State rebuilding is not an uncontested enterprise. Even though China remains an authoritarian state, the leadership cannot rebuild the state at will. Not only did the state rebuilding efforts produce enormous unexpected consequences but they also encouraged different social groups to jostle for participation in the new state. All these factors affected the leadership's efforts in state rebuilding. The next two chapters will discuss these aspects of state rebuilding.

This chapter focuses on how state rebuilding has led to the rise of social movements and collective action. While social protests are not new in China, some forms of protests are related to state rebuilding. The term “state-building” can be defined in different ways. As I have examined in previous chapters, state-building refers to, first, the efforts of recentralization and, second, the efforts to transform China's enterprise system from a socialist-oriented one to a capitalist-oriented one. Although “state-building” often overlaps “reforms,” not every measure of reform can be regarded as state-building. Economic decentralization such as financial and fiscal decentralization is not regarded as state-building. Similarly, many measures for restructuring China's enterprise system are not state-building, and only those efforts of systematic transformation aimed at strengthening the power of the central state in regulating enterprise behavior are considered state rebuilding.

A caveat has to be added here. Social movements, as Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald have pointed out, can be analyzed by three broad sets of factors: political opportunities, mobilizing structures and framing processes.