Mobilizing without the Masses
Control and Contention in China

How do weak activists organize under repression? This book theorizes a dynamic of contention called mobilizing without the masses.

Diana Fu (Author)

9781108430418, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 November 2017

206 pages, 2 b/w illus. 7 tables
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

'… Mobilizing Without the Masses stands out for disaggregating the state horizontally, rather than vertically, and because it unpacks the repression-mobilization nexus in a strikingly bottom-up, close-to-the-ground way. Fu explores what needs to be collective about collective action and how the response to migrant worker demands is not always uniform … we are not likely to see another book like this on Chinese activism and techniques of control soon.' Kevin J. O'Brien, University of California, Berkeley

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.

1. Introduction: organizing under duress
Part I. Technologies of Control: 2. Labor organizations in China
3. Fragmented control
4. Competitive control
Part II. Coaching Contention: 5. Micro-collective action
6. Atomized action
7. Discursive action 8. A political compromise? Appendix: political ethnography
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Advocacy [LASD], Political activism [JPW], Political structure & processes [JPH], Sociology [JHB]