Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781108420549

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Diana Fu observes a unique form of mobilisation in China; that is, mobilisation without the masses and its assorted tactics. In other words, civil society organizations in China do mobilise. However, instead of mobilising, for example, the working class, activists target individuals or small groups by coaching them on how to confront the state. Fu highlights explanations for such a unique form. She also systematically identifies several key conditions under which civil society organizations could strike a balance between being obedient to the state and facilitating labor contention.' Yao-Tai Li, Social Movement Studies

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available