China's Environmental Organizations and their Strategic Choice in Popular Protests: From the Perspective of ‘Political Opportunity Structures’

• In Event: Chinese Environmental Protests Linking Up: Towards a Broader Environmental Movement?

Abstract

From the perspective of ‘political opportunity structure’, China’s environmental organizations as well as their leading activists are currently confronted with an unprecedented favorable ‘political opportunity environment’. More successful stories of the popular environmental protests and the increasingly opening-up of national institutions have theoretically shown a broader political growth/participation space compared with the early 1990s. On the practical level, however, this favorable political opportunity structure has presented itself as one kind of ‘indigestible political challenge’. It seems that the majority of environmental protection groups are neither convinced themselves of this real emergence of new political opportunity environment, nor psychologically well prepared for it. Therefore, they often do not choose to take the initiative of joining in or leading the mass environmental protesting events or ‘environmental collective protests’, which are becoming obviously salient in China in recent years. Instead, these environmental NGOs have taken a wait-and-see attitude and position, and even tend to draw a demarcation line with these events. As a result, their strategic choice has undergone increasingly intense critiques from the mass media and society. Meanwhile, this situation further exacerbates the ‘transition confusion’,‘strategy predicament’ and ‘cooperation dilemma’ of environmental NGOs in China.

Author

• Xiaoyan Yang, Department of Political Science. School of Marxism, China University of Petroleum（East China）, Qingdao，Shandong Province, China