Xiaojun Yan – författare

While the processes of founding a new state or constructing a new political order after a transition have been well-studied, there has been much less attention to how regimes that survive major political crises purposefully reinvent a postcrisis state to respond to updated concepts, new circumstances, changed social demands, and a realigned elite consensus. In Engineering Stability, Yan Xiaojun examines the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reassert control and restore order on university campuses in the post-Tiananmen era. Since prominent national universities serve the nation-state as training grounds for the country’s future political, economic, and cultural elites, public life on university campuses has immediate political relevance. Drawing on rich materials gathered from in-depth field research in China during the Xi Jinping era, Engineering Stability invites scholars of comparative politics, state theory, contentious politics, and political development to rethink and reimagine how what Yan calls “a compromised autocratic state” is rebuilt within and from itself after overcoming a traumatic moment of vulnerability. The book further details the four types of infrastructure — institutional, significative, regulatory, and incentivizing — that state rebuilders need to overhaul, and looks into the campaign of state rebuilding in post-Tiananmen Chinese universities and its implications for our understanding of politics in general.

While the processes of founding a new state or constructing a new political order after a transition have been well-studied, there has been much less attention to how regimes that survive major political crises purposefully reinvent a postcrisis state to respond to updated concepts, new circumstances, changed social demands, and a realigned elite consensus. In Engineering Stability, Yan Xiaojun examines the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reassert control and restore order on university campuses in the post-Tiananmen era. Since prominent national universities serve the nation-state as training grounds for the country’s future political, economic, and cultural elites, public life on university campuses has immediate political relevance. Drawing on rich materials gathered from in-depth field research in China during the Xi Jinping era, Engineering Stability invites scholars of comparative politics, state theory, contentious politics, and political development to rethink and reimagine how what Yan calls “a compromised autocratic state” is rebuilt within and from itself after overcoming a traumatic moment of vulnerability. The book further details the four types of infrastructure — institutional, significative, regulatory, and incentivizing — that state rebuilders need to overhaul, and looks into the campaign of state rebuilding in post-Tiananmen Chinese universities and its implications for our understanding of politics in general.

What do states gain by sending citizens into the streets? Ruling by Other Means investigates this question through the lens of State-Mobilized Movements (SMMs), an umbrella concept that includes a range of (often covertly organized) collective actions intended to advance state interests. The SMMs research agenda departs significantly from that of classic social movement and contentious politics theory, focused on threats to the state from seemingly autonomous societal actors. Existing theories assume that the goal of popular protest is to voice societal grievances, represent oppressed groups, and challenge state authorities and other powerholders. The chapters in this volume show, however, that states themselves organize citizens (sometimes surreptitiously and even transnationally) to act collectively to advance state goals. Drawn from different historical periods and diverse geographical regions, these case studies expand and improve our understanding of social movements, civil society and state-society relations under authoritarian regimes.