Few policies pit the state against the people whom it governs more so than asset seizure, especially if the seized asset is a personal abode. Through more than 200 interviews with both victims and perpetrators of such seizures in China, examination of untold numbers of government documents, and statistical analysis of thousands of protests related to seizure and demolition, Lynette Ong has written a book that at once makes important conceptual breakthroughs and provides readers with rich descriptions and analysis of the mechanisms for what she calls “everyday forms of repression.” Even a strong state like the one in China does not always have to meet resistance with strong force. In fact, Ong shows clearly that more subtle tactics can result in lower costs and potentially greater payoffs for the state. This book provides an important piece of the authoritarian longevity puzzle. Following in the footsteps of classics by James Scott (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, 1985) and Yanhua Deng and Kevin O’Brien (“Relational Repression in China: Using Social Ties to Demobilize Protesters,” China Quarterly 215, 2013), as well as more recent breakthrough works such as Daniel Mattingly’s The Art of Political Repression in China (2019), Ong’s book substantially deepens our understanding of the complex strategies that a strong state like China uses to expropriate from society. This book will inspire many follow-up studies not just on China but also on other authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes.
In the face of systematic exploitation and repression by the state or colonial powers, Scott (1985) posits that people are not powerless and can engage in low-level obstruction, ranging from pilfering to arson, which escalates the state’s costs of governing. For the state, such low-level resistance presents a dilemma because deploying the full might of the state to repress it might trigger larger-scale collective action, which is much more costly or even impossible to quell. Yet, tolerating such “everyday forms of resistance” might prevent the state from reaching important objectives.
Ong astutely observes, however, that the state is far from helpless in the face of this low-level resistance. This is especially true for a regime with a grassroots-level presence such as the Chinese Communist Party, which can deploy “augmented state power.” To terminate low-level resistance without a backlash, the state deploys violent entrepreneurs, or “thugs,” to use coercive tactics to obtain compliance. Although ultimately employed by the state, these thugs’ informal status allows the government to disavow their ties with them and even punish them if they unleash violence beyond the state’s tolerance. Interviewing both victims and perpetrators of thuggish tactics, Ong carefully catalogs a whole range of tactics used to exert different degrees of pressure on targeted people. Furthermore, in a highly suggestive statistical analysis of more than 2,000 reported cases of land expropriation, Ong finds that the deployment of thugs reduces the chance of larger-scale backlash protests, compared to the deployment of official police forces. This finding suggests the real “worth” of these thugs to the government. Contrary to the popular belief that deployment of thugs would elicit a backlash, Ong’s analysis shows that it may not be the case or at least that the deployment of thugs may be better than the alternatives for the government.
Despite the novelty of this finding, the data collected by Ong are far from perfect because they are based on reported cases of protests and repression, which are selected to be reported based on the size of the protests and their location. For example, protests occurring in Southern China are much more likely to be reported by the foreign media; at the same time, localities in Southern China have greater fiscal resources, which afford them greater ability to pay for “thugs for hire.” At the very least, this selection issue should be addressed by including provincial- and ideally prefecture-fixed effects, as well as time-fixed effects. Future research on the impact of deploying various repressive agents should take advantage of exogeneous shocks that enlarged or tightened local government’s budget constraints, thereby affecting their ability to hire and pay for thugs. Ong’s hypothesis is an important one that should be retested using different empirical approaches.
The state perhaps has an even more powerful tool against low-intensity resistance in “brokers”: those who are willing to use their specialized social and political knowledge at the local level to persuade, cajole, and even threaten people into compliance. Through numerous interviews, Ong finds that an effective broker uses a whole range of emotional and economic appeals to garner compliance from previously recalcitrant people, thus saving the state many headaches. These brokers, many of whom are community workers at the neighborhood level, spend their days uncovering household-level information in their neighborhoods, which can then be deployed when the state needs it. This insight further adds substantial richness to the “relational repression” literature (Deng and O’Brien 2013; Mattingly 2019).
Here, one would have liked to see clearer conceptualization of the actions of these brokers and whether their role is repressive. The term “broker” denotes a purely voluntary transaction, but this may not be the case. These brokers are parastatal agents who can directly impose or indirectly recommend repressive measures on their targets. An elderly broker in the neighborhood can channel information on the social connections of residents to the authorities and recommend repressive measures such as detention and employment termination for residents perceived as “disharmonious.” Ong’s work focuses on the informational aspect of local agents, but their repressive roles also must be highlighted.
Drawing on years of fieldwork, Ong is able to describe not only the perspectives and actions of the interviewees but also their physical environment and livelihood. An important insight from this fieldwork is that villagers resisted expropriation not out of desperate material demand—many still lived comfortably—but out of a sense of injustice about how they were treated by the local authorities and their thugs. This collective memory of injustice can linger for years, creating focal points of resistance against further government expropriation. This insight suggests serial correlation in the localities of protests in China, something the field has not explored.
In addition to the substantial contribution of this book to our understanding of authoritarian repression, Ong’s work also provides an important insight into a potential vulnerability in China’s local political economy, following her previous works on local financial stress. Since the mid-1990s, local governments in China have accelerated the accumulation of debt to make up for revenue shortfalls and for accumulating unfunded mandates from the central government. By some estimates, local debt surpassed 70% of GDP in 2015, and it is likely that the ration is a higher ratio today (Bai, Chong-En, Chang-tai Hsieh, and Zheng Song, “The Long Shadow of a Fiscal Expansion,” in The Long Shadow of a Fiscal Expansion, 2016). Only a healthy amount of land sales has allowed the Chinese government to continue ordinary operations and to meet the ballooning “stability maintenance” budget, which includes payments to local thugs and brokers. In 2022, however, land sales revenue fell by more than 40%, even as local governments were pressured by the center to maintain interest payments and so avoid a systemic financial crisis. Local governments’ ability to pay local thugs and brokers has diminished quickly. In the short run, central transfers to finance zero-COVID policies have staved off the prospects of angry informal enforcers protesting against pay arrears all over China. Ong’s meticulously researched work, however, suggests a scenario where a fiscal hiccup at the central level immediately leads to massive pay arrears for both formal and informal enforcers at the local level. This in turn develops into a crisis of governance at the local level that is costly to reverse. When that occurs, “everyday forms of resistance” may transform into revolutionary energy.
