ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, bottom-up mobilizations of popular protest have increased in China, and have become the dominant form of urban mobilization. Besides the government, social organizations and individual citizens have increasingly become initiators and organizers of collective action in the urban realm. The contributions to this volume study how the Chinese have mobilized in urban settings. They borrow heavily from contemporary approaches to social movements—approaches emphasizing resource mobilization and political opportunity structures. Focusing on the way urbanites mobilize in China and relying on these kinds of approaches, the case studies presented in this volume pursue a rather modest goal. With some notable exceptions, they do not seek to address the broader questions of the social structural roots of these mobilization processes, or of their implications for the future of the Chinese regime. One may deplore this narrowing of the focus in the analysis of protest mobilizations and social movements more generally (see Walder 2009). We believe, however, that such a more narrow focus has considerable merit as well. It puts the observers on firmer empirical grounds and provides us with a new perspective on what is going on in contemporary China in terms of grassroots mobilization.
