This dissertation addresses the question “how disasters change state-society relations under authoritarian rule?” Specifically, I investigate how space and social capital were created after major earthquakes and the relationships between local governments and civil society organizations (CSOs). Based on four years of interviews conducted with government officials and CSO leaders and two rounds of surveys in 126 villages in rural Sichuan province, utilizing experiments, focus groups, and interviews, I argue that social capital and space for CSOs were created after major earthquakes. Adding to the literature of consultative authoritarianism and graduated control, I demonstrate that within the newly created space, local governments use a deliberate differentiation strategy towards different CSOs. Such differentiation is more driven by the state’s interest to extract productivity and outsource responsibility for public goods provision by regime-supporting CSOs, and less dictated by the state’s need to acquire information from regime-challenging CSOs with collective action potential. Such approach contributes to the authoritarian resilience in China. Despite the interference from the state from above, the newly created space also faces challenges from the private sphere with individual citizens being skeptical of the CSO sector due to limited interactions, mismatch of criteria, institutional constraints, and lack of civility. I then draw from the qualitative data and construct a dynamic framework of state-society relations under an authoritarian state after disasters by starting from co-operational, complementary, competitive, and confrontational relations, and end up in either co-optation or confrontation in the long run. Finally, I trace the development of the newly drafted charity law and the foreign NGO law. I argue that the state-organized legalization process would first allow the state to use the “zone of indifference” to get to know the new developments in the public sphere. Then, through a process of toleration, participation, initiation, replication, and bifurcation, the state manages to extract productivity from, and outsource responsibility to, the regime-supporting players, and drive out the regime challenging ones. The laws, made through this process, is also vulnerable to state intervention at any time, and therefore, prevents China from having a meaningful civil society. / 2020-02-22T00:00:00Z

過去20餘年來，在「穩定壓倒一切」的思維邏輯下，中國特色的維穩體系顯著擴張，預示中國正步入維穩國家。維穩體系主要是處理改革、發展與穩定的關係，目的無外乎鞏固中共韌性威權。然而，既往學者從媒介控制角度研究中共威權統治，往往聚焦於改革與發展，漠視已成社會常態的維穩。本研究旨在彌補這一不足，並希望以群體性事件為觀察對象，檢視市場化媒體與維穩之間的統合與衝突。依框架包裹取徑，本文歸納出高壓維穩、開明維穩、官民互動、為民維權四種媒介框架與話語。研究結果發現，面對群體性事件，媒體分別扮演了黨國喉舌、監督者和公眾利益代言人的角色；媒介框架呈現出多元化特徵，但框架並非固定不變，相反潛藏著動態變化的可能；多元衝突的框架實際可以整合到更宏觀的信任與擁護政府的框架中。本研究的另一重要發現是，在嚴格新聞管制之下，媒體最常見的框架建構是開明維穩，表明市場化媒體服從維穩需要仍是主流。這一研究結果在一定程度上解釋了市場化媒體如何鞏固中共威權統治。 / Over the past two decades, the systematic stability maintenance apparatus has expanded dramatically under the logic of “stability overrides everything”, which indicates that China is turning into a security state. The operation of Stability Maintenance mainly deals with the relationship between reform, development and stability. The purpose is nothing less than strengthening the CCP’s resilient authoritarianism. However, Stability Maintenance has been ignored when researchers who study China’s authoritarian rule from the perspective of media control paid much attention to the reform and development. Choosing mass incidents as case study, this paper aims to cover the shortage mentioned above, and examines the relationship between market-oriented media and Stability Maintenance. By taking framing package approach, this paper showed that mass incidents were framed as one of the following: coercion, enlightened coercion, official-civil interaction, and legal rights safeguarding. This study found that market-oriented media played different roles as party-state mouthpiece, supervisors and spokesperson for the public interest. It also showed that the pluralistic frames of mass incidents actually can be integrated into a broader pro-government frame. More important, enlightened coercion became the most common frame under tight news censorship. It indicated that market-oriented media subjected to the necessity of Stability Maintenance is still the mainstream for media coverage on mass incidents. To a certain extent this result explained how market-oriented media sustain the CCP’s authoritarian rule.

Cette thèse de doctorat vise à répondre à une question qui a été largement négligée par la littérature sur les crises des régimes autoritaires : pourquoi les forces armées tolèrent-elles ou répriment-elles les mouvements d’opposition en faveur de changements du régime ? L’hypothèse principale stipule que l’attitude conciliante ou réfractaire des forces armées dépend de la nature des mesures adoptées par le régime autoritaire afin de s’assurer de leur loyauté et prévenir des coups d’État. Lorsque ces mesures de préventions des coups d’État contribuent à créer des divisons au sein de l’armée, les factions marginalisées sont enclines à tolérer les mouvements d’opposition, si ces derniers offrent une alternative crédible au régime, en raison de leur capacité à s’unir autour d’une plate-forme commune de revendications modérées, réalistes et acceptables pour les militaires. À l’inverse, lorsque les mesures de prévention des coups d’État favorisent la cohésion interne de l’armée et son attachement au régime, les militaires adoptent une attitude répressive à l’égard des forces contestataires. Ces hypothèses sont vérifiées à l’aide d’une analyse comparative des différentes mesures de prévention des coups d’État adoptées par les régimes autoritaires du Bénin et du Togo et de leurs impacts sur le succès, dans le premier cas, et l’échec, dans le second cas, des mouvements d’opposition dans les deux pays, au début des années 1990. Cette analyse est effectuée à l’aide de deux approches méthodologiques : le traçage de processus ainsi que la comparaison de deux études de cas. / This Ph.D. dissertation analyzes the factors that influence armed forces’ decisions to tolerate or suppress opposition movements demanding political reforms which could lead to regime change. This dissertation helps to fill a large gap in the literature as only a few scholars have attempted to explain military behaviour during regime crisis. It does so through an analysis of how anti-coup policies and opposition forces’ characteristics lead to the formation of marginalized military cliques and their potential support for regime change. It theorizes that the head of state’s survival strategy, specifically coup-proofing measures, influences military factions’ willingness to preserve the status quo. Reliance on loyalists leads to armed forces with a powerful core loyal to the incumbent regime and willing to use repression, while the strategy of counterbalancing leads to armed forces largely unattached to the maintenance of the regime. Under these circumstances, opposition forces can foster regime defection when they offer a viable alternative to the incumbent government, if the opposition can unify around a moderate platform that provides realist demands vis-à-vis regime forces. The main argument, on the influence of divergent coup-proofing policies on military actions, is assessed through a comparison of Benin and Togo. In each state, authoritarian regimes responded to the challenge of opposition mobilization by initiating negotiation processes. Divergences in coup-prevention techniques and credible commitment capacity of the opposition explain why the opposition campaign in the beginning of the 1990s was successful in Benin but failed in Togo. This research is based on two methods: process-tracing and the comparative method.

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