China's Informal Tools of Grassroots Control

Abstract

A t the time of writing, young Chinese are gathering in cities across China, as well as on university campuses around the world, to protest their country’s harsh “zero-Covid” policy. And they are raising demands that are bracingly political, including calls for freedom of speech, for an end to concentration camps for Uighurs, and for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to step down. With this historic upsurge seizing our attention, it is worth remembering that protests are actually extremely common in China but normally take a less overtly political form. Farmers clash with police over water pollution. Workers routinely strike over low wages. Homeowners demand compensation when city redevelopment projects threaten their apartments. In her excellent new book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China, Lynette H. Ong examines the “everyday state power” deployed to contain these instances of what James C. Scott has called “everyday resistance.” Focusing on conflicts related to urbanization, in particular, Ong theorizes two approaches used by local authorities: handing violence off to thugs-for-hire in an effort at ensuring deniability, and relying on volunteer brokers with different degrees of independence from the state to use personal relationships to “mobilize the masses” into supporting, or at least acquiescing to, government plans. Although one of these approaches is coercive and the other is largely persuasive, they both involve exercising power “via society itself” (p. 5). Ong’s volume adds to a growing body of work that explores the great variety of Chinese actors either on the far fringes of the state or in a gray zone between state and society that help the government realize its objectives.1 Anyone who has conducted research or done business or worked