How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage? Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien and Li explore the origins, dynamics, and consequences of rightful resistance, they highlight similarities between collective action in places as varied as China, the former East Germany, and the United States, while suggesting how Chinese experiences speak to issues such as opportunities to protest, claims radicalization, tactical innovation, and the outcomes of contention.

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Chinese local officials frequently employ relational repression to demobilize protesters.When popular action occurs, they investigate activists' social ties, locate individuals who might be willing to help stop the protest, assemble a work team, and dispatch it to conduct thought work. Work team members are then expected to use their personal influence to persuade relatives, friends and fellow townspeople to stand down. Those who fail are subject to punishment, including suspension of salary, removal from office, and prosecution. Relational repression sometimes works. When local authorities have considerable say over work team members and bonds with protesters are strong, relational repression can help demobilize protesters and halt popular action. Even if relational repression does not end a protest entirely, it can limit its length and scope by reducing tension at times of high strain and providing a channel for negotiation. Often, however, as in a 2005 environmental protest in Zhejiang, insufficiently tight ties and limited concern about consequences creates a commitment deficit, partly because thought workers recognize their ineffectiveness with many protesters and partly because they anticipate little or no punishment for failing to demobilize anyone other than a close relative.The practice and effectiveness of relational, "soft" repression in China casts light on how social ties can demobilize as well as mobilize contention and ways in which state and social power can be combined to serve state ends.Keywords: protest control; soft repression; policing; work teams; thought work; social networks Relational Repression in China: Using Social Ties to Demobilize Protesters For some years now, students of contentious politics have been calling for a broader understanding of protest control. 1 They argue that existing scholarship has been overly focused on state-based and "hard" forms of repression at the expense of less heavy-handed ways to suppress popular action. In order to redress this imbalance, a number of studies have explored how surveillance, Relational repression is a control technique that uses social ties to demobilize protesters. In China, it amounts to relying on relatives, friends, and native-place connections to defuse popular  For helpful comments, we would like to thank Loren Brandt, Lei Guang, Rongbin Han, William Hurst, Andrew Kipnis, Richard Madsen, Barry Naughton, Jean Oi, Eva Pils, Scott Rozelle, Rachel Stern, Nicolai Volland, Xueguang Zhou, the journal's two anonymous referees, and especially Lianjiang Li. Generous financial support was provided by the China Fieldwork Fund and a Residential Research Fellowship from the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC-Berkeley. 1For typologies of protest control, see Jennifer Earl, "Tanks, tear gas, and taxes: toward a theory of movement repression, " Sociological Theory, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2003) Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2011), pp. 21-37. 3 Myra Marx Ferree, "Soft repression: ridicule, stigma, and silencing in gender-based movements," Re...

When residents of a few Guangxi villages decided to elect their own leaders in late 1980 and early 1981, none of them could have known they were starting a historic reform. What began as a stopgap effort to fill a political vacuum, after much debate and two decades of uneven implementation, is now enshrined in a national law. Procedures for holding elections have been spelled out and implementing regulations are being formulated at all levels. Voting is now mandatory every three years in every village, bar none.