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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.

How do discontented masses and opposition elites work together to engineer a change in electoral authoritarian regimes? Social movements and elections are often seen as operating in different terrains - outside and inside institutions, respectively. In this Element, I develop a theory to describe how a broad-based social movement that champions a grievance shared by a wide segment of the population can build alliances across society and opposition elites that, despite the rules of the game rigged against them, vote the incumbents out of power. The broad-based nature of the movement also contributes to the cohesion of the opposition alliance, and elite defection, which are often crucial for regime change. This Element examines the 2018 Malaysian election and a range of cases from other authoritarian regimes across Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa to illustrate these arguments.

The official banking institutions for rural China are Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs). Although these co-ops are mandated to support agricultural development among farm households, since 1980 half of RCC loans have gone to small and medium-sized industrial enterprises located in, and managed by, townships and villages. These township and village enterprises have experienced highly uneven levels of success, and by the end of the 1990s, half of all RCC loans were in or close to default, forcing China's central bank to bail out RCCs. In Prosper or Perish, Lynette H. Ong examines the bias in RCC lending patterns, focusing on why the mobilization of rural savings has contributed to successful industrial development in some locales but not in others. - Publisher's Web site

A strong authoritarian state such as China has a range of institutions and instruments at its disposal to resolve social conflicts. This study proposes a new mechanism—citizen's engagement of a profit-seeking broker—that helps to facilitate state-society bargaining, resolve conflicts and thereby absorb social contention. This form of state-society bargaining is conducted via professional brokers whose objective is to make a profit from the transactions. By establishing trust between the officials and citizen, the broker brings the two parties together, enables and facilitates state-society bargaining that would not have taken place otherwise. In so doing, the broker helps to resolve conflicts or protracted stand-offs that might have spilled into street protest. These profit-seekers represent commodification of state-society bargaining by matching demands from discontented citizens with supplies of special favours by state officials. This study contributes to the growing body of conflict resolution and state repression literature in China. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

This article examines "thugs-for-hire" in state repression. Local governments regularly deploy third-party violence to evict homeowners, expropriate land from farmers, manage illegal street vendors, and deal with petitioners and protestors in China. Violence is effective in implementing unpopular and illegal policies and also allows local authorities to evade responsibility for using violence and maintain a veneer of lawfulness. However, it may run the risk of backfiring and imposing costs vis-à-vis the legitimacy of the local state and of the Communist regime as a whole. (China J/GIGA)

Using violence or threat of violence, "thugs-for-hire" (TFH) is a form of privatized coercion that helps states subjugate a recalcitrant population. I lay out three scope conditions under which TFH is the preferred strategy: when state actions are illegal or policies are unpopular; when evasion of state responsibility is highly desirable; and when states are weak in their capacity or are less strong than their societies. Weak states relative to strong ones are more likely to deploy TFH, mostly for the purpose of bolstering their coercive capacity; strong states use TFH for evasion of responsibility. Yet the state-TFH relationship is functional only if the state is able to maintain the upper hand over the violent agents. Focusing on China, a seemingly paradoxical case due to its traditional perception of being a strong state, I examine how local states frequently deploy TFH to evict homeowners, enforce the one-child policy, collect exorbitant exactions, and deal with petitioners and protestors. However, the increasing prevalence of "local mafia states" suggests that some of the thuggish groups have grown to usurp local governments' autonomy. This points to the cost of relying upon TFH as a repressive strategy.