Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China

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.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/09/2017
Pages: 206
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.42w x 0.64d
ISBN: 9781108430418

About the Author
Fu, Diana: - Diana Fu is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto and an affiliate of the Munk School of Global Affairs Asian Institute. She holds a D.Phil. in Politics and an M.Phil. in Development Studies with distinction from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She was previously a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, California and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She teaches contentious politics, Chinese politics, and development studies.