Diana Fu, Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China

Excerpt

How do organizations marshal popular contention in the face of repression? Mobilizing Without the Masses, Diana Fu’s study of grassroots labor organizations in China during the Hu-Wen period (2002–2012), answers this question by showing how these groups educate workers to confront the state as individuals or in small numbers. In a contribution to the social movement literature, the book identifies mobilizing without the masses as coordinated small-scale contention—contrasted with non-coordinated individual contention and collective contention—and argues that it has become a core piece of the contentious work of some labor NGOs in China. Based on eighteen months of participant observation in the field in Beijing and the Pearl River Delta, the book deftly describes the efforts that these organizations undertake on behalf of China’s migrant workers and explores the political environment in which they find themselves. Mobilizing Without the Masses provides a granular, insider perspective on these organizations and the local bureaucracies with which they interact. …