Dual mediation and success of environmental protests in China: a qualitative comparative analysis of 10 cases

ABSTRACT

Existing studies of protest outcomes have focused on the effects of organizational characteristics, disruptive tactics, and political opportunity structures. However, most studies, especially those situated in Western democracies, fail to adequately account for the paths to successful protests in authoritarian regimes like China because of the structural differences between the two types of regimes. By incorporating insights from studies of protests in China and communication studies, this article extends the political mediation model and argues that the success of protests is shaped by the tripartite relations among protest forcefulness, favorable political contexts, and media exposure. In face of joint occurrence of elite support and media exposure, large size of protest is sufficient, whilst large size and disruptive actions are required when media exposure is present but elite support is absent. This result shows that the effectiveness of protest characteristics is dually mediated by political and media conditions. This study not only enhances our understandings of protest outcomes in China but also brings scholarly dialogue between social movement studies and communication studies so as to enrich the literature of protest outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest outcome
• dual mediation model
• environmental protest
• China
• QCA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Environmental NGOs do engage in environmental activism using a variety of strategies; however, ENGO-initiated campaign differs significantly from street protests, and ENGOs seldom involve in the latter activities. This study focuses on environment-related street protests and thus will not review literature on ENGOs in detail. More discussions on the consultative authoritarianism model of the state-NGOs relations can be found in Teets (2014).

2. ‘Grading Standards of Especially Major and Major Public Emergencies', available at: http://sysaq.snnu.edu.cn/show.aspx?id=54&cid=30 (accessed 13 March 2018).

3. Baidu news aggregator, instead of Wisenews database, was used to reflect the report dynamics between traditional and online media considering the fact that the vast majority of traditional news reports were reposted by news portal websites.

4. The authors have consulted previous studies and decide that 100 is a sufficiently large number indicating widespread media exposure. For instance, among the three high-profile cases of contention studied by Lin and Zhang (2018), only one was reported by more than 100 repackaged news reports.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shanghai Social Science Fundation [2017EZZ002;2018BSH003].

Notes on contributors

Ronggui Huang

Ronggui Huang is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Fudan University. His research interests include digital sociology, social movements, urban sociology. His recent works have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Chinese Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Urban Affairs Review. [E-mail: [email protected]]

Xiaoyi Sun

Xiaoyi Sun [corresponding author] is associate professor in the School of International Relations and Public affairs, Fudan University. Her research focuses on environmental politics, contentious politics, and urban governance in China. Her recent articles have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Chinese Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Urban Affairs Review. [E-mail: [email protected]]