Hu Jintao’s concept of a “harmonious society” now stands elevated to the highest rhetorical levels of importance in state policy. The Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held in 2006 drew a direct correlation between continued prosperity and the need for social equity and justice. The Plenum passed a resolution for a harmonious society to be established by 2020 and called for “putting people first” as the first step towards building a prosperous society. It has set itself an ambitious agenda of fostering a “democratic society under the rule of law”, underlining the need for “maintaining social stability” and for “a stable and orderly society.”

The preoccupation with order and stability has been a fairly obsessive one in Chinese politics, with frequent appeals to the public to “consolidate the great unity of the Chinese people.” Wu Heping, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security expressed the hope that public expressions of resistance would be mindful of “public order” and that the masses would “resolve problems in a harmonious and an orderly way.” The point however is, does China’s political leadership seriously think that a mix-and-stir version of dissent is possible? Are harmonious protests feasible? By placing its faith in what can at best be a fond hope and a risky policy calculation at the worst, China is clearly asking the wrong question.

The real question that China needs to ask is whether it can get the politics of social harmony right. This will essentially turn on whether the Communist Party is willing to be a force for change and address the tensions within state-society relations. This is not to assume that state-society relations in China are a perpetual conflict arena as they are often typecast to be. Far from being zero-sum or uni-directional as state-dominant theories would have us believe, their interface has proved to be a symbiotic and interactive one. The post-reform decades have seen a truly dramatic expansion of social organisations in China with their ingenious ways of creating an impressive organisational space to perform an array of vital social welfare functions. China’s vibrant environmental activism is a case in point with an estimated 2000 officially registered NGOs including Friends of Nature which have been relatively successful in engaging the state on the issue of environmental protection.

... contd.