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 study traces the transformation of China’s feminist movement under intensifying repression across the first decade of Xi Jinping’s rule, from 2013 to 2023. Drawing on an original database of more than 500 mobilization events, this study identifies the repressive episodes that produced strategic turns and treats them as points of discontinuity for assessing the movement’s adaptation along two dimensions. Politicization measures the degree to which movement activity challenges authoritarian order, and popularization measures the degree to which movement concerns penetrate wider social life. The study further analyzes the iterative adjustments the movement made across the three components of its strategy, namely mobilizing structures, discourse, and repertoires, particularly during pivotal phases such as the peak of the MeToo movement between 2018 and 2020. Interviews with more than 50 activists, read alongside movement archives, reconstruct the subtle strategic reasoning and the practical experimentation behind those adjustments.

Through an in-depth case study in a high-capacity authoritarian context, the study complicates the scholarship on the repression-resistance nexus, showing that movements persist by reconfiguring themselves and that the resistant resilience this produces is reactive, costly, and self-contradictory. What settles into place is an antagonistic coexistence between the movement and the authoritarian regime. The concept of compensatory adaptation and the dual-dimensional measurement framework developed by this study give comparative politics a systematic means of tracking movement transformation, one especially suited to settings where activity is covert, dispersed, or deliberately ambiguous.

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