Institutional Resolutions of Mass Actions in Post-Reform China: An Interdisciplinary Study of Internal Functionality and Externally Perceived Functionality

My dissertation bridges the wisdom of legal and political scholars to make sense of the governance system as the basic context where the administrative justice norms and mechanisms evolved. Focusing on a rather insufficiently explored subject: complainants questioning the content and/or implementation of government policies in China (‘mass actions’), it develops a credibility-focused frame to explain why certain norms have been accepted by the government over time, through what mechanisms these accepted norms are being applied in resolving mass actions, and how are they popularly perceived in the news discourse.