Beyond Coercion: The New Politics of Conflict Processing in China

Abstract

Coercive capacity matters for keeping stability of authoritarian regime. Yet governing conflict is more than deployment of coercion. State response to contentious politics can be classified by the form of power it uses to direct challenging behaviors. This paper suggests a typology of conflict processing mechanism and uses it to illustrate the diversity of China’s domestic security strategy and detect new signs of conflict management beyond coercive actions. The focus is an emerging social engagement approach—a conceptually distinct process through which contentious behavior is transformed by intermediate agencies. Despite its limits in handling large-scale conflicts, this approach of conflict resolution is able to contribute to regime stability from below by demobilizing and depoliticizing local and issue-based contentions.