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HOU, RUI (2) answer(s).
 
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ID:   175559


Maintaining Social Stability without Solving Problems: Emotional Repression in the Chinese Petition System / Hou, Rui   Journal Article
Hou, Rui Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract What role do emotions play in state repression? Building upon ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this paper explores the emotional labour performed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. The petition system serves as an official channel through which the Chinese government receives complaints and grievances from citizens. Notwithstanding its institutional inefficiency in addressing petitioners’ requirements, this system plays a critical role in maintaining social stability. I investigate the process by which frontline petition officials manage petitions. I argue that channelling petitioners’ emotions has become one of these officials’ core functions. Petition officials have developed three types of emotional strategies – emotional defusing, emotional constraint and emotional reshaping – to absorb petitioners’ complaints. This study of emotional repression offers a fresh perspective on the affective dimension of contentious politics and also contributes to the theoretical discussion on how authoritarian regimes deal with dissent.
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2
ID:   193187


Outsourcing authoritarian governance: the privatization of mayors’ hotlines in China / Hou, Rui   Journal Article
Hou, Rui Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract How does privatization impact authoritarian governance on the frontline? This article examines the impact of outsourcing on the labour process involved in the operation of mayors’ hotlines. The mayor’s hotline system is a channel set up by Chinese municipal governments to address residents’ suggestions, appeals, inquiries, and complaints. While the expansion of mayors’ hotlines falls under the government in China, the operation of call centres has been outsourced to professional tele-corporations; thus, it is for-profit companies and their employees that represent the state in communications with the public. By examining both the practical and relational components of call operators’ labour process, this article looks at how an institution of responsive authoritarianism has been contracted out in China. It argues that the outsourcing creates a dual-pressure structure that shapes the frontline governance of this institution. The engagement of privatization in authoritarian domination leads to a conflict between market rationality and the inherited tradition of state intervention.
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