VAWIP in a State-Monopolized Political Field: The Case of Chinese Feminist Activism

The literature on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) implicitly treats such violence as boundary enforcement: a political field already exists; the violence women encounter marks the edge they are not permitted to cross; and the state stands as the guarantor of protection and redress under the rule of law, whether or not it delivers (Krook 2020; Krook and Restrepo Sanín2016). In high-capacity authoritarian states like China (Johnston 2019), the premise of this framing does not hold. The political field itself is monopolized and policed by the state, which determines what counts as politics, who is recognized as a legitimate political subject, and what forms of political action are permitted.