: 1). In addition to creating optimism, competition pressures were created within the party-state system, and different groups were also mobilized. The awareness of such complexities has given rise to the inclusion of more factors and subordinate processes in the analysis, such as lower-level leaderships, their experience, training and performance, policy continuity, and the interplay of local and state interests. Importantly, the comparative analysis also regards mobilization as a process. Despite the lack of details, and despite the disastrous end to China’s collectivization, our knowledge of social mobilization has been broadened and observers have since seen mobilizations in China as a far more complex process.

China-based researchers introduced the concept of social mobilization into China in the early 2000s, and just like non-Chinese researchers did before them, they started with some historical cases of social mobilization. Since the early 2000s, Chinese research on social mobilization has gone through three stages of development. Leaving aside the last two stages, which will be considered in the next section, the initial phase is characterized by the simple introduction of the mobilization concept and the formation of the Chinese understanding of this analytical perspective. With the exception of analyses by Sun et al. (1999; Sun and Guo, 2000), the earlier efforts by Chinese analysts were designed either to analyze pre- and post-1949 political mobilizations, such as the land reform of the late 1940s and collectivization (Liu, 2000; Lou, 2000; Zhang, 2003), or to discuss the concept generally (Zheng, 2000). Although some have simply accepted the Deutschian explanation, most Chinese scholars have considered the mobilization mechanism at a micro or operational level, regarding it as a type of activity and process to achieve desired outcomes (Gan and Luo, 2011).

China’s decades-long reform has since the late 1970s added many new topics to the field. Research on China has also become highly diversified, going beyond existing knowledge, including the outdated and partial understanding of social mobilization. More researchers have paid attention to the issues emerging from China’s reforms. Among these, the birth-control campaign after 1979 is a reminder that mobilization is still an active part of the post-revolutionary Chinese political process (White, 1990). As Tyrene White reveals, the only change in using the mobilization mechanism is the use of new language such as modernization. Also attempted are in-depth analyses of the mobilization of emotions in China (Y Liu, 2010; Perry, 2002), filling a gap left by the overemphasis on political structure, crisis, and ideology.

Despite the above efforts, which have resulted in a small body of literature, the changes in post-1978 China have, as mentioned above, drawn research attention away from what we have called the focused-studies of pre-1978 social mobilizations. However, this type of study has revealed the importance of mobilization in both the pre- and the post-1949 eras and the various ways in which this mechanism has operated. Of course, these studies have paid more attention to the top-down process than to the bottom-up process and the involvement of individuals, groups, and bureaucrats in social mobilizations. Importantly, many still view various forms of mobilization in China from the revolutionary perspective or the conflict viewpoint, paying too much attention to their impact on the stability of the existing regime, hardly considering them as a normal part of social processes, which has prevented a better understanding.

Social mobilization in non-unitary political orders

As mentioned, the shifting research interests and perspectives taking place in China since the late 1970s and early 1980s have made studies of mobilizations highly diversified and dispersed. The shift initially reflected not only the rapid changes resulting from China’s rural reform of the late 1970s, but also the view that there was a ‘decentralized, demobilized thrust [to] the post-Mao reforms’ (White, 1990: 53). The thrust is believed to herald the start of China’s post-revolutionary phase and adaptive governance, though some disagree with the assessment. Such understandings have even led some analysts to believe in a political normalization, regularized decision making and institutionalized rule in China, while others have accepted the emergence of adaptive governance characterized by a ‘guerrilla’ policy style (Heilmann and Perry, 2011). All these views have broadened the scope of research on social mobilization, giving rise to debates over many issues related to the complex picture of China’s reforms. The latter has not only gone far beyond what was first predicted, but has also been more comprehensive than a ‘guerrilla style’.

Because of a vast amount of literature on the new issues, this part of the article needs to be selective, focusing on three important areas: rural reforms; public policy and public administration reforms; and mass politics and the media.

China’s post-1978 rural reforms have been the topic for many studies of mobilizations, while, as noted above, the one-child policy has attracted the attention of several others. The rural reform was caused by strong grassroots pressure after the Cultural Revolution, the end of which was marked by growing power among the peasants (Kelliher, 1992). Such pressure posed a serious challenge to Maoist rural policies, but it also gave rise to thoughts different from the top-down perspective. Among many studies of the changes caused by rural reforms (Goldman and MacFarquhar, 1999), Lynn White’s study of the Shanghai region pays attention to the issues of when China’s reform started, who initiated it, and how it was implemented from a local point of view. Though her study appears to be descriptive, it identifies local causes of the reform in some areas, especially the factors not previously considered, including the role of local groups and interests in forming policies and programs. Some of these factors are in fact an alternative way of mobilizing resources and people behind a common cause. All these findings are helpful to current discussions as they challenge ‘deeply engrained understandings’ about the top-down nature of China (Fewsmith, 2000).

While the above type of study has broadened our knowledge, giving rise to the idea that social processes, forces, and mobilizations in China are complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-directional, a deterministic understanding of Chinese political economy and culture is still very influential (Shi, 2000). Analysts are often divided by either taking a top-down or a bottom-up approach to some issues, and the interactions of local and central politics are often ignored, which has been one of the most unfortunate omissions in current China studies. Having identified the importance of local forces, more studies have focused on a range of issues at lower levels. However, partly because of the complexity, the issues related to mobilizations in later reform programs, especially rural industrialization, have drawn insufficient attention compared with the efforts of economists. Even those interested in the bottom-up viewpoint have continued to pay more attention to top-level politics and ideology than to other issues (Burns, 1988).

The complexities of grassroots politics are a crucial part of understanding post-1978 rural China, but research efforts are not sufficiently related to China’s changing socio-political circumstances. The latter has resulted in less attention being given to how local groups and interests are involved in local economic programs, which are vital to the restructuring of rural China, and more attention being paid to a few narrowly defined political aspects, such as rural elections, of rural transformation. Other than rural mass protests, which will be considered next, village elections are the topic of many studies done in the past decades (Goldman and MacFarquhar, 1999; Schubert and Ahlers, 2012). What get overshadowed by such research focuses are rural social and demographical structures and many other local factors, as well as social mobilizations in response to rural industrialization (He, 2015). The latter has become a far more critical step in rural poverty reduction and economic growth than introducing political changes, and it has mobilized far more participants across the country than the push for democracy in rural China. Even at the time when the CCP decided to recruit private entrepreneurs into the Party, there were few researchers devoting attention to the local responses (Zheng, 2010). In other words, though many agree that mass mobilization has been a key feature of Chinese political life since the Maoist era (Perry, 2002), the overemphasis on China as an authoritarian regime has prevented attention being paid to new forms of mobilization and participation in China’s rural industrialization.

The second phase of Chinese research on social mobilization coincided with the above-mentioned expansion of research activities in a thematic sense. As a concept brought in from the West, and also as an established analytical perspective, social mobilization has quickly been adopted to examine various emerging issues since its introduction into the Chinese academic world. The extensive utilization of the concept among Chinese scholars is also due to the fact that they have the advantage of living in the country and being able to gather evidence quickly from a wide range of local sources. However, in terms of topics, they have examined the same ones as international researchers, ranging, as mentioned above, from rural reforms, to administrative reforms, to mass political participations. Of course, their research is characterized by its rich detail and its practical nature. It can be seen that hardly any Chinese researchers now accept that ideology or revolutionary politics, such as class struggles, are still behind social mobilizations (Feng, 2011; Zhou, 2008), as they have all devoted their attention to different policy initiatives (Long, 2005; Yang, 2004) and the routinization of public governance (Chen, 2015). Toward the end of this phase, researchers have reached a shared understanding that campaign-style governance is no longer dominant and social mobilizations in China are now being driven by multiple forces (Wen, 2017).

China’s recent push to urbanize rural areas, called ‘the new socialist countryside’ strategy, has renewed research interest in social mobilizations since the mid-2000s (Bislev and Thøgersen, 2012; Harwood, 2014). There is not much attention paid to the political meaning of the word socialism in the name of the campaign, but efforts have been made to examine how this rural urbanization is being operated and how rural regions are being modernized. Recent studies have further identified several factors that shape the campaign, such as the strength of bureaucratic mobilization, rural organizations, and policy priorities (Looney, 2015), while others have focused on the implementation of the plan (Ahlers, 2014). Because the many changes to China’s decision making and rural society have not been systematically studied, especially the nature of mobilizations, recent studies appear to just further establish that ‘mobilization has remained an integral, active part of the postrevolutionary Chinese political process’ (White, 1990: 55). The old-fashioned, narrow focus on the form, content, and intensity of social mobilization seems to have prevented analysts from forming a new explanation of the mechanism in present-day China.

The second main research area in which key aspects of social mobilization have been studied relates to studies of public policy and administration, many of which were initially conducted by economists.

China’s reform was expanded from villages to cities in the 1980s, and the complexities of urban society made it very difficult to repeat what had been learned from rural reforms. One of the main problems came from the party-state system, presenting a situation known as zhonggengzu (literally, intermediary obstacles), and which refers to different types of bureaucratic obstacles in the middle levels of the party-state system. Bureaucrats working within the system were reluctant in the 1980s to implement reform policies, which even forced the CCP leadership to initiate administrative reform to remove the obstacles and to make the system more efficient in mobilizing participation in reforms (Goldman, 1994). Since it was impossible at the time, just years after Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to launch a full-scale administrative or political reform, zhonggengzu was dealt with in several ways. The small administrative reform measures included changes to central–local relations to encourage lower-level bureaucrats to support reform policies, and the introduction of market mechanisms into management to bypass parts of middle-level bureaucracies (Breslin, 1996; Li, 1998). All these measures in the early stages of urban reforms improved the institutional environment for implementing new strategies and broadened the channels appropriate for mobilizing mass participation.

In addition to the issue of problematic bureaucracies, attention has also been given to the ways in which resources as a vital component of central–local relations could be better mobilized. At first sight, China’s one-party rule would indicate it merely has to assert its power in order to mobilize resources, but the centralized power system also finds it tricky to mobilize individuals into embracing reforms. Fiscal decentralization has been one of the CCP’s tactics since the 1980s to deal with local challenges, especially with regard to central–local relations and bureaucratic obstacles. Trials of a revenue-sharing mechanism were undertaken as early as 1977 and the new mechanism was introduced in 1980 (Shirk, 1993).

Though fiscal decentralization does not always work (Shue and Wong, 2007), it has been modified repeatedly as an incentive and a mechanism to inspire local support for reforms, including the recent rural urbanization plan (Kung et al., 2013). There has been a transition from political mobilization to resource mobilization, in which the political and economic dynamics between the mobilizers and the mobilized have been transformed, while the role of bureaucratic agencies at different levels has also changed, becoming as critical to the process as central decision makers. Therefore, some observers even believe that there has been a trend to reverse statism in China, and that the pervasive localism emerging in the late Maoist era has further evolved into a dynamic force (Whiting, 2000).

Some political economists have also considered the social mobilization issue in light of the many policy changes, but focusing explicitly on China’s state capacity. Economic reforms in China have since the beginning experienced the fluctuations of economic cycles, producing many ups and downs over the decades. However, the state’s ability to ‘mobilize all sorts of society’s resources, to unite all forces in society’, as well as to form a consensus, has been regarded as a vital mechanism for driving through reforms (Wang and Hu, 2001: 3). Though some analysts believe that there is an erosion of ‘the ruling regime’s ability to mobilise political support’ (Pei, 2008: 168), the CCP is still believed to have the ‘organizational capacity’ to launch political campaigns (Zeng, 2013: 126). Of course, there are few analysts who believe that recent campaigns are characterized by the Maoist style, but social mobilization is indeed found to be an effective means of implementing new initiatives and driving the economy out of one downturn after the other.

The third key area in which social mobilizations are analyzed is relatively new, which is its utilization in mass politics and mass media.

China’s ongoing reforms have resulted in several rounds of decentralization and many new forms of mass politics, and rural resistance, urban labor protests, and student protests, especially the one in 1989, have all attracted the interest of China analysts (Zhao, 1998). Recently, social mobilization is even seen as an effort to inspire ‘people to take action and prepare themselves for the future’ (Chapin, 2014: 519). At the same time, the dynamics of various social movements as a type of mobilization have also changed greatly, and the people involved are no longer those left behind by China’s rapid growth, but members of the so-called new middle class (Wasserstrom, 2009). Many popular protests, including those by middle class groups, are still political, but the traditional approach of politicizing protests is not widely used any more as protests are now usually set off by specific events, rather than ideology (Bruun, 2013). All these non-institutional mobilizations or social activism are now seen to be part of new social mobilizations in China, but they often take the form of popular expression of discontent and protests, bottom-up modes of social mobilization (Cai, 2010). Therefore, the problem of considering various forms of social mobilization from a diverse range of perspectives not only remains but has also reached the extent that many related issues need to be reconsidered theoretically.

Different from the above-mentioned forms of social mobilization, mass protests have been so widespread or routinized that they are now considered to be a crucial sign of the emergence of new models of state–society relations (Chen, 2012). These new models or forms seem to suggest that a mass perspective, a different type of the bottom-up view, of socio-political life has been developed and adopted as a way of looking at contemporary Chinese society and politics. However, analysts have different views about how to explain the bottom-up initiated mass mobilizations, and many still consider them from the conflict point of view, tending to separate challengers or protests from not only state- or elite-led mobilizations, but, importantly, also from other normal socio-political activities. Though the dynamics of contention perspective is brought into the discussion (Liu, 2015; O’Brien, 2008), interactions between the state and other challenging agencies are still considered disjointedly by some, and the paradigms of either high democratization and activism or popular riot are so dominant that they have hindered the process of forming a better understanding of social mobilization.

Despite many theoretical distractions, the studies of mass protests have since the 1990s developed some shared understandings. While more researchers now accept the routinization of protests has not destabilized China’s political system as predicted, other analysts also agree that the protests and other forms of activism as a disruptive force are becoming an important form of political participation in China (Cai, 2010). Such viewpoints imply that social mobilization has not only become part of normal socio-political life in China, but has also been expressed in different ways. Because of this understanding, more analysts have turned their attention to the various forms of activism and mobilization, especially those that mainstream elites still refuse to accept. However, politics in China are now polarized, and political elites still do not recognize certain kinds of activism and mobilization as a way of social participation, which remains a big challenge in its new development phase. At the same time, some studies of rural activism are often guided by urban-biased ideas or imported concepts and theories, and some inherent factors, such as clan networks, are overlooked (Ma, 2006; Shih, 1995).

Fortunately, modern China has never stagnated for lack of change and diversity. In the past decades, while more local and global factors have been closely intertwined to bring about changes, new communication technologies, including new media, as a type of disruptive force, have also played a critical role in political participation and activism. The Chinese media started their partial commercialization in the 1980s, which has continued ever since, while still being controlled by the party-state. The role of the media in mobilizing social and political participations from both top-down and bottom-up has been altered and accelerated by the Internet and other new communication technologies. Because of the changes, the old dichotomies of ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’, ‘freedom versus control’, ‘regime versus resistance’, and ‘co-evolution’ of the new media environment and civil society are all believed to be no longer sufficient to explain what has taken place in China (deLisle et al., 2016: 3). While the new media environments have actually created more opportunities for mass activism and mobilization, researchers are still unable to identify any new approach but to generate other dichotomies based on the theoretical separation of society and state. What is promising now, however, is that some new theories have been put forward to analyze the Chinese state, such as responsive authoritarianism, and the notion of political contestation. What is needed now is to consider new forms of social activism and mobilization not only as a singular, but also as a normal part of life in China.

It is because of the above efforts, which have been made simultaneously in China, that Chinese research on social mobilization has entered its third and current stage, which is characterized by a shared belief that social mobilizations in China now take place in the new context of non-unitary political orders. That is, Chinese researchers this time are well ahead of their international peers in theorizing what social mobilizations are about in China. The above-mentioned state capacity view has given rise to a dynamic interaction viewpoint, which stresses that new initiatives are not one-sidedly based on a state strategy, but often decided ‘by day-to-day interactions between state agents of various levels and different social groups in multiple arenas’ (Zeng, 2013: 24). To explain why individuals can be mobilized to partake in mass protests when the state encounters grave problems in mobilizing the whole nation behinds its goals, the notion of the ‘micro-foundations’ of the macro-phenomena is introduced to stress the importance of both the micro–macro link and the new relations between the elites and masses (Zha, 2015: 1). Importantly, China’s domestic politics have been transformed, although many have not yet realized it or refuse to accept it, entering what researchers in China have called the new era of boyi (strategic game-playing) (Lee and Zhang, 2013; Xu and Cui, 2011), which is characterized by political conflicts and bargaining among different forces or groups at different levels (Liang, 2014). The hierarchical top-down process and campaign-style governance have also been transformed and partially replaced by new and complex forms of social mobilization.

Conclusion: Toward an improved understanding

This article has reviewed the literature related to past and recent research on social mobilization in China, focusing on a range of issues crucial to the understanding of social mobilization as a key social mechanism in the country. Since its introduction, the concept has been applied beyond what Deutsch defined, to study not only various campaigns but also a range of China-related topics. The latter efforts are clearly made in two stages, and have prepared the ground for further study of social mobilization in contemporary China. Based on this review, there is a need to consider social mobilization and its use not only from a comprehensive viewpoint of taking more factors or aspects of the reality into account, but also from a dynamic view to treat mobilizations as interactions of multiple organizational and individual forces. This suggestion also leads to the following points that would be helpful to future studies.

First, social mobilization is not only still in use in China, but is also playing a more crucial role in organizing and directing the social, economic, and political life of the country than ever before because of the country’s continuing high-speed economic growth and its high level of mass participation in socio-political activities. As shown in this review, there have been various discussions as to whether social mobilization still plays its role in China, but also analyses that dispute the idea that post-revolutionary regimes ‘lose capacity and desire to use mobilizational means’ and underline that ‘mobilization remain[s] an essential instrument’ in China (White, 1990: 54). However, some researchers have challenged the latter part of the argument, which is partly because there is a lack of in-depth studies to support it.

While the above confusion has resulted from the many changes in China, especially those related to party-state systems and governance or social control practices, the emergence and diversification of numerous studies of many new issues have also further blurred our understanding. Since the late 1970s, there have been numerous efforts made by Chinese reformers to identify new mechanisms to replace or supplement old governance practices. Since the responsibility system was tried in rural China, it has been regarded as a practical and efficient way of connecting national interests with individual benefits. However, the complexity of urban reforms has resulted in a lack of focused attention to the use of the social mobilization mechanism, and the fragmented understanding of all these issues has appeared to some analysts to be the dilution of political authority and social mobilization in China. Therefore, what requires attention is not only how the mobilization mechanism has evolved into what it is now, but also how it has lately been utilized and its nature and new characteristics.

Second, the key issue in forming a new understanding of social mobilization in China is not only to go beyond the current knowledge of both top-down and bottom-up processes and their interactions, but also to examine and define the new ways in which the social mobilization mechanism is used and its political-economic nature. As early as in the 1960s, Chalmers Johnson already argued that social mobilization in China is a dynamic process, a view which has since been shared by other researchers, but its true meaning has not been adequately defined. Some analysts have paid attention to its temporal dimension, while others have emphasized the role of different forces in the process. Lately, because of the far-reaching changes in China, it has now become even more difficult than before to tell what forces and motivations are involved in social mobilization. Without such understanding, social mobilization in China is no longer a known process, and there is hardly anyone who can answer how each part of the system is now mobilized and takes part in the process. What has happened since the reform is a far more complex process than earlier studies understood. Social mobilizations are found to involve not only sharing ideas and aspirations, utilizing institutional resources and powers, but also distributing and channeling material resources and benefits, in which bargaining for the better interests of the mobilized and the mobilizers, and negotiations and even protests have taken place at all levels.

As mentioned, the new rural household responsibility system was expanded to other sectors in Chinese cities, and one of the many new practices in non-agricultural sectors has been called the performance-based assessment system. Having been led by the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping, the system fitted China’s need to reform its economy at the time. However, it has weakened the ideology-based rule, and social mobilizations in China have since shown a trend moving toward a new politics based on shared needs, material interests and benefits. While some analysts are still using the outdated top-down approach, more have realized that grassroots groups, lower-level officials, and citizens have played a crucial role in initiating and driving various forms of social mobilization. These new forms can be defined as the bottom-up process. But social mobilization is no longer operating in a dichotomized fashion of top-down and bottom-up. Now even the interactive approach is no longer found to be credible in explaining how the two processes have worked together. All these factors should be examined, especially the nature of common interest-based social mobilizations.

Specifically, the most obvious omission in the literature on social mobilization in China is the lack of discussion of the socio-economic and socio-political dynamics in present-day China, and their specific nature, on which various social mobilizations are based. China’s domestic politics, political structure, and power relationships have been transformed considerably, and have entered what Chinese analysts have often called the era of boyi (strategic game-playing). Regardless of whether the notion of boyi is an accurate explanation of China’s current political situation, social changes need to be considered when analyzing the use and role of social mobilization. Numerous Chinese research publications have suggested that China in this current boyi era is no longer guided by any rigid ideology or doctrine as some researchers have incorrectly assumed, but instead, it is characterized by a new political order that has brought almost all social classes and sectors into the political equation, turning China into a country that is evidently full of political tensions and negotiations among different social forces and groups (Tang, 2014). It is precisely under such new circumstances that various social mobilizations are initiated and organized. However, such new understanding has not been reflected in the social mobilization literature published outside China.

Third, the process of developing a new explanation for social mobilization has been particularly challenged by the issue of how to define the many popular protests and activism in China. This has been difficult because popular protests in China are normally directed against government policies and institutions, and therefore often considered from the conflict perspective. Similar actions in several other countries are usually seen as part of normal social life, but those taking place in China are regarded not only as conflicts, but not normal either, and impossible to be addressed under the current system. Such theoretical orientation has, of course, been challenged by the relatively stable development that China has attained so far, but these theories remain influential, preventing analysts from viewing socio-economic and socio-political life in China as normal as it stands. There is ample evidence indicating that conflicts have accompanied China’s transition, and that both sides of the conflicts should be considered as participants in societal level negotiations. Evidence from a few less-politicized fields also suggests that there has been a trend toward minjin guotui, indicating that private sectors have advanced while the state is retreating (Lardy, 2014). This trend is not limited to economic activities, but has also spread to other areas, and social mobilization has, to some extent, played a role in compensating for the various issues caused by managerial decentralization through letting grassroots groups and citizens seek to fulfill their needs. However, these emerging relationships between the state and society, especially some forms of social mobilization, can only be understood by looking beyond the notion and paradigm of irresolvable conflict.

Finally, this review has recommended a comprehensive and dynamic approach, which should be helpful in addressing an age-old problem in studying social mobilization, which is the overemphasis on authoritarianism. Since the work of Deutsch, political scientists’ involvement in the study has led to more attention to authoritarian regimes and to the top-down process. This review has revealed that researchers have analyzed new and complex forms of social mobilization in China from different disciplinary viewpoints. Such interdisciplinary efforts have made it clear that the social mobilization mechanism has not only been applied in non-political contexts, but also has often been involved in multi-step, multi-directional, and multi-faceted processes, or interactions. Because of some dogmatic beliefs, many previous studies have separated not only some forms of social mobilization from others, but also studies in one field from those in other disciplines, making it difficult to reach a clearer understanding of how social mobilization is used in China, and resulting in the tendency to ‘know more and more about less and less’ (Shambaugh, 2013: ix). The approach suggested by this critical review stresses that analysts should go beyond disciplinary and political boundaries, and take more factors than those already known into consideration to make qualified analyses of social mobilization in present-day China.