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Urbanization since the 1990s causes considerable social conflicts in China. From a positive perspective, the conflicts can be regarded as an active reshaping of state-individual relationships initiated by the actors through social movements. However, due to the specific political condition as protests are not institutionalized in China, actors here face a dilemma: they must produce both the "legitimacy" to protest and the “opportunity” for protest at the same time during their rights-defending movements. This implies a paradox as far as state-individual relationships is considered. To get the “opportunity”, actors have to detach themselves from the state which they are supposed to be subordinated to; meanwhile, to secure the “legitimacy”, they have to internalize the state as it used to be. Therefore, tensions exist between these two kinds of state-individual relationship caused by the dilemma. To deal with this dilemma, actors in this case have to conceptualize the state as two levels: the abstract central government and concrete local governments. An adaptive mechanism, referred to as the “selective firming mechanism of the self-boundary” in this article, is developed to construct different state-individual relationships when dealing with different state levels. Therefore, by examining a collective litigation caused by demolition in City B, this mechanism of “selective firming” can be understood in three steps: firstly, actors distinguish the concrete state from the abstract state, so as to build respective relationships with the different levels of state; secondly, they distinguish the land-use rights from the land ownership when considering the abstract state; thirdly, they distinguish the economic function from the political and administrative duties when considering the concrete state. Through this triple-level distinction, actors successfully restrict the effect of the subordinate state-individual relationship resulted from the Chinese tradition, while expanding the space for an emerging egalitarian relationship between the individual and state responding to the changing society. The nature of this mechanism is the transformation of the self-boundary from being flexible and permeated to being fixed and firm. During this process, the relationship between individuals and state is reconstructed, whilst a modern state is built out of a unified, traditional state.

the journal of chinese sociology

"Selective firming" of the self-boundary: social movements and the reshaping of the state-individual relationship during China’s transformation: A case study of a collective litigation caused by demolition in City B