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When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Based on political ethnography inside both legal and blacklisted labor organizations in China, this book reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention - mobilizing without the masses - that lowers the risk of activism under duress. Instead of facilitating collective action, activists coach the aggrieved to challenge authorities one by one. In doing so, they lower the risks of organizing while empowering the weak. This dynamic represents a third pathway of contention that challenges conventional understandings of mobilization in an illiberal state. It takes readers inside the world of underground labor organizing and opens the black box of repression inside the world's most powerful authoritarian state

Public confessions are repression spectacles that have appeared in different regimes and historical periods. This study theorizes an indoctrination dimension of repression—the turning of punishment into a control tool that displays the regime's apparent transformative power. Whereas repression is often defined by its inhibiting dimension, this study argues that authorities stage repressive spectacles not only to deter further dissent but also as an instrument of "thought reform," a governance tradition in China. The study finds two indoctrinating narratives based on an interpretive analysis of a dataset of televised confessions in China. First, confessions show a doctrine of political dissident as traitorous and immoral. Second, they convey a doctrine of rectification that displays the seemingly transformative power of the regime, one in which transgressors perform law-abiding citizens. These findings advance the conceptual refinement of repression by analyzing its indoctrination dimension.

AbstractHow does an authoritarian state govern contentious civil society and what are the effects on grassroots mobilization? This article theorizes the relationship between repression and mobilization by examining the case of informal labor organizations in South China that threaten social stability. Findings based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside these organizations suggest that the central state's mandate to maintain social stability is refracted through the interests and capabilities of local agencies. This results in "fragmented control": divergent, even conflicting, forms of state governance over civil society. Local authorities work at cross‐purposes by simultaneously repressing, co‐opting, and neglecting underground organizing. Fragmented control generates political uncertainty on the part of activists and induces them to engage in "censored entrepreneurialism"—a set of tactical adaptations characterized by a mixture of self‐censorship and entrepreneurial experimentation.

The Chinese Party-state's repression of politically sensitive social organizations is well-known. Less known, however, is how the central state has governed a broader range of social organizations that have violated laws or regulations and are hence considered "untrustworthy" in the context of the social credit system. Analyzing over 22,000 entries of social organizations on the Ministry of Civil Affairs' National Social Organization Credit Information Public Notification Platform, this study examines which social organizations are publicly designated as untrustworthy—and why—as well as punishments and possibilities for redemption. The study finds that, on the one hand, the Xi Jinping administration has increased governance transparency by selectively publicizing untrustworthy organizations through the social credit system and standardizing their punishments. On the other hand, the administration continues to be opaque about its treatment of more politically sensitive organizations, such as those advocating for civil rights or representing marginalized communities. By maintaining an incomplete public list of banned organizations, the Party-state preserves maximum discretionary power over the most politically threatening sector. This governance approach breaks from the past in rendering civil society more legible while continuing the Party-state's tradition of flexible control. (China J/GIGA)

AbstractChina's social credit system can be examined as a governance tool which sorts citizenship behaviors into trustworthy and untrustworthy categories as part of the regime's long‐standing effort to cultivate a loyal citizenry. Based on a data set comprised of central‐level official documents, national model citizen lists, and media reports, this study qualitatively examines how the Chinese state constructs "good" and "bad" citizen ideal types. Contrary to media depictions of the system as digital totalitarianism, political behaviors are not the sole criterion for sorting citizens into categories. In fact, the state constructs "bad" (untrustworthy) citizens as those who engage in a wide range of behaviors, including financial and professional misconduct. Simultaneously, the state also uses the system to construct and cultivate "good" (trustworthy) citizens as those who publicly demonstrate loyalty to the regime. Theoretically, this study sheds light on how the world's most powerful authoritarian regime governs through a system that distributes material and symbolic capital.

How should we study citizenship in authoritarian regimes? We propose studying how citizenship is performed using the "public transcript"—communication between ordinary citizens and political authorities. The stakes of these strategic communications allow us to observe the roles citizens play to elicit assistance from authoritarian elites. We use this technique to study citizenship in contemporary China, analyzing evidence from an original database of over eight thousand appeals to local officials. These public transcripts reveal three ideal-type scripts of citizenship. First, we observe individuals performing subjecthood, positioning themselves as subalterns before benevolent rulers. We also identify an authoritarian legal citizenship that appeals to the formal legal commitments of the state. Finally, we find evidence for a socialist citizenship which appeals to the moral duties of officials to provide collective welfare. This approach eschews a classification scheme based on regime types, instead acknowledging that diverse performances of citizenship can coexist within a single state.