“Not-In-My Backyard” (NIMBY) Activism in China: Why Some Succeed or Fail?

• In Event: Pro-Democracy Protests

Abstract

To date, social protests have become “routinized” in authoritarian China (Chen, 2012), but only a few of them have successfully extracted concessions from the state. Extant literature has long emphasized how dissidents frame their grievances in the manner of “rightful resistance” (O’Brien and Li, 2006) or disguise collective activism “as if” individual contention (Fu, 2016). Yet little attention has been paid to an important yet underexamined actor – state-endorsed environmental NGOs (SENGOs), a group of civil society actors that acquired formal registration status from the autocrats. Their survival hinges not only on their loyalties to the regime but also on their ability to channel dissent. The latter task cannot be achieved without maintaining some credibility as an opposition.
Drawing on a novel dataset of 119 anti-incinerator movements across China between 2006 and 2019, this study finds that in localities with intense intra-competition between SENGOs (as proxied by the number and diversity of the activities organized by them, whether officials attend their events, and whether their advocacies were mentioned or even adopted by the state authorities), the disgraced SENGOs are more likely to side with the protest by taking relatively less risky albeit more visible act. That is, to join the movement with the provision of their professional knowledge.
The effects of their presence are mixed, depending upon the perception of the crowd. To the less-resourceful protestors, SENGOs can help expand their movement repertoires (both formally and informally) while constraining the radical flanks from further stepping up the violence. In turn, the local authorities are more likely to give in (i.e., suspension or relocation of the plant). By contrast, the more resourceful participants (both physically and virtually) perceive the involvement of SENGOs as (local) state’s attempt to divide the movement, and hence galvanize themselves into more disruptive actions. As a result, the outcome turns perverse.
The differences in movement dynamics were investigated through comparison over two recent anti-incinerator contention in China – the successful one in Zhaoqing (2017) and the failed one in Anqing (2018), with the use of participant observation, on-site survey, and semi-structured interviews with 97 protest participants, SENGOs representatives, and officials from various levels of government.
These findings contribute to the scholarship on popular contention in China, and more broadly on state-society relations in non-democracies. First, it relaxes the assumption that state-endorsed CSOs are unitary actors that are always uniformly loyal to the regime. By advancing competitive logic, it allows us to peek into internal strife/rivalry among them and examine how the process of vying for official recognition shape the trajectories of contention. Specifically, as the cases will show, they matter not (just) because they act as mediator between the state and the crowd but (also) because their presence alter the perception about in-group/out-group identity from within the movement. Second, and related, while prior research has treated state-pliable civil society organizations as part of preventive social control, the role they play once protest erupts remains unexplored and this study seeks to fill in this gap. Taken together, bringing SENGOs into analysis can shed lights on the more nuanced definition of pluralistic civil society.

Author

• Steven Yet, University of Toronto