From Curse to Cooptation: How Resource Conflicts Drive Social Policies in China

• In Event: Domestic Politics in Contemporary and Historical China

Abstract

Regions abundant in mineral resources often face detrimental environmental and socioeconomic consequences caused by extractive industries. The lack of linkages between these industries and local communities, combined with insufficient corporate social responsibility, frequently leads to resource conflicts, necessitating state intervention. However, whether and how governments in resource-rich countries respond to the local resource curse, defined as the adverse environmental, socioeconomic, and political impacts of resource extraction on local communities, remains unclear.
This study examines how China, an authoritarian and resource-rich country with robust state capacity, addresses the local resource curse and mitigates resource conflicts. We construct an original panel dataset covering all Chinese prefecture-level cities during the Xi Jinping era based on thousands of policy papers collected from legal document databases and government websites and hundreds of mining-community conflicts identified from multiple social conflict datasets.
Our statistical analysis reveals a strong correlation between mining-community conflicts and the issuance of social policies, including resettlement, compensation, medical aid, etc. for affected citizens. However, higher resource dependence and conflict intensity weaken the influence of conflict frequency on social policy formulation. The findings demonstrate that Chinese local states actively establish linkages between extractive industries and communities, enhancing public welfare to coopt aggrieved citizens. However, when faced with a heavily resource-dependent economy or highly disruptive resource conflicts, local states adopt alternative strategies such as repression, showcasing a pattern of strategic cooptation. By revealing the intricate dynamics between resource extraction, state intervention, and community well-being in resource-rich regions, we offer practical implications for resource governance and conflict resolution beyond the Chinese context.

Authors

• Jing Vivian Zhan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Qin Li, The Chinese University of Hong Kong