Missing Binds: How Absent Ties Unleash Migrant Worker Activism Under an Authoritarian Regime

ABSTRACT Migrant workers are considered less militant in collective action than locals, partly because they lack social ties in the receiving community. However, in China's Pearl River Delta, I find the opposite. Comparing five cases of labor protest from 2014 to 2016 drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and labor activists' records, I show that migrant peasant workers are less exposed to the local state's demobilization efforts than are local peasant workers because they are less socially embedded in the receiving community. Due in part to China's internal citizenship system, they have fewer social ties within the territorial domain of the local state—especially the triadic pathways among citizens, intermediaries, and the local state that constitute what I call “interactional conduits of power.” This feature of migrants' social networks affords the local state fewer opportunities to exert interpersonal influence on citizens to withdraw from protests, which leads to a local “missing binds” effect among migrant peasant workers. This paper offers three key insights: First, in authoritarian contexts, local embeddedness may afford the local state greater ease in exercising soft repression. Second, the territorial fragmentation of state power, across regions and within internal citizenship hierarchies, conditions how repression is exercised. Third, migration is a crucial factor driving labor protests in China, with ongoing demographic and policy changes potentially impacting future labor militancy.