“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
REpression & Contention
BOOK
Fu, Diana. 2018. "Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China." Cambridge University Press, Contentious Politics Series. Columbia University Weatherhead Series on East Asia. [Interview] [Podcast]
*Winner of the 2018 American Political Science Association’s Gregory Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics published in the previous two years.
*Winner of the 2019 International Studies Association’s International Political Sociology Award for best book
*Co-Winner of the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship book award
How does the authoritarian party-state govern civil society organizations? Under repression, how do weak citizens mobilize? Based on eighteen months of political ethnography inside informal labor organizations in China (2009-2011), this project analyzed both state repression and civil society contention under Hu Jintao.
ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS
Fu, D. Forthcoming in 2021. “How the Party-State Harnessed People Power in China.” in Stoltzfus, N. and C. Osmar(eds). The Power of Populism and People: Resistance and Protest in the Modern World. Bloomsbury.
Fu, D. and C. Berman. “Repression and Unconventional Contention in Asia” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social & Political Movements, 2nd edition. Snow, D., D. Della Porta, and D. McAdam (eds). Wiley-Blackwell. Under contract.
Fu, D. “How should the US Support Chinese Civil Society?” in The China Questions II: Critical Insights into the US-China Relationship. Carrai, M., J. Rudolph, M. Szonyi (eds). Harvard University Press. Under contract.
Fu, D. and E. Dirks. “The Party’s Struggle to Tame Civil Society in China.” in edited book with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Under contract.
Fu, Diana and G. Distelhorst. 2018. "Grassroots Participation and Repression under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping." The China Journal. [PDF]
How has repression of civil society transformed under the current administration? Are there remaining channels for political participation? A new study finds that while political opportunities for contentious participation has closed, institutionalized participation channels remains open.
Fu, Diana. 2017. “Disguised Collective Action in China.” Comparative Political Studies. Vol. 50, No. 4, 499-527. [PDF] Methods appendix published online, Oct. 2016.
*Co-Winner of the 2018 Best Article Published in Comparative Political Studies.
It is forbidden for civil society groups in China to coordinate collective action. Any group that organizes protests or demonstrations runs a high risk of being repressed. Under such conditions, how does civil society bypass these constraints? Based on first hand participant observation inside labor organizations, this study finds that activists deploy "disguised collective action" which hides organizing behind a facade of atomized actions.
*Winner of the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Article Award in Labor and Labor Movements
Contrary to the assumption that a high capacity authoritarian state can stamp out all unwanted activism, the study finds that the local states deploy fragmented repression. Different arms of a single local state simultaneously repress, co-opt, and facilitate illegal activism. In the cracks, underground civil society groups survived under Hu Jintao.
“I have a stomach full of words, but I just can’t say them” is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical role that an influential Beijing women’s organization plays as both a site of articulation and a cage that limits and contains the marginal voices of migrant women.
Authoritarian citizenship
Book Project: Good Citizen, Bad Citizen Under Authoritarian Rule
What does it mean to be a “good” or “bad” citizen in an authoritarian state? How do state and society co-construct meanings of citizenship through producing “public transcripts”—ritualistic communication between rulers and the ruled? This new project studies authoritarian citizenship by examining “public transcripts”—on-stage exchanges between power-holders and the powerless. These transcripts provide a rich source of empirical data for examining how ordinary individuals perform citizenship on an everyday basis. The project also theorizes how dissidence—the antithesis of “good citizenship” is constructed and disseminated by the authoritarian state.
Fu, Diana and G. Distelhorst. 2019 "Performing Authoritarian Citizenship: Public Transcripts in China." Perspectives on Politics. 17(1), p.106-121. [PDF] [Replication data]
This study draws upon on an original database of over 8,000 letters scraped from mayoral governments’ websites across China in 2013. Based on a close reading of five hundred letters, the study theorizes three ideal types of authoritarian citizenship: subjecthood, authoritarian legal citizenship, and socialist citizenship.
Media Coverage: The Washington Post
Diana Fu and Greg Distelhorst, for instance, show in their chapter how institutionalized forms of popular participation such as Freedom-of-Information requests and lawsuits against government agencies have persisted and, in some cases, increased during Xi’s rule. At the same time, his regime has criminalized and repressed more contentious forms of social activism in China, including crackdowns on labor activists, rights lawyers and even Marxist student groups.