Home Issues Past Issues MCS 2015 Issue 2 The Cycle Fluctuation of Large-scale Social Political Movements in Contemporary China
The Cycle Fluctuation of Large-scale Social Political Movements in Contemporary China
Abstract: The research focusing on the cycle of social movement is regarded as an effective method to explain the pattern of social movement. Yet most researches draw on the cycle theory of economics, and thus cannot develop a comprehensive and specific cycle theory for social movement. Starting from 1949, when the Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, an era of movements arrived. Recently, researchers begin to focus on this era from several perspectives, and among them political crisis and turmoil perspectives have become two main schools. Both schools have found that there exists a cycle of social movements based on an approximately ten-year period and have drawn highly similar conclusions. This article argues that in addition to the movements that follow the ten-year cycle, there is still another group of movements that have been overlooked by researchers. These less known movements demonstrate abnormal fluctuations and cycles far less than the ten-year cycle. Moreover, although the current political system has merely existed for about 60 years, it has witnessed fundamental changes, which have altered the mechanism and pattern of the movements, causing the cycle to change, albeit subtly at times.