ABSTRACT
Compared to previous years, contentious actions caused by land acquisition and housing demolition contributed the most in quantity and were of the highest intensity in 2013. To be exact, there tends to be an outburst of contentious actions concentrated in the fields of town construction, employer-employee disputes, environmental pollution, patient-hospital disputes and official-population contradictions. In the last area, fighting between police and protesters attracts the widest attention, and the actions mainly manifest on three levels, namely violation of law, denial of justice and police misconduct when enforcing the law. Analysis of a large number of cases shows that contentious actions tend to take place in developed areas. It shows that there are correlations between economic development levels and contentious actions, which means that in the more developed areas the more intense contentious actions break out with greater frequency.
(The authors are faculty members at the School of Political Science and Public Administration at East China University of Political Science and Law.)
