Lynette H Ong
Biographic Data
| ID | 295699 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lynette H Ong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lynette H |
| FAMILY NAME | Ong |
| SIGNATURE | ONG L H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5615-6408 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A revived Canada-China relations 2.0: Trump’s tariff war and its implications for Canada-China bilateral trade
Canada’s foreign relations with China and the United States are at a critical juncture. President Trump has put unprecedented pressure on Ottawa, turning Canadian public opinion sharply against the traditional closely-knitted Canada-US relationship. China has signaled its willingness to restore economic relations with Canada; however, political and security risks stemming from Chinese foreign interference and transnational repression remain. The …
Stability Maintenance, Preventive Repression, and Contentious Politics in China under Xi Jinping’s Rule
The recent authoritarian turn in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping has invigorated interest in the concept of “public security,” a metamorphosis of the term “weiwen” (stability maintenance) fashioned by his predecessor Hu Jintao. Both concepts emphasize a preventive repression that involves a whole-of-society approach to preserving social order. Drawing on an original protest dataset and the Chinese government statistics on public security spendi…
Response to Victor C. Shih’s Review of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail
China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November a…
The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts
How do discontented masses and opposition elites work together to engineer a change in electoral authoritarian regimes? Social movements and elections are often seen as operating in different terrains – outside and inside institutions, respectively. In this Element, I develop a theory to describe how a broad-based social movement that champions a grievance shared by a wide segment of the population can build alliances across society and oppositio…
Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
How do states coerce citizens into compliance and minimize backlash at the same time? Outsourcing Repression portrays state engagement of nonstate actors—violent street gangsters and nonviolent grassroots brokers—to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits in a manner that reduces resistance. This book draws on more than 200 interviews from ethnographic research conducted annually over a decade (2011‒2019) from the era of Hu Jintao to Xi…
Strengthening the State through Crisis Management: Battles against the Sars and Covid-19 Pandemics in China
How do state leaders use crisis management to strengthen state infrastructural power? What explains the strategic choices of a state’s selective institutionalization of crisis measures? Crises offer unique opportunities for state-building, yet the role of crisis management in consolidating state power is underexamined. This paper explores these important issues by examining how the Chinese government has deployed wartime-like measures in battling…
"Land Grabbing" in an Autocracy and a Multi-Party Democracy: China and India Compared
Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the state from farmers for use in industrialisation and urbanisation projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This article poses two questions: (i) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in both countries, despite their distinctively dissimilar political systems, one being a one-party authoritarian regime, the other being a multi-party democ…
What Drives People to Protest in an Authoritarian Country? Resources and Rewards vs Risks of Protests in Urban and Rural China
What drives people to protest in an authoritarian country? Drawing from a rich set of individual-level data from the China General Social Survey 2010, we address the question of protest participation by focusing on the factors of resources, and rewards vs risks, that might be unique to protestors in an authoritarian state. We find strong evidence for education, typically conceived as a key enabling resource in protests, to be negatively associate…
Thugs and Outsourcing of State Repression in China
This article examines “thugs-for-hire” in state repression. Local governments regularly deploy third-party violence to evict homeowners, expropriate land from farmers, manage illegal street vendors, and deal with petitioners and protestors in China. Violence is effective in implementing unpopular and illegal policies and also allows local authorities to evade responsibility for using violence and maintain a veneer of lawfulness. However, it may r…
Engaging Huangniu (brokers): Commodification of State-Society Bargaining in China
A strong authoritarian state such as China has a range of institutions and instruments at its disposal to resolve social conflicts. This study proposes a new mechanism—citizen’s engagement of a profit-seeking broker—that helps to facilitate state-society bargaining, resolve conflicts and thereby absorb social contention. This form of state-society bargaining is conducted via professional brokers whose objective is to make a profit from the transa…
Thugs-for-Hire: Subcontracting of State Coercion and State Capacity in China
Using violence or threat of violence, “thugs-for-hire” (TFH) is a form of privatized coercion that helps states subjugate a recalcitrant population. I lay out three scope conditions under which TFH is the preferred strategy: when state actions are illegal or policies are unpopular; when evasion of state responsibility is highly desirable; and when states are weak in their capacity or are less strong than their societies. Weak states relative to s…
A Discussion of Daniel A. Bell’s The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
State-Led Urbanization in China: Skyscrapers, Land Revenue and “Concentrated Villages”
This article examines the rationale behind municipal and local governments' pursuance of urbanization, and the political and socio-economic implications of the policy to move villagers from their farmland into apartment blocks in high-density resettlement areas, or “concentrated villages.” It provides evidence of an increasing reliance by municipal and local governments on land revenues and the financing of urban infrastructure by the governments…
The Apparent “Paradox” in China's Climate Policies
China, the world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter, appears to have contradictory climate policies. While aggressively pursuing a renewable energy policy, Beijing is weak on a commitment to emissions reduction. The “paradox” can be reconciled on the basis of China's priority for growth, which is critical in ensuring the Communist Party's grip on power
Fiscal federalism and soft budget constraints: The case of China
China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of ‘market-preserving federalism.’ This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incen…
Between Developmental and Clientelist States: Local State-Business Relationships in China
The role of the state, particularly the local states, has received enormous attention in explaining the spectacular rural industrialization in China, a process that jumpstarted the country’s economic take-off in the early 1980s and pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty during the first 15 years of economic reform
Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation . Victor C. Shih
Rural Democracy in China: The Role of Village Elections . Baogang He
The Communist Party and Financial Institutions: Institutional Design of China's Post-Reform Rural Credit Cooperatives
Despite the fact that the Rural Credit Cooperatives are the only formal credit providers to millions of households in rural China, empirical evidence suggests that they hardly serve the interests of member households. This study examines the extent to which the recent institutional reform have ameliorated the problems of “insider control” and “collective action” in the corporate governance, as well as local political influence in their operations…
A Chinese Economic Revolution: Rural Entrepreneurship in the Twentieth Century . Linda Grove
Multiple Principals and Collective Action: China's Rural Credit Cooperatives and Poor Households' Access to Credit
Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using the multiple principals-agent framework: the credit cooperatives as agents are accountable to multiple heterogeneous principals—with multiple conflicting o…
Financial Sector Reform in China . Yasheng Huang , Tony Saich , Edward Steinfeld
The Heart of Economic Reform: China's Banking Reform and State Enterprise Restructuring . Donald D. Tong
China's Developmental Miracle: Origins, Transformations, and Challenges . Alvin So
Thugs and Outsourcing of State Repression in China
This article examines “thugs-for-hire” in state repression. Local governments regularly deploy third-party violence to evict homeowners, expropriate land from farmers, manage illegal street vendors, and deal with petitioners and protestors in China. Violence is effective in implementing unpopular and illegal policies and also allows local authorities to evade responsibility for using violence and maintain a veneer of lawfulness. However, it may r…
Thugs-for-Hire: Subcontracting of State Coercion and State Capacity in China
Using violence or threat of violence, “thugs-for-hire” (TFH) is a form of privatized coercion that helps states subjugate a recalcitrant population. I lay out three scope conditions under which TFH is the preferred strategy: when state actions are illegal or policies are unpopular; when evasion of state responsibility is highly desirable; and when states are weak in their capacity or are less strong than their societies. Weak states relative to s…
Fiscal federalism and soft budget constraints: The case of China
China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of ‘market-preserving federalism.’ This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incen…
What Drives People to Protest in an Authoritarian Country? Resources and Rewards vs Risks of Protests in Urban and Rural China
What drives people to protest in an authoritarian country? Drawing from a rich set of individual-level data from the China General Social Survey 2010, we address the question of protest participation by focusing on the factors of resources, and rewards vs risks, that might be unique to protestors in an authoritarian state. We find strong evidence for education, typically conceived as a key enabling resource in protests, to be negatively associate…
Between Developmental and Clientelist States: Local State-Business Relationships in China
The role of the state, particularly the local states, has received enormous attention in explaining the spectacular rural industrialization in China, a process that jumpstarted the country’s economic take-off in the early 1980s and pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty during the first 15 years of economic reform
"Land Grabbing" in an Autocracy and a Multi-Party Democracy: China and India Compared
Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the state from farmers for use in industrialisation and urbanisation projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This article poses two questions: (i) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in both countries, despite their distinctively dissimilar political systems, one being a one-party authoritarian regime, the other being a multi-party democ…
Engaging Huangniu (brokers): Commodification of State-Society Bargaining in China
A strong authoritarian state such as China has a range of institutions and instruments at its disposal to resolve social conflicts. This study proposes a new mechanism—citizen’s engagement of a profit-seeking broker—that helps to facilitate state-society bargaining, resolve conflicts and thereby absorb social contention. This form of state-society bargaining is conducted via professional brokers whose objective is to make a profit from the transa…
The Apparent “Paradox” in China's Climate Policies
China, the world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter, appears to have contradictory climate policies. While aggressively pursuing a renewable energy policy, Beijing is weak on a commitment to emissions reduction. The “paradox” can be reconciled on the basis of China's priority for growth, which is critical in ensuring the Communist Party's grip on power
A Discussion of Daniel A. Bell’s The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail
China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November a…
Strengthening the State through Crisis Management: Battles against the Sars and Covid-19 Pandemics in China
How do state leaders use crisis management to strengthen state infrastructural power? What explains the strategic choices of a state’s selective institutionalization of crisis measures? Crises offer unique opportunities for state-building, yet the role of crisis management in consolidating state power is underexamined. This paper explores these important issues by examining how the Chinese government has deployed wartime-like measures in battling…
The Communist Party and Financial Institutions: Institutional Design of China's Post-Reform Rural Credit Cooperatives
Despite the fact that the Rural Credit Cooperatives are the only formal credit providers to millions of households in rural China, empirical evidence suggests that they hardly serve the interests of member households. This study examines the extent to which the recent institutional reform have ameliorated the problems of “insider control” and “collective action” in the corporate governance, as well as local political influence in their operations…
China's Developmental Miracle: Origins, Transformations, and Challenges . Alvin So
The Heart of Economic Reform: China's Banking Reform and State Enterprise Restructuring . Donald D. Tong
Multiple Principals and Collective Action: China's Rural Credit Cooperatives and Poor Households' Access to Credit
Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using the multiple principals-agent framework: the credit cooperatives as agents are accountable to multiple heterogeneous principals—with multiple conflicting o…
Financial Sector Reform in China . Yasheng Huang , Tony Saich , Edward Steinfeld
A Chinese Economic Revolution: Rural Entrepreneurship in the Twentieth Century . Linda Grove
Rural Democracy in China: The Role of Village Elections . Baogang He
The Communist Party and Financial Institutions: Institutional Design of China's Post-Reform Rural Credit Cooperatives
Despite the fact that the Rural Credit Cooperatives are the only formal credit providers to millions of households in rural China, empirical evidence suggests that they hardly serve the interests of member households. This study examines the extent to which the recent institutional reform have ameliorated the problems of “insider control” and “collective action” in the corporate governance, as well as local political influence in their operations…
Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation . Victor C. Shih
The Apparent “Paradox” in China's Climate Policies
China, the world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter, appears to have contradictory climate policies. While aggressively pursuing a renewable energy policy, Beijing is weak on a commitment to emissions reduction. The “paradox” can be reconciled on the basis of China's priority for growth, which is critical in ensuring the Communist Party's grip on power
Fiscal federalism and soft budget constraints: The case of China
China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of ‘market-preserving federalism.’ This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incen…
Between Developmental and Clientelist States: Local State-Business Relationships in China
The role of the state, particularly the local states, has received enormous attention in explaining the spectacular rural industrialization in China, a process that jumpstarted the country’s economic take-off in the early 1980s and pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty during the first 15 years of economic reform
State-Led Urbanization in China: Skyscrapers, Land Revenue and “Concentrated Villages”
This article examines the rationale behind municipal and local governments' pursuance of urbanization, and the political and socio-economic implications of the policy to move villagers from their farmland into apartment blocks in high-density resettlement areas, or “concentrated villages.” It provides evidence of an increasing reliance by municipal and local governments on land revenues and the financing of urban infrastructure by the governments…
A Discussion of Daniel A. Bell’s The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Thugs and Outsourcing of State Repression in China
This article examines “thugs-for-hire” in state repression. Local governments regularly deploy third-party violence to evict homeowners, expropriate land from farmers, manage illegal street vendors, and deal with petitioners and protestors in China. Violence is effective in implementing unpopular and illegal policies and also allows local authorities to evade responsibility for using violence and maintain a veneer of lawfulness. However, it may r…
Engaging Huangniu (brokers): Commodification of State-Society Bargaining in China
A strong authoritarian state such as China has a range of institutions and instruments at its disposal to resolve social conflicts. This study proposes a new mechanism—citizen’s engagement of a profit-seeking broker—that helps to facilitate state-society bargaining, resolve conflicts and thereby absorb social contention. This form of state-society bargaining is conducted via professional brokers whose objective is to make a profit from the transa…
Thugs-for-Hire: Subcontracting of State Coercion and State Capacity in China
Using violence or threat of violence, “thugs-for-hire” (TFH) is a form of privatized coercion that helps states subjugate a recalcitrant population. I lay out three scope conditions under which TFH is the preferred strategy: when state actions are illegal or policies are unpopular; when evasion of state responsibility is highly desirable; and when states are weak in their capacity or are less strong than their societies. Weak states relative to s…
What Drives People to Protest in an Authoritarian Country? Resources and Rewards vs Risks of Protests in Urban and Rural China
What drives people to protest in an authoritarian country? Drawing from a rich set of individual-level data from the China General Social Survey 2010, we address the question of protest participation by focusing on the factors of resources, and rewards vs risks, that might be unique to protestors in an authoritarian state. We find strong evidence for education, typically conceived as a key enabling resource in protests, to be negatively associate…
"Land Grabbing" in an Autocracy and a Multi-Party Democracy: China and India Compared
Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the state from farmers for use in industrialisation and urbanisation projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This article poses two questions: (i) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in both countries, despite their distinctively dissimilar political systems, one being a one-party authoritarian regime, the other being a multi-party democ…
The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts
How do discontented masses and opposition elites work together to engineer a change in electoral authoritarian regimes? Social movements and elections are often seen as operating in different terrains – outside and inside institutions, respectively. In this Element, I develop a theory to describe how a broad-based social movement that champions a grievance shared by a wide segment of the population can build alliances across society and oppositio…
Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
How do states coerce citizens into compliance and minimize backlash at the same time? Outsourcing Repression portrays state engagement of nonstate actors—violent street gangsters and nonviolent grassroots brokers—to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits in a manner that reduces resistance. This book draws on more than 200 interviews from ethnographic research conducted annually over a decade (2011‒2019) from the era of Hu Jintao to Xi…
Strengthening the State through Crisis Management: Battles against the Sars and Covid-19 Pandemics in China
How do state leaders use crisis management to strengthen state infrastructural power? What explains the strategic choices of a state’s selective institutionalization of crisis measures? Crises offer unique opportunities for state-building, yet the role of crisis management in consolidating state power is underexamined. This paper explores these important issues by examining how the Chinese government has deployed wartime-like measures in battling…
Response to Victor C. Shih’s Review of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail
China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November a…
Stability Maintenance, Preventive Repression, and Contentious Politics in China under Xi Jinping’s Rule
The recent authoritarian turn in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping has invigorated interest in the concept of “public security,” a metamorphosis of the term “weiwen” (stability maintenance) fashioned by his predecessor Hu Jintao. Both concepts emphasize a preventive repression that involves a whole-of-society approach to preserving social order. Drawing on an original protest dataset and the Chinese government statistics on public security spendi…
A revived Canada-China relations 2.0: Trump’s tariff war and its implications for Canada-China bilateral trade
Canada’s foreign relations with China and the United States are at a critical juncture. President Trump has put unprecedented pressure on Ottawa, turning Canadian public opinion sharply against the traditional closely-knitted Canada-US relationship. China has signaled its willingness to restore economic relations with Canada; however, political and security risks stemming from Chinese foreign interference and transnational repression remain. The …
China (24 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (18 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sociology (12 works) · State (computer science (10 works) · Political economy (9 works)