Portrait of Lü Pin 吕频

Download photo Curriculum vitae Biography

Lü Pin 吕频

I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rutgers University, with the degree expected in summer 2027. My work is situated at the intersection of authoritarian politics, gender and politics, and social movement studies, with China as its empirical focus.

My dissertation develops compensatory adaptation to explain the trajectory of China’s feminist movement under intensifying repression between 2013 and 2023. Drawing on an original database of more than 500 mobilization events and 50 interviews with activists, I build a two-dimensional framework for tracking movement dynamics and show that its social reach widened as its capacity for political challenge contracted. The study reveals the costs and contradictions of resistant resilience under repression and complicates the scholarship on the repression-resistance nexus.

My second line of research examines the political violence directed at feminist activists in China. I use the repression matrix to conceptualize violence that the state orchestrates and distributes across public and private actors, which saturates everyday life and erodes activists’ capacity for action while being deniable by largely bypassing formal criminalization. I argue that this violence takes hold by targeting intersectional vulnerabilities and activating patriarchal power in the family and the market.

I am also collaborating on an online survey experiment on policy compliance among Chinese citizens, and writing a book chapter on 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 findings have appeared or are forthcoming in China Perspectives and Politics & Gender.

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

News