But in the 1990s, college students and intellectuals have escaped from this protest-instigating situation. Instead, rural peasants and urban industrial workers have now become the main actors in almost every collective behavior in Chinese society. In villages, collective action protests unreasonable taxation and the violent confiscations accompanying it. Meanwhile, in urban areas, the most frequent scene is workers acting against corrupt management to demand overdue payments and protest benefit cuts or the meager compensation for laid-off workers. In addition, other collective movements have developed, such as consumer rights protection groups, environment protection organizations, and other grass-roots mobilizing initiatives aimed at enhancing the rights and benefits of minority groups like women, children, and the elderly. Thus, from a spatial perspective, we can conclude that grievance production is accelerating in China compared to the 1980s.

For example, official Labor Ministry statistics showed 14 times more labor disputes, from simple contractual disagreements to work stoppages and strikes, which is a jump from 8,150 in 1992 to more than 120,000 in 2002. This is largely the result of economic reforms producing millions of laid-off urban workers, coupled with the commercialization and privatization of social welfare and social security programs, especially in areas like housing, healthcare, and education, thus removing the social safety net once offered to these workers. This deterioration in workers’ conditions—a limited, decreasing income and higher expenditures—becomes even more glaring considering the relative deprivation of industrial workers to those powerful groups like factory managers and new commercial elites.

Thus, the changes in urban Chinese society since the 1980s have allowed fresh grievances to accumulate to a saturation point that can easily break out in forms of collective actions and public protests.

Furthermore, the nature of the governmental response to these increased tensions depends on the level of government against which public agitation is aimed. Collective actions directed at national political agencies—such as the 1989 Beijing student movement—are most likely to incur a negative response, such as a government crack-down. Alternatively, collective action can be geared toward local government or party authorities to demand compensatory or restorative action on the part of local authority. Third, collective action can target non-political entities—such as businesses, the media, organized crime groups, or corrupt officials and departments—to provoke the intervention of important third party to resolve the conflict. Indeed, these collective actions aimed at non-political actors or individuals and departments of political hierarchy are likely to receive positive reactions from local or central authorities.

Thus, the focus of collective actions may determine the reaction patterns of the authority, which may absorb the original grievance or increase the level of existing grievance to an even worse level.

Activists and Mobilization

The organization and mobilization of collective action depends on the provision of leadership and activists, and the formation of mobilizing networks among urban communities.

In general, except for a small number of cases such as those global consensus social movements like environment protection, women’s movements, the provision of leadership and activists of China’s urban collective behavior is limited. On the one hand, it must be born in mind that the current unfavorable political opportunity structures have a negative effect on the emergence of leaders and activists, who face much higher costs (such as risks of arrests, detentions in the event of government crackdowns) from collective action than ordinary participants.

There are, however, a number of new developments in the past two decades that further weaken the development of activist leadership. First, the Chinese people now increasingly question the morality of the leadership of the 1989 student movement—mainly composed of elite intellectuals and university students. The credibility of these charismatic leaders has faded, replaced by growing doubt of the political maturity of the intellectual elite.

Second, decades of steady economic development and social reform have induced the majority of Chinese intellectuals to accept the concept of progressive and non-disruptive social reform, now disapproving of drastic and disruptive collective behavior. Thus the role of urban intellectuals has changed, from being a potential source of leadership as in the 1980s, to being an important third party mediator between challengers and authorities.

As a result, the leadership role falls to grassroots organizers such as village leaders and labor activists, but as these groups mature and choose to participate in collective action, they are even more prone to the inhibitory effects of government crackdowns. These developments point to a critical conclusion about the nature of collective movement leadership in China. Because of the unfavorable political opportunity structure and the transformation of the role and image of elite intellectuals, the provision of leadership in urban collective behaviors is in great shortage.

With the shortage of external leadership provision and the grass-root leadership under higher risk of arrest and detention, if urban collective behavior is still to increase, it will rely heavily on a sustainable internal leadership manufacturing mechanism. This points to a second aspect of mobilizing structure: the formation of oppositional communities and its spatial distribution within specific urban area.

People can form an oppositional community in two ways: first, through the sharing of grievances among a community living or working together in close physical proximity; second, by sharing grievances in the form of an imagined community defined by identifiable social characteristics. The formation of an oppositional community provides conditions not only for the formation of collective identity such as laid-off workers or taxi drivers under exploitation, but also for the activation of preexisting mobilizing networks like kinship groups of colleagues, friends, and neighbors.

Since 2000, a large plurality of mobilizations have indeed taken place in industrial urban centers, within which workers suffering from everyday hardships and corruption of managerial leadership form industrial oppositional communities to further public protest. Other kinds of oppositional communities being formed include those of Three-Gorges-Dam project migrants in cities, those of urban homeowners struggling with profit-seeking real estate corporations, and urban residents whose neighborhoods are under serious environmental threat.

Thus, while facing a decline of traditional leadership for collective action, urban China is still able to create rich oppositional communities and extensive mobilizing networks, which, taken together, form a spatial pattern that is not only conducive to the rise of urban collective actions, but is also a hotbed for fostering grassroot leadership.