Abstract

What are the sources of ‘everyday state power’ in China? This is a key question in Professor Lynette Ong’s award-winning book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. In her book, she draws on extensive field research conducted between 2011 to 2019 of ordinary citizens who have undergone land grabs and housing demolition in China during the years of rapid urbanization growth. She draws attention to the concept of ‘everyday state power’ to shed light on how the state’s control is typically experienced by ordinary citizens and to illuminate the state’s repertoire for inducing citizens’ compliance with its top-down, sometimes drastic, policies. The ‘thugs-for-hire’ are an expedient extension of the state’s formal coercive capacity, while the political, social, and economic brokers constitute the state’s penetrative ‘infrastructural power’. Besides outright coercion, the state also deploys ‘brokers’ with intimate knowledge of communities to ‘persuade’ the masses into compliance, often on an emotional basis. Her study advances a theory of state power by revealing a counterintuitive form of state repression that minimises backlash.

About the Speaker

Lynette Ong is Professor of Political Science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto, and Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Her research lies at the intersection of authoritarian politics, contentious politics, and the political economy of development. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, China Quarterly, and China Journal, among other outlets. Outsourcing Repression is the recipient of the American Sociological Association Distinguished Contribution to Political Sociology (co-winner), the Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award and the International Studies Association Human Rights Section Best Book Award.