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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $108.95

Format:
Hardback
296 pp.
25 b/w figures; 21 tables, 6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780197628768

Publication date:
May 2022

Imprint: OUP US


Outsourcing Repression

Everyday State Power in Contemporary China

Lynette H. Ong

A compelling examination of and counterintuitive solution to China's engagement of nonstate actors to coerce citizens into compliance while minimizing backlash against the state.

How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China's urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts.

Readership : Political Science and Sociology scholars; China studies scholars; Qualitative and mixed-method scholars.

Reviews

  • "A granular, documented, and persuasive analysis of how authoritarian control is maintained on a quotidian basis in Xi's China. Lest we ever doubt that all authoritarian regimes operate 'outside' even their own hand-tailored, legal order, this fine study closes the case. A discerning examination of the atomization, perversion, and cooptation of what might otherwise be a mobilized, autonomous civil society."

    --James C. Scott, Yale University

  • "Outsourcing Repression is a fascinating study of an important but underexplored issue about state control in China-outsourcing state repression to non-state actors. Analytically rigorous, this book uncovers how the state exercises its everyday coercion by securing the collaboration of social actors, mainly thugs-for-hire and brokers. This is an important book that sheds new light on the coercive power of authoritarian states."

    --Yongshun Cai, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  • "Ong provides what's likely to be the definitive account of socialized repression in contemporary China. That the state uses third parties to extend its power down to the grassroots (and to avoid backlash) is one of the key features of China's hardening authoritarianism, and a development of great importance to China scholars and comparativists alike."

    --Kevin J. O'Brien, University of California, Berkeley

List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Bulldozers, Violent Thugs, and Nonviolent Brokers
Chapter 2: The Theory: State Power, Repression, and Implications for Development
Chapter 3: Outsourcing Violence: Everyday Repression via Thugs-for-Hire
Chapter 4: Case Studies: Thugs-for-Hire, Repression, and Mobilization
Chapter 5: Networks of State Infrastructural Power: Brokerage, State Penetration, and Mobilization
Chapter 6: Brokers in Harmonious Demolition: Mass Mobilizers, Mediators, and Huangniu
Chapter 7: Comparative Context: South Korea and India
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix A: Content Analysis of Government Regulations
Appendix B: List of Interviewees
Appendix C: Media-Sourced Event Dataset
Appendix D: Additional Tables & Graphs for Chapter 3
Notes
Bibliography

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Lynette H. Ong is an associate professor of political science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (2012). Her work has been published in Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Affairs, and other outlets.

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Special Features

  • Analyzes repression in China, not by examining state coercive apparatus, but from the perspective of grassroots nonstate actors to whom coercion is outsourced.
  • Includes a decade's worth of ethnographic research in China.
  • Draws upon more than 200 field interviews and quantitative data, half the book covers violence outsourced to street gangsters and thugs.
  • Offers a novel concept of outsourcing repression that expands the scope and existing contours of state power.