Maintaining Social Stability without Solving Problems: Emotional Repression in the Chinese Petition System

• In Event: 1161 - Regular Session on Sociology of Emotions: Managing Emotions in Conflict

Abstract

What role do emotions play in state repression? Building upon my ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this paper explores the emotional labour employed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. The petition system serves as an official channel for the Chinese government to hear 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 and argue that channelling petitioners’ emotions has become one of their 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 both offers a new perspective to explore the affective dimension of contentious politics and also contributes to the theoretical discussion about how authoritarian regimes deal with dissent.

Author

• Rui Hou, Queen's University