The Secret Police Among Us: Diverging Instruments of Mass Repression in China and the Soviet Union

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: State and Society in Contemporary China

Abstract

How do states repress society and minimize backlash at the same time? In this paper I address this theoretical puzzle by proposing their use of a strategy of repression through complicit society. I examine the roles of brokers as complicit nonstate actors and the conditions under which they help to legitimate state repression. Notably, social brokers draw on their social capital with network members to exercise social compulsion. By legitimating repression with social‒moral norms, they assuage the perception of policy imposition as state coercive acts and help to augment state power to penetrate society and elicit compliance from the masses accordingly. I illustrate these arguments drawing on case studies of the Chinese state’s gaining community consent to contentious urbanization and demolition projects. This paper contributes to the literatures on state power, repression, and brokerage.

Author

• Lynette H. Ong, University of Toronto