The Circular State: A Case Study of the Symbolic Labor Governance System in Transitional China.

The relationship between contentious politics and the state building is a classic topic in the study of social movements. Through detailed analysis of a ten-year struggle of a group of state workers to defend their pensions by active engagement with state agents, this paper attempts to explore the circular feature of the state and how this circular state functions to absorb the labor contentions. From August 1998 to October 2008, a group of retired state workers in H Steel Factory carried out radical street protests, persistent legal litigations and peaceful collective petitions to fight against their factory's retention and reduction of their pensions. The trajectory of the workers' struggles delineates a gradually formed state bureaucratic field of labor governance. This state is composed of three intersecting circles--a circle between different petition offices,a circle between petition offices and courts, and a circle between the local and the center. This system full of tensions within and between different circles produces the negotiation and bargaining relation between different levels and sectors in the state, which in turn leads to the circulation mechanism of social conflicts rather than a resolution structure. The institutional configuration of this circular state includes the double bind between decentralization and marketization and the mutual reference between the petition system and the legal system. The circulation of the workers' case in this circular bureaucratic field, on one side elongates the struggles of the workers and prevents the radicalization of their resistance; on the other side, promotes the circulation and inculcation of the statist capitals among the workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]