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Outsourcing Repression
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in
1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary
East Asia.
Outsourcing Repression
Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
LYNETTE H. ONG
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. Oxford is a
registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford
University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the
appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of
the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any
acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ong, Lynette H., author.
Title: Outsourcing repression : everyday state power in
contemporary China / Lynette H. Ong.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056065 (print) | LCCN 2021056066 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197628768 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197628775 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780197628799 (epub) | ISBN 9780197628782 (UPDF) |
ISBN 9780197628805 (Digital-Online)
Subjects: LCSH: Political persecution—China. | Social control—China. |
Government, Resistance to—China. | Power (Social sciences)—China. |
Urbanization—Political aspects—China. | Gangs—Political
aspects—China. | China—Politics and government—2002-
Classification: LCC JC599.C6 O58 2022 (print) | LCC JC599.C6 (ebook) |
DDC 323/.0440951—dc23/eng/20211210
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056065
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197628768.001.0001
To all those who received the short end of the stick in
the state’s ambitious scheme
Figures
Given the long and arduous process that research entails, this book would have been impossible without the
many people who have accompanied me at various stages of this journey. I stand on the broad shoulders of
scholars and colleagues who have contributed to the eld of authoritarian politics, the study of the state,
and China studies.
My China-based colleagues and friends have helped me tremendously in understanding the country—both
its allures and idiosyncrasies. With wise advice and good humor, many went out of their way to open doors
for me and helped me navigate the eld. Their tenacious capacity to survive, and even thrive, in an
increasingly challenging environment has always been a source of inspiration.
I extend my gratitude to Dave McBride, my editor at Oxford University Press, who has enthusiastically
supported this project from the outset, steering it in the right direction.
Over the decade during which this research was conducted, numerous colleagues and friends have taken
time to discuss ideas and invited me to conferences, workshops, and seminars to present working papers,
from all of which I have bene ted tremendously. Among them were Ben Hillman, David Goodman, Shan
Wei, Qian Jiwei, Peter Lorentzen, Xiaobo Lü (Columbia), Mary Gallagher, Christian Davenport, Yuen Yuen
Ang, Cai Yongshun, Ray Yep, Feng Cheng, Ting Gong, Chen Chih-Jou, Jean Hong, Li Lianjiang, Pierre
Landry, Stephen Noakes, Elena Meyer-Clement, Jesper Zeuthen, Genia Kostka, Patricia Thornton, Xin Sun,
Kerry Brown, Hyun Bang Shin, Tim Hildebrandt, Federico Varese, Jean Oi, Andy Walder, Lizhi Liu, Melanie
Manion, Dan Slater, Kimberly Marten, Sheena Greitens, Suzanne Scoggins, Dimitar Gueorguiev, Victor Shih,
Kristen Looney, Jenn Pan, Iza Ding, Blake Miller, Peng Wang, Yanhua Deng, and Yang Zhong.
I am thankful for the support of the Weatherhead Center for International A airs at Harvard University
under the leadership of Michelle Lamont and subsequently Melani Cammett for generously o ering me a
fellowship to host my writing for this book.
I have also drawn on the generosity of colleagues and friends who provided insightful comments on earlier
drafts and chapters, including those circulated at a book manuscript workshop. They are Liz Perry, Kevin
O’Brien, Ben Read, Meg Rithmire, Jenn Earl, Brian Taylor, David Cunningham, Xu Xu, Martin Dimitrov,
Xiaobo Lü (UT Austin), John Fitzgerald, Anita Chan, Andy Kipnis, and Charles Crabtree. My colleagues at
the University of Toronto, including Ed Schatz, Seva Gunitsky, Lucan Way, Yoonkyung Lee, Yiching Wu, and
Adam Casey, also o ered critical comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
p. xx
Carolina de Miguel, my department colleague who passed away in 2020, was someone who always made
time to chat, read my work, and discuss it over lunch or co ee. Her generous and humane spirit remains a
source of inspiration and is sorely missed. The intellectual communities of scholars in political science,
global a airs, and Asian studies at the University of Toronto have provided me with the inspiration and
advice I needed: Antoinette Handley, Ryan Balot, Peter Loewen, Ron Levi, Joseph Wong, Rachel Silvey, Diana
Fu, Sida Liu, Greg Distelhorst, Tak Fujitani, Frank Cody, Melissa Williams, Aisha Ahmad, Phil
Triada lopoulos, Ludovic Rheault, and Kenichi Ariga.
I would have been unable to write this book without the team of dedicated students who have given me
incredible support, often under tight deadlines. Although naming them all would be impractical, the
following are a few whose help was critical in the nal stages of the writing: Kevin, Alex, Alissa, Hao,
Zhouyang, Minghan, Brodie, Jasper, Yifan, and Yitian.
Much of the writing was done during the COVID-19 lockdown. Weaving together the stories my
interlocutors shared over the course of the research provided much comfort and ameliorated to some extent
the toll taken by the extended lockdown in Toronto. I am most grateful for the trust of my interviewees and
interlocutors, allowing me to tell their stories. This book is dedicated to them.
Lynette H. Ong
Toronto
July 1, 2021
1
Bulldozers, Violent Thugs, and
Nonviolent Brokers
In July 2010, I stood at the Shanghai Expo’s main national pavilion on the banks
of the Huangpu River, marveling at the grandiosity of the architectural jugger-
naut before me. Much like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the ostentatious Shanghai
Expo was intended to display China’s raw economic and political ambitions as
well as to mark its arrival on the world stage. The Expo’s theme of “Better City—
Better Life” underscored these messages, intended for domestic and global
consumption.
Fast forward six years. In the summer of 2016, my field research for this book
led me to interview a group of Shanghai residents who had lost their homes be-
cause of the Expo. “My home was situated right where the main national pa-
vilion stood!” an evictee in his 60s told me.1 After his forced removal in the early
2000s, he was never properly resettled or compensated. He and a group of other
evictees from Shanghai have paid monthly visits to the Beijing Petition Bureau
for nearly two decades in the hope of having their housing grievances addressed.
Nevertheless, all efforts to reassert their property rights and regain their dignity
have been nearly futile.
That summer I interviewed another group of Shanghai residents, who shared
with me their experience engaging with market brokers to bargain with local
governments for even more lucrative compensation over and above the brand-
new apartments and handsome cash payments they had been promised and
given.2 The juxtaposition of the two groups of Shanghai residents, who faced
similar eviction pressures, albeit at different times—but ended up receiving
diverging treatments by the state—is instructive. Their stories encapsulate in
miniature the varied configurations of the power of the state and the distinctive
means through which it coerces compliance.
Outsourcing Repression. Lynette H. Ong, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197628768.003.0001
2 Outsourcing Repression
of its strength, I also invite readers to reimagine what constitutes the notion of
state power.
Advancing two major arguments, this book presents a theory about outsour-
cing repression which lies at the core of everyday state power over society.7 First,
the state implements unpopular policies effectively and swiftly by using the
“everyday repression” of outsourced violence.8 Carried out by “thugs-for-hire”
(TFH), it is an expedient state strategy to impose its will on society.9 Although vi-
olent repression usually incurs costs, outsourcing violence to third-party agents
provides the pretense for plausible deniability and evasion of political account-
ability. Second, the state extracts citizen compliance and resolves state‒society
conflicts by mobilizing the masses (MTM), which involves marshalling a small
segment of society—the brokers—to gain acquiescence from the larger society.
Because mass mobilization is conducted through social networks, brokers with
social capital legitimate state repression, in turn minimizing resistance and
backlash.
An unconventional autocratic tool, outsourcing violence to TFH serves as a
proverbial stick. When outsourced to third parties, however, violent repression is
a stick with no identifiable wielding agent, allowing for plausible deniability and
the evasion of political accountability that is a major cost of violent repression.
I call this strategy “everyday repression,” denoting the banal, low-grade violent
repressive acts of coercion, deployed when formal state coercive acts are imprac-
tical (Ong 2015b). It is most effective in minimizing costs when the hiring au-
thority can effectively distance itself from the illegitimate violent acts and serious
casualties caused by it.
Meanwhile, MTM is a political strategy that shapes citizen behavior through
persuasion, an authoritarian tool independent of the proverbial carrots and
sticks, often carried out alongside rewards and punishments with the similar
intention of extracting compliance. MTM via persuasion is carried out by po-
litical, social, and economic grassroots brokers, who persuade citizens through
mobilization of affective emotions like love, trust, and respect. Critically, because
persuasion is lubricated by social relations and their attendant emotions, it is not
commonly perceived as state repression—thus allowing for lower-cost state ex-
traction of consent.
Figure 1.1 illustrates the agents and mechanisms through which outsour-
cing repression augments everyday state power. The nonstate agency of TFH and
brokers enables the state to exercise low-level violent everyday repression and to
4 Outsourcing Repression
mobilize the masses with socially embedded emotions. The elusive private iden-
tity of TFH makes possible plausible deniability and the evasion of state account-
ability, and brokers with social standing legitimize the state’s mass mobilization.
Collectively, these strategies minimize the resistance and backlash typically asso-
ciated with state repression.
Everyday state power is not, however, a guaranteed outcome of engaging non-
state agents. Outsourcing repression works to the state’s advantage only under
certain conditions, leading to variation in the successful practice of everyday
state power over society, the outcome variable of this study. Untrained TFH can
exert undisciplined violence that results in excess casualties, making the evasion
of responsibility a challenge. When government officials are seen as endorsing
TFH explicitly, the agents’ illegitimate violence is then associated with state
sponsorship. As with brokers, they bring net benefits to the state insofar as they
remain legitimate in the citizens’ eyes. When they are corrupt or prioritize per-
sonal interests at the citizens’ expense, they cease to legitimate state mobilization.
Under these circumstances, outsourcing repression is costly, and everyday state
power is diminished accordingly.
I illustrate these arguments through a study of the Chinese state’s efforts to
spearhead urbanization as an engine of growth. Most governments face formi-
dable challenges in land redistribution, but the Chinese state has been far more
successful in imposing its will on society and forcing citizens to acquiesce to state
orders—thanks to its engagement of nonstate agents. Beyond urbanization, the
state also engages TFH in areas of illegitimate or illegal actions, such as the rural
exactions of the 1990s, and the intimidation of protestors, petitioners, dissidents,
journalists, and other troublemakers. To appreciate how ubiquitous the strategy
of mobilizing the masses is, simply consider the role of neighborhood committees
and the nationwide army of volunteers in controlling people’s movements during
the fight against SARS and the COVID-19 pandemic. Grassroots brokers not
only contribute enormous manpower to state pursuits, but they also invoke af-
fective emotions to persuade citizens, a strategy that is often overlooked.
In addition, temporal and regional variations in China are noteworthy. In
general, the prevalence of violent repression by TFH diminished from the
Bulldozers, Violent Thugs, and Nonviolent Brokers 5
2000s to 2010s, the period covered by this study; but nonviolent, brokered
mass mobilization has increased in prominence over time. In a regional var-
iation, people living in the inner core of metropolitan cities, such as Shanghai
and Chengdu, tend to see significantly less or no violence, whereas those in
the city peripheries and the rural areas still experience violent repression.
Using in-depth case studies, I show that the violent repression prevalent in
Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of the mid-income Henan province, in the
mid-2010s had already occurred in metropolitan Shanghai a decade earlier in
the mid-2000s. By the mid-2010s, however, Shanghai had “progressed” into
the nonviolent mass mobilization era.
Despite these variations, outsourced violent coercion can be deployed along-
side nonviolent mobilization. As the case studies will illustrate, much depends
on the availability of thuggish agents and trustworthy local volunteers willing to
do the state’s bidding and the extent to which they can effectively repress or mo-
bilize the society. These considerations are location specific.
In this book, the state refers to the Party‒state, notwithstanding the occasional
bifurcation of the central‒local state interest.10 Using “state” in this volume,
I refer to local governments that have direct agency, not the central leadership.
But some of the outsourced repressive strategies, such as mobilizing the masses,
have been actively promoted by the central government as in the “Fengqiao
Experience” (Z. Zhu 2018). Overall, local governments’ outsourcing of repres-
sion has been either explicitly promoted or tacitly approved by the central au-
thority. Condonation by the center is palpable in the case of “black jails,” where
petitioners are illegally detained.11
To what extent do these arguments apply beyond China? Everyday state power
is the state’s exercise of power through society, or via society itself. To exercise
this power, the state must be strong enough to control the behavior of the vi-
olent agents or nonviolent brokers with whom it engages. In the absence of
state domination over agents, the latter should normatively believe that doing
the state’s bidding contributes to the collective public good. Furthermore, that
authoritarianism is not a necessary condition for the outsourcing of repression
deserves emphasis. The arguments advanced here could be applied to other
autocracies as well as democracies, subject to the scope condition that I will elab-
orate in Chapter 2. I illustrate in Chapter 8 the prevalent use of criminals and
gangsters by the authoritarian South Korean regime under Park Chung Hee and
Chun Doo Hwan to conduct mass evictions. This violent practice continued after
the country transitioned to a democracy in 1987, albeit less blatantly and more
tacitly. In democratic India, goondas, or neighborhood gangsters, lend their
“muscle power” to local politicians to intimidate political rivals, gather cam-
paign budgets, and win elections in return for political protection for their illegal
business pursuits.
6 Outsourcing Repression
State repression typically involves trade-offs between increased control and loss
of loyalty, giving rise to what Ronald Wintrobe (1998) called the “dictator’s di-
lemma.” This is the reason that no regime can survive through naked coercion
alone. I argue, however, that reconstituted everyday state power makes possible
the state’s enforcement of compliance, which is met with minimal backlash.
Thus, I theorize a counterintuitive form of repression—when carried out by non-
state agents, outsourced repressive acts lower the costs of state repression.
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észnek nem sikerült volna olyan hévvel és gyorsasággal ragadni
előre az emberiséget a művelődés útján, mint ahogy ezek az
agyrémek vitték. Bizonyára szükség volt ezekre az agyrémekre, a
bennünket vezető tudattalan szülötteire. Minden faj lelki alkatában
hordja végzetének törvényeit és tán e törvények azok, amelyeknek
még a látszólag legészellenesebb impulzus hatása alatt is
leküzdhetetlen ösztönből engedelmeskednek. Néha úgy látszik,
hogy a népek olyan titkos erőknek vannak alávetve, mint amelyek a
makkból tölgyfát növesztenek, vagy az üstökösöket pályájuk
megtartására kényszerítik.
Azt a keveset, amit ezekből az erőkből sejthetünk, valamely nép
fejlődésének egész menetében kell kutatnunk és nem az izolált
tényekben, honnan néha látszólag erednek. Ha csak a tényeket
vesszük külön-külön figyelembe, úgy látszik, hogy a történelemben a
valószínűtlenség és véletlen uralkodnak. Valószínűtlen volt az, hogy
egy tudatlan galileai ácsmester kétezer esztendőn keresztül
mindenható isten lehessen és nevében alapítsák a legfontosabb
civilizációkat. Valószínűtlen az is, hogy egy arab horda, otthagyva a
pusztáját, meghódíthassa a régi görög és római világ legnagyobb
részét és Nagy Sándorénál nagyobb birodalmat alapítson.
Valószínűtlen még az is, hogy a vén és hierarchizált Európában egy
szürke tüzérhadnagynak sikerüljön uralkodni népek és királyok
tömegei fölött.
Hagyjuk csak az észt a filozófusoknak, de ne kívánjunk tőle
túlságos nagy részvételt az emberek kormányzásában. Nem az ész
közreműködésével, hanem ellenére támadnak az olyan érzelmek,
mint a becsület, lemondás, a vallásos hit, a dicsőség és
hazaszeretet, s ezek voltak máig minden civilizáció nagy forrásai.
HARMADIK FEJEZET.
A tömegek vezetői és rábeszélési módszereik.
1. §. A tömegek vezetői. – Minden tömegnél ösztönszerű szükséglet, hogy
vezetőknek engedelmeskedjék. – Csak ők tudnak hitet teremteni és
tömegeket szervezni. – A vezetők szükségképen zsarnokok. – A vezetők
osztályozása. – Az akarat szerepe. – 2. §. A hatás eszközei a vezetőknél. – Az
állítás, ismétlés, lelki infekció. – E tényezők szerepe. – Hogyan jut a lelki
infekció alsóbb társadalmi rétegekből magasabb társadalmi rétegekbe. – A
népszerű gondolat minél előbb általános gondolattá lesz. – 3. §. A presztizs.
– A presztizs meghatározása és osztályozása. – A szerzett és személyes
presztizs. – Különböző példák. – Hogyan szűnik meg a presztizs.
1. §. A tömegek vezetői.
3. §. A presztizs.
NEGYEDIK FEJEZET.
A tömegnézetek és tömegmeggyőződések
változékonyságának határai.
1. §. A megrögzött vélemények.