State and Society in China’s Environmental Politics

Abstract

Over the course of the debate on social activism in China different concepts have been advanced to explain the emergence of new social organizations within the context of an authoritarian one-party-state. First, this article will briefly review the major contending perspectives on relations between the party-state on the one hand and social organizations on the other. It will argue that neither society-centered nor state-centered approaches can satisfactorily explain the current politics of social activism in China. Instead it will propose a third perspective building on Migdal’s “state-in-society” approach to reconcile the perplexing ambiguity of this relationship. This article will contend that if we are to make sense of seemingly contradictory trends in state-society relations, we need to fully recognize the fragmentation of both the party-state and the emergent civil society. The second section will discuss the changing dynamics and strategies of environmental groups within this political environment. It thus places their interaction with the state at the center of analysis. In particular it highlights new and more contentious strategies for environmental advocacy and the greater reliance on the law on the one hand and incipient links between state and social actors on the other. It argues that the fragmentation of the state provides opportunities for social activists to become “embedded,” yet at the same time can be a source of considerable risk for them. In the conclusion we come back to the question of how to best understand recent trends in environmental politics and state-society relations.