China’s ambitious state-led urbanization accelerated in the early 2010s, annually increasing urban construction by 1.2 million acres— double the size of Rhode Island’s land mass— from 2010 to 2017. But urbanization was not a clean nor simple process. Massive volumes of people were forced from their homes, with estimates showing that at least 52 million peasants were displaced between 1987 and 2010. How did China manage to seize land for development so rapidly?
The neighborhood aunty. A street gangster. Like an octopus with many tentacles, China has successfully enforced its will without sacrificing its legitimacy via the strategic outsourcing of power to non-state actors, argues Lynette Ong— and in the digital age, surveillance and repression continue to blur the boundaries between state and society. Dr. Ong agreed to speak with the U.S.-China Perception Monitor about the physical and digital manifestations of everyday state power in China.
Lynette H. Ong is the Distinguished Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Toronto with appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where she directs the China Governance Lab. She has been invited to deliver expert testimonies before the U.S. Congress and the Canadian House of Commons. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (open access) (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her most recent book, Outsourcing Surveillance: Online Opinion Management in China (Cambridge University Press, 2026), will be released this month.
Isobel Li: A few years ago, you published a book titled Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. Could you briefly introduce this book and your most important findings?
Lynette Ong: We often think about the Chinese party state as extremely powerful in its ability to conduct repression and implement very challenging policies, ranging from the one-child policy to difficult urbanization policies in the last two decades. My argument is that the Chinese party state is powerful not because of its bureaucracy per se, but because of its capacity to mobilize society by outsourcing challenging policy implementation and repression to non-state actors. That is where its power lies.
The book focuses on two major types of non-state actors. One is thugs and gangsters. I call them “thugs-for-hire,” where the state pays these thugs to intimidate people into complying with state urbanization plans. The second part of the book focuses on trusted brokers such as neighborhood aunties and uncles, whom I call “social brokers.” Strictly speaking, these are non-state actors, but they could be mobilized by the state for ideological reasons or with all sorts of material incentives. These people could then use their own social networks, imposing community pressures to get others to comply with state policies.
IL: I saw that you began conducting research for this book in 2011. What changes or continuities have you noticed over the past 15 years regarding how thugs-for-hire or social brokers are taking on this power, or if the dynamics have shifted in any way?
LO: In many ways, it was a different world back in 2011 where Xi Jinping hadn’t assumed power and it was easier to conduct field research in China. The mechanisms that I have described in the book are still ongoing, but as time passes, one can imagine that it’s more challenging to mobilize people using ideology. People who could be mobilized this way such as neighborhood aunties— for example, in Beijing they are commonly called chaoyang dama (朝阳大妈)— tend to be elderly people above 55 or 60 years old. As time goes by, some of them have passed on, and they are not as readily available.
Think about the success of the Zero-COVID policies. The first 2.5 years were very successful with high compliance and low resistance, but there was increasing resistance starting from the Shanghai lockdown in April 2022. These first 2.5 years yielded high compliance because a lot of the mundane administrative work, COVID testing and taking temperatures, was actually imposed by whom I would call social brokers. These people are not young anymore. Now, they could be 55 or 60 years old. In 10 years, they will be 65-70 years old. Whether people in their 40s who grew up in the post-Deng liberal reform era could be ideologically mobilized to the same extent as the previous generation is an open question.
IL: I’m curious about the motivations for outsourcing repression. Would you say these goals are fulfilled, whether on a short-term or long-term basis, or does outsourcing repression actually harm the ultimate “power” goals of the government?
LO: Let’s first consider why the government would want to outsource repression. In a way, the government is outsourcing dirty work to somebody over whom it doesn’t have complete control. Low-level governments often do it because it’s convenient— it gets the job done more efficiently and effectively than they could do it in-house. For instance, if you want to get a family to relocate quickly, or to evict them from their home, you cannot send uniformed officers or a local official to do that. In the book, I show evidence that when the government sends local officials or police officers to evict people, it runs into significant resistance. For those at the receiving end, it would feel like the state is imposing its will on me and evicting me from my home, which is illegal. But if the government could hire someone who is not clearly identifiable— for example, pull an unemployed guy from the street and pay him 100 yuan a day to intimidate people in the middle of the night, whether that be spray painting intimidating words, or backing them up into an alley and saying “you have to move by a certain date, otherwise your family will be in trouble” — then people will be scared and comply. It’s often done for reasons of convenience and the evasion of responsibility.
However, it’s not entirely good for the local governments who order those actions because they don’t have complete control over the thugs and gangsters. What if they beat people up and end up killing people, even though they may not have killed intentionally? There are cases of when excessive violence was used even accidentally, local officials were removed from office. The central government wants to appear somehow accountable to people’s actions, even if they also want to implement urbanization swiftly. Consequently, some local officials get into trouble and get removed from office because of the excessive violence caused by outsourcing.
IL: You also write that despite using China as a very clear case study for your arguments, a state doesn’t have to be authoritarian to outsource repression. Could you elaborate on other states that exert similar controls and how they compare to China?
LO: I wrote about the United States, Guantanamo Bay, how the government somewhat outsourced putting undocumented immigrants into an area that is outside of the mainland United States. But I think a more common example right now would be ICE agents. They are police officials and are part of the state apparatus, but they also behave in such a way that they are really not accountable to the state anymore. So ICE agents, in a way, are like chengguan (城管) in China where they somewhat belong to the state but also do not belong to the state. It has reached a point where the U.S. government right now is more or less like the Chinese government 20 years ago, which deployed a lot of chengguan in urban areas to get dirty jobs done— such as controlling the movement of migrant workers in the cities— and the United States government right now is using ICE agent to do what they would say is “controlling the movement of illegal immigrants.” This is to the detriment of the legitimacy of the government, which clearly has been deprioritized.
So yes, I think there are a lot of examples throughout the world where democracies and non-democracies and hybrid regimes outsource violence and outsource repression for convenience’s sake, for expediency’s sake.
IL: On the social broker side, could you share more about your findings regarding the practice of guanxi (关系) and persuasion as tools for autocratic control? I am also wondering if that has positively impacted people’s domestic perceptions towards the government— has the state removed itself enough from the process that community members are unaware of its involvement?
LO: Guanxi (关系) is really a civil people-to-people network. You have guanxi with your university peers. I have guanxi with my University of Toronto peers. The party state has no access to guanxi, no access to the personal networks. But if the party state could mobilize someone in the guanxi network, then this person could use their guanxito convince people within those networks to comply with state policy. That’s the gist— instead of the state going to knock on each door of individuals in a network to get them to sign papers, to vacate their properties, the state mobilizes a central person to do the job. This central person is what I would call a social broker. Typically, this is someone who has a good reputation in the community, someone a little bit older who commands respect and has lived in the neighborhood for decades.
The mechanism for persuasion is that of social pressure. This broker might go into someone’s home and say, you know the auntie next door, right? She has a son who is waiting to get married and needs a new apartment. If you don’t sign the papers, you are holding up the future of everybody in the neighborhood, because the government often needed the consent of 99%— sometimes 100%— of the people. Social brokers don’t put it in such a way that you would know it is the party that asked the social broker to get your signature. It’s often framed as some sort of social obligation, which makes it more effective and psychologically imposing.
IL: So domestically, community perceptions of the state would not deteriorate because social brokers are not known to be connected to government will. Do you see any international implications of how China is perceived as more or less controlling? For instance, I know in Canada there have been indictments of China’s forced labor violations, which made Canadians wary about furthering the Canada-China relationship. Do you see outsourced repression potentially supporting China’s global image, or is it not really considered in the international scheme?
LO: I would say that outsourcing repression is very much a crucial feature of how the Chinese party state conducts repression on an everyday basis, which has been going on since Mao’s years. Some of the practices such as mutual surveillance or zhulian (株连) have been going on since imperial times and have strong cultural roots. Those things don’t make it to the headlines because it’s embodied within the society, and oftentimes the society itself doesn’t see these practices as coercive. In the last 20–25 years, what has shifted is what Western analysts would recognize clearly as repression, such as labor camps in Xinjiang and violent repression in Hong Kong and in Tibet; what would be clearly labeled as coercion and repression started to come up especially against runaway territories or ethnic minorities. I would argue, as I did in the final chapter, that you have two types of repression going on in China. First is everyday repression or outsourced repression, which has been going on for a long time and doesn’t necessarily delegitimize the state, if it’s not carried out in an excessive manner— that’s the nonviolent part. But in the last two decades we also see overt, violent repression that delegitimizes the state, particularly from an outsider’s perspective. These two things can happen at the same time. Both are true.
IL: That’s very insightful, thank you. Moving on to your forthcoming book, it would be great to explore how social resistance and continued state repression have changed in the digital age. Could you give a brief overview of the arguments made in Outsourcing Surveillance?
LO: Outsourcing Surveillance takes the arguments of Outsourcing Repression to the digital era. The underlying premise is that the Chinese party state is so strong in digital surveillance and censorship because it outsources the technical dimensions to private companies and for-profit subsidiaries of state-owned media giants, such as Xinhua Daily and the People’s Daily.
The motivation for outsourcing repression is to evade responsibility, particularly in terms of violent coercion, but in the digital era, outsourcing is really to augment the state’s technical capacity. Digital surveillance is highly demanding in terms of the technological sophistication involved. Every government agency and every party committee across all administrative levels— from Beijing, province, prefecture, and county— are involved in moderating public opinion, because people can go on the internet such as Weibo or WeChat to complain about the government. Every state agency has a responsibility as part of their evaluation to keep track of what the people are saying about them.
Public opinion is a double-edged sword in China. On one hand, the government wants to allow for some degree of public opinion expression; on the other hand, the government can’t afford to have an online mass incident with thousands of people complaining or have an online situation spill over to become a street protest. So, the government outsources surveillance by procuring software and AI algorithms that can detect keywords and help them preempt sensitive posts and intervene before the posts go viral. Services that are more politically sensitive, such as training employees to do moderation in-house and writing news digests and briefs that are read by the central leadership, are exclusively outsourced to the subsidiaries of Xinhua Daily and People’s Daily.
IL: How do netizens experience or circumvent outsourced surveillance? And how might that differ from when they experience more direct forms of government censorship?
LO: Let’s say you’re a netizen, you go on the Chinese Internet, you participate in all sorts of online discourses. When your post gets censored or taken down, you don’t know who is actually doing it, whether it is the propaganda department or private companies. Therefore, it makes no difference from the society’s perspective, because everything is done behind the scenes.
The origin of outsourced surveillance or censorship 20 to 25 years ago was the so-called 50 Cent Army, the wumaodang (五毛党). Rumor says that they were paid fifty cents for neutralizing negative posts about the party. If I were to go online and criticize Xi Jinping, one of these wumaodang people would then flood the Internet with ten posts to overturn my negative sentiment. This was the first generation of how digital surveillance was done to moderate public opinion in China. But these days it has become much more technically sophisticated. The demand for moderation of online opinion has become so huge that it has spawned a multi-billion RMB industry with companies specializing in these services that cater to the party state’s demand.
IL: That makes sense. You talked a little bit in the book about instrumentarian power. Could you elaborate a little bit more about what you mean?
LO: The term was first used by a scholar who writes about the power of Google and Meta in the United States. Her argument is that these technology companies are in possession of a lot of private data, their power is usurping that of the state in Western democracies such as the United States, and the Western governments are playing catch-up in terms of enacting legislation that could properly regulate companies like Google and Meta. In China’s case, yes, you do have these big platform companies, like Alibaba and WeChat, that are in possession of a lot of private data and the party state has to work with them too. But in China, regulations are not required to get the companies to do what the party state wants. It could just run an audit. For instance, threatening a tax audit or an anti-monopoly investigation could send any CEO or Jack Ma into hiding for several years. There are all sorts of informal coercive measures the party state could potentially impose to exert control over private companies. You could have a private company that possesses a lot of private data in China, but their power would never usurp that of the party state. That is the difference.
IL: Does this put a strain on state–business relations in China? Or does it improve relations now that the state is giving these tech companies a lot of money and support?
LO: State–business relationships in China are undergoing some fundamental transformation. We often see the private sector operate independently of the state. But if the state is actively outsourcing surveillance and digital repression to the private sector, the private sector then becomes an extension of the state, actively doing the state’s bidding. That raises a host of principal–agent problems. To what extent could the state control the behavior of private companies so that the companies don’t side or collude with society against the party?
The evidence thus far suggests that the party has been able to largely control what the private sector does. The private companies are now actively doing the state’s bidding because there is profit to be made— and in the industry of digital surveillance and moderating online opinion, the party state has become its largest and most important client. This complicates state–business relations— private businesses have become an instrument of the party state to impose its will on the society, and an agent of its outsourced repression.