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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
160502
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recent legal reforms in China, particularly amendments in 2014 to the Environmental Protection Law, have encouraged environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) to embrace legal strategies in their advocacy. However, the wider significance of such strategies remains understudied and underestimated. This article examines one such example in Xiamen, Fujian Province, where an ENGO, incensed by the conversion of walkways into parking spaces, led the first administrative lawsuit in the name of ‘pedestrians’ rights’ (行人路权) in China in early 2015. Based on digital ethnography and participant observation, the case illustrates three salient points: first, legal mobilization is conflict-laden and confrontational; second, depoliticized legal actions belie the development of popular critical consciousness; and third, professional ties have become more instrumental than connections with state officials. The net result is then an embedded activism that evinces disembedding tensions. This questions conventional expectations over Chinese environmental activism, that it is non-confrontational and overdependent on personal relations with local officials. In addition to elucidating the disembedding processes and experiences absent in previous ENGO literature, this exploratory research offers a snapshot of lawful activism among environmentalists, illustrating the wider opportunities and challenges accompanying ‘the turn to law’.
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| 2 |
ID:
186943
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| Summary/Abstract |
Land expropriation, where peasants’ property rights are encroached by the state, has been recognized as a primary source of social dissension in rural China. Since the end of the last century, the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) has provided people with a legal weapon to defend themselves against violations by state power. Drawing on the theory of relative deprivation, this paper proposes that peasants are more likely to sue the state when they feel deprived. To examine this hypothesis, we first present a case study to depict the causal process and then use quantitative research to improve the external validity of our findings. We created a novel and unique database of prefecture-level administrative litigations and relative deprivation for Poisson regression analysis. The quantitative results prove that the more peasants feel relatively deprived, the more likely they are to sue the state. Furthermore, the positive effect of relative deprivation on administrative litigations has become more significant over time, implying peasants’ growing awareness of legal resistance. This paper concludes that a critical step towards eliminating social inequity and maintaining social stability in rural China is to reduce the relative deprivation of peasants by, for example, allowing them to share in land value appreciation in the process of urbanization.
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