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This paper proposes a new framework to analyze social contentions in China from the perspectives of contention motives and mobilization channels, explains why traditional forms of contention do not undermine the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rule, and identifies anti-system contention as a distinctive form of contention that poses the greatest challenge to the CCP's rule. Through analysis of political opportunity structures and mobilization mechanisms that allowed anti-system contentions to rise, this paper argues that since such contentions mainly consist of value-oriented social actors mobilized via informal channels, it would require the Chinese regime to adapt to a more targeted and coordinated model of repression to address the new challenges. The paper further provides empirical case studies to show the effectiveness of the regime's adaptive repression and shows that anti-system contentions in China face their own hurdle to develop into more prominent contentions.

Abstract:
This paper argues that despite the considerable resilience demonstrated by the Chinese authoritarian regime, its power experiences continuous atrophy. With the weakening of the totalitarian control imposed on Chinese society, the current stability maintenance system has been decreasing in its effectiveness. Meanwhile, contentious activities within the civil society gain momentum, and grow in both frequency and complexity. Movements such as human rights advocacy and political pluralism are traversing down a path towards a multilaterally coalesced resistance of authoritarian authority. The final part of this paper proposes and analyzes three possible trends of the development of social contentions in Chinese civil society.

The Chinese government has long enjoyed a higher level of popular trust in its central authority than in its local governments, which means that the Chinese public's trust in government is hierarchical. While existing research has highlighted hierarchical trust's role in bolstering the Chinese regime's rule, the formation mechanism for such trust has not been adequately explored empirically. In this paper, we use data from the China General Social Survey (2010) to explore the formation mechanism of hierarchical government trust and find that economic development, adherence to traditional values, and high frequency of Internet usage all contribute to the decrease of hierarchical government trust. These findings challenge conventional views that cultural traditions and Internet use help sustain hierarchical government trust and show that propaganda is the only variable that sustains the pattern of hierarchical government trust. We further challenge existing literature that views hierarchical government trust as a natural outcome of China's hierarchical administrative structure and empirically prove that such trust is in fact intentionally constructed by the central government through propaganda campaigns and an institutional design aimed at strengthening the central government's authority and at guiding people to divert dissent to local governments. Our findings make an important contribution to the dialogue and highlight a new area of authoritarian durability. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

Existing studies have traced China's high political trust to three sources: traditional culture, the state's success in fostering economic growth, and ideological propaganda. We identify a fourth source: perceived social mobility. We argue that when people perceive a reasonable chance for upward mobility based on personal initiatives and efforts, the status quo becomes more justifiable because individuals are responsible for their own successes and failures. Perceived social mobility thus instills a sense of optimism and fairness and exonerates the regime from many blames, thereby enhancing political trust. Regression analysis of the China portion of the 2007 World Values Survey data shows that respondents who saw themselves as having choices and control in life were indeed more likely to trust the ruling communist party. The respondents' overall level of perceived social mobility is also high, which is consistent with the massive shake-up of the preexisting social order in China's reform era.