Interview: Professor Lynette Ong
Author of "Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China"
In your own words, can you tell us what the book is about?
My book provides an in-depth look into how the Chinese state imposes compliance on its citizens in its own unique ways. It is a social science inquiry into how the Chinese state conducts state repression, and is able to do it “right”- in minimizing resistance and backlash. That is the central premise of the book; but it is also an area studies book in that I spent nearly a decade in the field visiting eight provinces or municipalities really trying to understand regional and temporal variations in China.
Can you share the story of the book’s origins?
When I started off on this project, the empirical context was urbanization in China. When I first went to the field in 2011, I wanted to understand the political economy of urbanization. Building off of my first book, I wanted to understand how local governments grab land, develop land, build commercial housing, and infrastructure in order to accumulate fiscal revenue. I wanted to understand how the machinery of political economy works.
When I was in the field, I was struck by my interviewees wanting to tell me of their encounters with non-state agents, particularly violent agents who intimidated or coerced them into signing papers, into giving up their land. Those stories were told in many places I visited, I started in Hefei in Anhui province and then into Sichuan, across several sites. When I spoke to people who had been relocated, who had signed papers, people were very interested in telling me about their violent encounters, which seemed to be very commonplace.
I began to dig deeper, and discovered that this is something that no one had written about, not even Chinese researchers. From then on, I took a departure from my initial political economy angle, and started to write about state coercion, state repression, and state power.
The book has a really balanced mix of both the urban and rural context, something unusual for China Studies Scholarship. Can you share your process?
I spent nearly a decade conducting field research for this book, and the time was roughly divided 50/50 between rural and urban China, as well as between inland provinces and coastal cities.
I started with field sites for my first book, “Prosper or Perish”, which was more rural-focused, researching Rural Credit systems in the early to mid 2000s. The book was published by Cornell University press in 2012. I went back to those sites, which were more rural and inland, and I encountered more violent non-state brokers, whom I call “thugs for hire”. These are people who are unemployed and who are hired by local governments to intimidate peasants and residents into signing papers and giving up their land.
Their acts are usually covert and involve low-level violence conducted in the middle of the night and away from public scrutiny. After about 4-5 years of doing this research, I had enough data and I had seen enough of a pattern of what was going on, but I really didn’t want to write a book just about violence in China. I knew that this was not the full story- even though I was pretty sure that was an interesting story people would be interested in. I was curious in exploring how these violent dynamics would play out in metropolitan cities in China.
So starting from about 2015, I started to move on to the central business districts in Shanghai and Chengdu (which is not a first-tier city but is economically fairly advanced), and I realized that the pattern and prevalence of violent non-state actors that I observed in rural China was not present there.
What had replaced it? Non-violent brokers. These range from residents’ committees and volunteer groups, whom I call grassroots brokers- the state is very adept at mobilizing all kinds of brokers to carry out everyday state policies.
Out of these brokers, the social brokers or the volunteers are the most effective. If you think about zero COVID in China, the image that comes to everyone’s mind are those men and women behind those white HAZMAT suits, right? Those are largely actually social volunteers. Some of them maybe political brokers or committee members, but they simply don’t have the man-power to do mass testing and so they need to mobilize a lot of social volunteers. The volunteers are what I term, “social brokers”.
For readers who have less of a sense of the rural-urban divide in China, would you be so kind as to explain a little the differences between rural China and rural Canada?
A key difference between the rural-urban divide in China versus Canada; there is not such a big disparity in Canada in terms of income, wealth gap, access to social media, or education level.
However in China, that is not the case. Rural China can be 10-20 years behind urban China in terms of education level, the sophistication of understanding of political rights, experience travelling overseas, their access to social media and their understanding of what they can do when their rights are infringed, and the extent to which they will hold the government accountable for their actions.
The supply and demand for civil liberty, and that for political accountability vary significantly between rural and urban areas in China in addition to the wealth disparity that people often talk about.
One refreshing aspect of your book is the focus on authenticity. What common misconception or trope do you read or hear a lot around China Studies that you would like to see retired from the discourse?
I think terms like “Authoritarian Responsiveness” is very much a cliché, a term that doesn’t tell us very much.
”Authoritarianism with Chinese Characteristics” to me is a bit of a lazy term; your observation may not fit into the typical categories, and you simply lump it into some sort of miscellaneous category, anything within “Chinese characteristics” is not really helpful in understanding China.
I think some scholars tend to see China as too much of an exceptional case. I do think China is different because it is large and has very strong state capacity, and it might have some cultural traits that differentiates itself from other countries. And yet, it’s really not so unique.
Take my research for instance, social brokers and the strong sense of volunteerism that we’ve observed throughout zero COVID in China, seem to be manifestations of unique Chinese culture, right? That people are willing to sacrifice their time for the sake of the community – how unique is it to China? The uniqueness is only partly true, part of the Confucianist political culture, but we can also observe that throughout Asia, in South Korea, Japan, as well as Southeast Asia to some extent. So China is not so unique.
There is great emergent scholarship on the public sphere in China as it pertains to the web, and academics have been diving into the dynamics of the online public discourse in China. Can you share a little about how your research relates the threat of physical violence and intimidation with the online world?
My book tells a different set of stories compared to the emergent scholarship on online discourse in China. Ya-Wen Lei’s book The Contentious Public Sphere is a prime example alongside many other scholars looking at online censorship. My book is about state repression in the quotidian people-to-people interaction. I don’t spend time on Weibo or the Chinese internet, observing online interaction. Instead, I spend time talking to Chinese people, talking to Chinese officials, to understand the in-person state-society dynamics. This book tells a complimentary story to the emerging scholarship on online discourse.
Having said that, I use multiple sources of data for this book -- primarily ethnographic research, but also 2000 cases collected from the Chinese media run by human rights organizations and China-based human rights activists. Most of them have been repressed by the government by now, but 10 years ago there were quite a few of them.
What challenges do you see in the field of China Studies, and what subjects would you like to see more academics study?
I’ll talk a little about what is missing from the existing China literature and what the future trends and constraints on China research are.
The one big missing piece in existing research is elite politics, which is traditionally under-studied because of its very opaque nature. We don’t know what is going on in Zhongnanhai or inside the Politburo Standing Committee. No one has access to that zone of information, unless you are one of the people in the room. People tend to try to get around it by compiling biographies of individuals, but I think that is an “educated guesstimate” at best, because one’s biography does not necessarily predict one’s behaviour.
I think a good understanding of elite politics is particularly important now, given how tense US-China relations are, and the authoritarian nature of Xi’s regime. We need to know what preoccupies the minds of central policy makers in China.
Moving forward, Chinese politics is getting increasingly difficult to study, especially anything that involves field research. I feel very privileged to be able to do the sort of ethnographic research I’ve done for the last 10 years. It has not been possible to conduct field research for the last couple of years because of COVID, but even without COVID, it’s just not possible anymore to do what we used to do. The Chinese Government does not want you to study China that way. You can’t just walk into people’s offices now, even if you have secured an official interview, no one is willing to talk. Everyone is under pressure to become more politically conservative because of the anti-corruption campaigns and crack-downs within the bureaucracy.
Moving forward, it's becoming more and more challenging to obtain primary data, which includes ethnographic research, and even survey work is getting increasingly challenging to carry out. Survey companies are refusing to carry out surveys, because of the high political costs.
So, China studies are going through some fundamental transformation. One has to ask: if you cannot collect primary data, how can you study a country properly? A lot of people have resorted to scraping data from the Chinese internet, or quoting government policy documents, but logic would tell us that the Chinese government has made those documents available for a reason; because they tell certain stories that are probably more amenable to the government’s ears. So, I think we need to be aware of the constraints and what the available data is telling – and – not telling us.
What other media would you recommend to a younger audience of China Watchers?
When I first started studying China in the 90s, throughout my PhD research as well as research for my first book I spent a lot of time reading Chinese material.
These days, more authentic materials are available in the English press. I read the NYT, Economist, WSJ regularly. I also read Caixin and Sixth Tone, which translate Chinese reporting. In addition, I also subscribe to a half-dozen blogs and Substacks written by long-time China observers.
Thank you so much! I’ll link your social media for our readers to be able to follow you in the future, as well as links to purchase your book. Thank you for your time.
Thank you!
twitter- @onglynette
LinkedIn- Lynette Ong
Purchase from Amazon.ca
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Purchase from Oxford University Press