Lü Pin

Research

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Dissertation

Resistant Resilience in the Age of Escalating Repression: Understanding the Dynamics of China’s Feminist Movement, 2013–2023

This dissertation asks how social movements persist as repression escalates, and what it is that persists. It addresses these questions through China’s feminist movement, which remained active under the intensifying repression of the party-state between 2013 and 2023, when many other movements withdrew from public view. It locates the explanation primarily in the iterated interaction between state and movement, in which movement actors exercised agency under continuous constraint. Building on scholarship on the repression-mobilization nexus, it develops the concept of reconfigurative adaptation, which describes how a movement adjusts the configuration of its strategy to evade repression and preserve its vitality. Adaptation takes shape as dispersed and competing actors read environmental signals and proceed by trial and error, through the abandonment of actions whose costs have become too high, innovation that brings new forms of action into the movement, and the carryover of forms from one phase to the next.

Reconfiguration is traced along two theoretically independent dimensions. Politicization is a movement’s position on a spectrum of engagement with the state, set jointly by its claims, its organization, and its repertoire. Social base is its position on a spectrum of reach into society, from an enclosed circle to the public at large, set jointly by the threshold for taking part, the commitment an action asks of participants, and the resonance of its terms. Coding these components in an original database of more than 1,000 feminist actions, the dissertation traces the movement’s trajectory across the crackdowns of 2015, 2018, and 2021. More than 50 semi-structured interviews with activists and an extensive body of movement archives reconstruct how movement actors weighed their options and arrived at the shifts the database records. With each crackdown, the movement scaled back politicization while expanding its social base, moving from organizing to mobilizing, from coordination to connection, and from advocacy to discourse. What emerged was an antagonistic coexistence with the state, in which the movement persists as a feminist counterpublic carrying dissenting discourse and culture, with its activist networks and collective identity latent within it.

The dissertation contributes a framework for tracing change in a movement’s form under repression at the level of the action, matching on the movement side the disaggregation that research has achieved for repression. Its coding scheme makes movement change traceable by integrating individual actions into a temporal sequence. It also offers a close case of state and movement in interaction, revising how the resilience of each is understood.

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