Abstract: The occurrence of mass incidents such as protests, strikes, and social disorders has increased dramatically in China since 1989; however, these mass incidents are very different from the national demonstrations that occurred in 1976, 1978, 1989, and, most famously, in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Post-1989 protesters no longer challenge the legitimacy of the Central Communist government nor do they seek democratization but, instead, they try to gain the attention of the central government in order to force local governments to redress their specific local grievances. Therefore, I suggest that the spatial distribution of these mass incidents is shaped by the policies of local governments that give rise to these grievances, and, that it is China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization that are the sources of local grievances. Land disputes and labor disputes rise out of and escalate from government control over land and industry (state-owned enterprises, or SOEs). Government policies intended to foster industrial expansion increase the rate of urbanization. Local governments expropriate land from farmers and from residents for the purpose of industrial expansion, which leads to higher incidence of protests. I use a negative binominal regression model to estimate the impact of certain elements of China’s industrialization and urbanization on the incidence of protests across 31 provinces over three time periods. I posit a relationship between the frequency of mass incidents and several variables that are associated with land expropriation and the job security of recent migrants to urban areas who are not legal residents of those urban areas under the terms of China’s Household Registration System. First, the more large cities there are in a province, the higher the incidence of protests will be. Second, the higher the ratio of urban land to rural land, the higher the incidence of protests will be in a province. Third, the larger the number of state-owned enterprises relative to foreign owned enterprises in a province, the lower the frequency of mass incidents will be. In testing the relationships between these concepts, I find strong support for these hypotheses.
Place Name coordinates. (May be approximate.)
Place Name coordinates. (May be approximate.)
