Puppets or Agents? "Thugs-for-Hire" and Brokers between State and Society

Abstract

I t is difficult to read Lynette H. Ong’s Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China and not be constantly reminded of China’s pandemic response, in which the Chinese party-state implemented often harsh and controversial lockdowns. The local nature of the lockdowns, however, allowed the top leadership to distance itself from excesses, with Xi Jinping early in the pandemic even blaming “some localities” for misimplementation and “criminal acts.”1 But this tactic is not only a privilege of the central government. The local party-state also deploys third-party agents to shield itself from blame for oftentimes crude implementation and to enhance its capacity. Outsourcing Repression, based on Ong’s fieldwork conducted before the Covid-19 outbreak, exposes these mechanisms used by the local party-states and reveals deeper underlying structures in their operations. The book, therefore, is timely, examining how the government can marshal third-party agents to implement often unpopular policies and exact compliance from the citizenry. In the book, Ong distinguishes between “thugs-for-hire” and “brokers” that together constitute “everyday state power” (p. 3), which she defines as “the state’s exercise of power through society, or via society itself” (p. 5). As she notes, the categories are “conceptually distinct and by and large mutually exclusive” (p. 99). Thugs-for-hire use violent coercion (p. 31) to impose the party-state’s will, thereby representing the “stick” that, in the ideal case, lends plausible deniability to the state. “Brokers,” on the other hand, are largely nonviolent (p. 99), use emotional mobilization to persuade and psychologically coerce participants, and are “legitimizing vehicles of state repression” (p. 33). Their success hinges on “legitimacy, or legitimation by the actor who persuades” (p. 36). While this might augment state