How does the Chinese state coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In her latest book, Outsourcing Repression, Lynette 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. 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, 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.
About our speaker: Lynette H. Ong is Professor of Political Science (from July 1) at the University of Toronto, where she researches issues at the intersection of authoritarian politics, contention and development. She is primarily a China specialist; she has also published on Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific contexts. Her works have appeared or cited in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Economist, Washington Post, etc., alongside academic outlets.