Portrait of Lü Pin 吕频

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Lü Pin 吕频

I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rutgers University. I will defend my dissertation in February 2027 and complete the degree in May 2027. My work is situated at the intersection of authoritarian politics, social movements, and gender politics, with China as its empirical focus.

My dissertation develops the concept of reconfigurative adaptation to explain why China’s feminist movement remained active under intensifying repression between 2013 and 2023, even as many other movements withdrew from public view. I trace the movement’s reconfiguration along two theoretically independent dimensions, politicization and social base, coded in an original database of more than 1,000 feminist actions and reconstructed through more than 50 interviews with activists and movement archives. With each of the crackdowns of 2015, 2018, and 2021, the movement scaled back politicization while expanding its social base. It persisted in an antagonistic coexistence with the state as a feminist counterpublic, and the study reconceptualizes strategic adaptation in the scholarship on the repression-mobilization nexus.

My second line of research examines state violence against feminist activists in China that produces no spectacle. I develop the concept of the repression matrix, in which the police and state security agencies orchestrate violence that state and non-state actors with power over activists’ everyday lives carry out in dispersed and continuous fashion, exhausting activists’ will and resources while evading accountability. This violence takes hold by exploiting activists’ intersecting vulnerabilities and activating power embedded in institutional, social, and familial relations, including the emotional bonds of the family, a mechanism I theorize as emotional proxy repression.

My other ongoing projects examine state-society relations in the domain of reproduction, including a collaborative online survey experiment on how Chinese citizens comply with or resist pronatalist policy, and the media strategies of the Chinese feminist movement.

My research has been supported by the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics and by the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. My articles have appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum and Politics & Gender and are forthcoming in China Perspectives.

Outside the academy, I have worked in China’s feminist movement for close to thirty years.

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