China's Informal Tools of Grassroots Control

Abstract

China's Informal Tools of Grassroots Control Manfred Elfstrom (bio) At 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 [End Page 168] with civil society in China will recognize the importance of the particular actors Ong studies. Many scholars conducting fieldwork in the country will have suspected that they are being followed by hired muscle. And foreign investors and nonprofit managers will be familiar with the manner in which entrepreneurial individuals frequently step forward to act as brokers between them and the state, easing the experience for both these perplexed outsiders and officials alike. It is thus strange that a book like Outsourcing Repression that focuses on thugs and brokers has not been written before. The likely reason for this oversight is that obtaining systematic data on "everyday state power" is incredibly difficult. Ong has expended considerable effort in assembling an impressive array of sources. She draws principally on fieldwork conducted in eight cities in China between 2011 and 2017, and her fieldwork does not take the form of one-off encounters but rather repeated interviews with people participating in the processes she describes: angry villagers, profit-oriented huangniu ("cattle") who bargain for higher compensation for the villagers and thereby pacify them, property lawyers, and local officials. Ong balances this approach with quantitative analysis using an original dataset that she assembled of over two thousand cases of land seizures and demolitions between the mid-1990s and the second decade of the 21st century. The quantitative analysis yields complicated results, but it shows that relying on arms-length coercers can often be beneficial for authorities. Ong finds that thugs are (unsurprisingly) more likely to disrupt, injure, and kill people with land or housing complaints, compared to state security forces (pp. 59–62). However, the participation of thugs in a conflict decreases the odds of protesting and petitioning by citizens significantly. If control variables are held at their means, the direct involvement of government officials, by contrast, increases protest. And the presence of officials also encourages the legal mobilization of aggrieved people (pp. 62–68). Ong's study of the Chinese government's "infrastructural" power and the role of brokers involves content analysis of the language of central and municipal government regulations on land-taking and demolitions, in-depth interviews, and the study of correlations between different government actions and citizen reactions using the same data as the analysis of the thugs versus government officials. The statistics here suggest that "thought work" and financial rewards are most effective at winning compliance (pp. 124–27). But Ong's interviews...