“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
PRotest & Contention
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.
*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
ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS
Fu, D. and E. Dirks. 2022. “The Party’s Struggle to Tame Civil Society in China” in The Party Leads All? The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s Politics, Governance, Society, Economy, and External Relations. Delisle, J., and G. Yang (eds). Brookings Institution Press.
Fu, D. and C. Berman. 2022. “Unconventional Mobilization (Asia and the Middle East)” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social & Political Movements, 2nd edition. Snow, D., D. Della Porta, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam (eds). Wiley-Blackwell.
Fu, Diana. 2022. “Why and 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.
Fu, D. and E. Dirks. 2022. “The Xi Jinping Era of Chinese Politics” in The Oxford History of Modern China, 3rd edition. Wasserstrom, J. (ed). Oxford University Press.
Fu, D. 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? This 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]
*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
Good Citizen, Bad Citizen in Xi Jinping’s China
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 project examines authoritarian citizenship by analyzing “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.
How do victims of police violence express their dissatisfaction? This study examines this question in contemporary China, where repression of protesters is well documented. Based on a dataset of microblogs—Chinese tweets—documenting 74,415 protest events in the early Xi administration (2013–2016), this study analyzes how ordinary protestors, including migrant workers, peasants, and the urban poor, expose police abuse in social media.
China's social credit system can be examined as a governance tool which sorts citizenship behaviors into trustworthy and untrustworthy categories as part of the regime's long-standing effort to cultivate a loyal citizenry. Based on a data set comprised of central-level official documents, national model citizen lists, and media reports, this study qualitatively examines how the Chinese state constructs “good” and “bad” citizen ideal types. Theoretically, this study sheds light on how the world's most powerful authoritarian regime governs through a system that distributes material and symbolic capital.
Fu, Diana. 2023. “The Indoctrination Dimension of Repression: Televised Confessions Scripts in China.” Mobilization. Vol.28 (3), p.323-342.
*Runner-up for the 2020 best paper award from the International Studies Association’s human rights section.
Public confessions are repression spectacles that have appeared in different regimes and historical periods. This study theorizes an indoctrination dimension of repression—the turning of punishment into a control tool that displays the regime’s apparent transformative power. Whereas repression is often defined by its inhibiting dimension, this study argues that authorities stage repressive spectacles not only to deter further dissent but also as an instrument of “thought reform,” a governance tradition in China.
Fu, D. and G. Distelhorst. 2019. "Performing Authoritarian Citizenship: Public Transcripts in China." Perspectives on Politics. 17(1), p.106-121. [PDF] [Replication data]
Media Coverage: The Economist; The Washington Post
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.
Fu, D., R. Nielson and E. Schatz. 2025. “Ethnographic Approaches in Political Science.” Annual Review of Political Science.
Fu, D. and E. Simmons. (2021). “Ethnographic Approaches to Contentious Politics: The What, How, and Why.” Lead article of the special issue, “Studying Contentions Politics: From Afar or Up-Close? Fu, D. (ed). Comparative Political Studies. Vol. 54 (10). 1695-1721.
E. Dirks and Fu, D. Under Review. Governing Global China’s Diaspora: Consent and Coercion. Cambridge University Press, Global China Elements Series.
How does the world’s most powerful authoritarian state govern vast and diverse diaspora communities? Deftly managing internal and external threats has always been central to maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. How does global China as a power project manifest itself in governing the diaspora abroad? How and why has China’s use of coercive power abroad—in particular, transnational repression—increased under Xi? How has the party-state wielded coercive power alongside a wider toolkit of control against diaspora populations outside of its borders? And what makes China’s playbook of control distinctive compared to other authoritarian and illiberal states? This book offers comparative analysis of what, if anything, distinguishes the Chinese party-state’s governance of diaspora members from other regimes.
Interview: China Considered with Elizabeth Economy (Hoover 2025)
Related Policy Essay: “Distinguish Between Foreign Influence and Interference (SAIS 2025)
