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...

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...

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...

Using interviews and survey data from four counties, this paper examines Chinese villagers' trust in the state. It shows that while some villagers seem to see a monolithic state that is either trustworthy or untrustworthy, more believe that there are substantial differences between higher and...

The paper examines the significance of distinguishing trust in government's commitment from trust in its competence for understanding the relationship between political trust and political participation. It finds that Chinese farmers have more trust in the central government's commitment to...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...