When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Based on political ethnography inside both legal and blacklisted labor organizations in China, this book reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention--mobilizing without the masses--that lowers the risk of activism under duress. Instead of facilitating collective action, activists coach the aggrieved to...

When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Based on political ethnography inside both legal and blacklisted labor organizations in China, this book reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention--mobilizing without the masses--that lowers the risk of activism under duress. Instead of facilitating collective action, activists coach the aggrieved to...