Mobilizing Without the Masses in China

Thursday, October 13, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
(Pacific)
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Diana Fu

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How do weak organizations engage in mobilization under duress? Based on ethnographic work inside labor organizations in China, this talk makes the case that in a repressive environment, civil society organizations can mobilize through a counter-intuitive mechanism. Instead of amassing the crowds to take to the streets, groups can mobilize without the masses. Rather than citizens forming groups in order to trigger larger-scale contention, they form groups in order to better contend as individuals or as small bands of the aggrieved. The clear advantage of this strategy is that it lowers the cost of activism in an authoritarian state. Because it is highly risky for civil society groups to organize large-scale contention, they must devise ways to work around this constraint. Civil society groups coach citizens to adopt a grammar of contention that effectively threatens local social stability and challenges the moral authority of officials. However, at the point of contention, these groups disperse. By sending out only a sole contender or a limited number of contenders to confront state authorities, organizations minimize their risk of being targeted by authorities.

 

Diana Fu is an assistant professor of Asian Politics at the University of Toronto. Her research examines the relationship between popular contention, state power, and civil society, with an emphasis on contemporary China. Her book manuscript, Mobilizing Without the Masses in China examines state control and civil society contention under authoritarian rule. Based on two years of ethnographic research that tracks the development of informal labor organizations, the book explores counterintuitive dynamics of organized contention in post-1989 China.  

Prior to joining the Univeristy of Toronto, Professor Fu was a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science. She holds a D.Phil. in Politics and an M.Phil. in Development Studies with distinction from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.