Evolving Agencies amid Rapid Social Change: Political Leadership and State–Civil Society Relations in China

Causes of social change can usually be categorized into three groups: economic, political and cultural factors. Economic factors, especially the impact of industrial capitalism, form the core of the Marxist approach to social change. Such a Marxist emphasis on economic factors, whether for ideological reasons or for the convenience of power maintenance, still forms the basis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) fundamental definition of human rights as the people’s rights to be fed, to be sheltered, to be educated and to be employed. Nevertheless, straying from this orthodox Marxist tenet is the neo-Marxist expansion of sources of social contradictions, which are inherent in social structures, to the political, religious, ethnic and ideological factors of conflicts and also the importance of culture not least as a marker for political mobilization. Adapting Buckley’s (1967: 58–59) concepts of morphostasis referring to ‘those processes in complex system-environment exchanges that tend to preserve or maintain a system’s given form, organization or state’ and morphogenesis referring to ‘those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure or state’, Archer (1995), on the other hand, posited that humanity had entered the stage of the morphogenetic society and spoke of the central importance of the role of the human agency that generates the social segments’ morphostatic and morphogenetic relationships which, in turn, are not able to exert causal powers without working through human agents.