What If You Had a Revolution and No One Came? Isolation, Intersubjectivity, and Agency in China's 2011 Jasmine Revolution

ABSTRACT Why did people join China's doomed Jasmine Revolution in 2011? And why, considering the deep motivation required to join, did they eventually stop? This ethnographic study, based on 4 months of observation of protest sites and discussions with participants, moves beyond previous research on the revolution's macropolitical failure by engaging with the micropolitical motivations of participants. The meaning of this seemingly meaningless revolution is found in the promise of social bonds of mutual recognition based on shared ideals, overcoming isolation, and bringing alternative online communities into the real world. Such yearning for social bonds as the foundation of the revolution, however, presented the Party‐state with a means to infiltrate and undermine the movement. In a paradox of self‐other relations labeled the agent effect, the unavoidable reliance on others for political agency clashes with the simultaneous inaccessibility of others’ motivations. The seemingly meaningless Jasmine Revolution is, then, in fact, deeply meaningful for understanding the meaning of anti‐regime protest in China and, more broadly, the dilemmas of the exercise of political agency.