Mediation and grassroots policing in China: Conflict resolution or social control?

Abstract

This article examines the practices of mediation that have become increasingly common in contemporary grassroots governance in China. The analysis focuses on the mode of governmentality embodied in the discourse on the ‘Fengqiao model’, which supplies a framework for hierarchizing and managing social conflict with the goal of keeping instability at bay. Based on 10 months of ethnographical research in various political-legal organizations within a single county, I found a grassroots governance apparatus that positions a recently invented institution – the Social Governance Centre – as the core organizational locus for coordinating a broadly distributed collection of daily operations aimed at preserving social stability. Analytically, I provide ideal-typical characterizations of three distinct conflict types – ordinary, abnormal, and tricky – to describe the discretionary decision-making by which local party-state operatives perceive and react to social conflicts based on their implications for the value of social stability. Drawn from conversations in the ethnographic literature on policing, this study of street-level mediation contributes to our understanding of how social conflict is rendered policeable, and it provides a case study of the use of mediation as a mode of police work in an authoritarian context.