Outsourcing Repression

In Outsourcing Repression, Lynette H. Ong tells the story of how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors--from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers. Drawing from a decade of ethnographic research from 2011 to 2019, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations, Ong shows how the state uses these nonstate actors to coerce and mobilize the masses, while reducing resistance. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of state repression, she uses China's urbanization scheme to examine how authoritarian states can successfully enlist a small segment of society to gain acquiescence from the larger segments of society.