Bureaucrat-assisted contention in China is a type of collective action in which native-born officials help socioeconomic elites launch or sustain popular action against outsider party secretaries by leaking information and sabotaging repression. Bureaucrats who assist local influentials are...

Protest outcomes in rural China are typically an outgrowth of interaction between activists, sympathetic elites, targets and the wider public. Popular agitation first alerts concerned officials to poor policy implementation and may prompt them to take corrective steps. As a result of...

Rural protest leaders in China play a number of roles. Among others, they lead the charge, shape collective claims, recruit activists and mobilize the public, devise and orchestrate acts of contention, and organize cross-community efforts. Protest leaders emerge in two main ways. Long-time...

Citizenship often has a rural and local origin. Although villagers' committee elections in China have heightened cadre responsiveness and drawn rural residents into the local polity, sizable obstacles to inclusion remain because electoral rules do not enfranchise villagers reliably. That...

Research on social movements points to the role of networks in recruiting intimates and public spaces in recruiting strangers. But for Chinese Protestants, creative outreach strategies can substitute for previously existing relationships and initiate recruitment even when public proselytizing is...

In studies of popular politics a split exists. Some scholars focus on rather tame forms of participation while others become interested mainly when political action spills out onto the streets. This article considers acts located near the boundary between official, prescribed politics and...

As China urbanizes, more migrants need and expect public services. Many municipalities, however, resist and undermine elements of the central government's urbanization strategy by deflecting demands for benefits instead of accepting or denying them outright. Urban authorities sometimes do so by...