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Resumo

This article tracks the ways citizens in the People's Republic of China have come to manage the banality of state violence and impunity by turning common political failures into a distinctive politics of fiasco. As a mode of civilian engagement with officialdom in contemporary China, this kind of politics is a departure from the usual straightforward forms of popular resistance, as typified by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Fiasco is not just any kind of failure. It is a kind of flop with performative flair, where repeated malfunctions and blunders escalate in often ludicrous and humiliating fashion to turn once earnest and serious projects in feel-bad dramas of inescapable failure. As such, this form of politics casts a renewed light on the aesthetic and affective dimensions of citizen–state struggles, especially among those that persist in confronting failures of justice under authoritarian conditions of political non-crisis.

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