Citizen Rights Claiming and Social Accountability in a Chinese City

In this paper we examine four cases where citizen groups in the Chinese city of Hangzhou engage in social protest in order to claim their legal rights. Because of its fairly responsive local government, Hangzhou is considered to be a crucial and most-likely case for the existence of social accountability in China. The concept social accountability – in contrast to either horizontal accountability (between government agencies) or vertical accountability (in the form of elections) – is used to analyze if rights claimants manage to hold the local government accountable with the use of informal and semi-formal channels. Inspired by Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006) and other scholars, our multiple case-study specifies social accountability in terms of (A) answerability, (B) sanctions, and (C) legal rights attainment. The paper discusses this concept and its empirical applicability to the Chinese political context. Our cases of citizen social protest are based on in-depth field studies and interviews with key stake-holders. We use process tracing to examine the social settings and mechanisms linking social protest with specific outcomes. So far, our findings show that two forms of social accountability – i.e., answerability and the attainment of legal rights – are more likely than sanctions. More specifically, once claimants manage to overcome challenges to gain media attention and to invoke legal channels, their chance of achieving some degree of social accountability will tangibly increase. In addition to the display of original empirical findings, our study makes a theoretical contribution by more firmly connecting the two research fields of social movement and social accountability, which will be of interest to a wider scholarly audience.