2025 Theses Doctoral

Relational Power: Legal Authority and Particularized Power in Authoritarian China

Fu, Zheng

How does an authoritarian state exercise its power and get commends obeyed? This dissertation looks at two challenging moments for an authoritarian state that correspond to two forms of power exercised by the authoritarian state: first, the promulgation of a new law that seeks to regulate a labor market previously dominated by an informal moral economy and replace it with formal-legal authority; and second, the eruption of crisis—such as labor unrest—where the state mobilizes informal, personalized connections to restore order. I argue that both legal-rational authority and particularistic, patron-clientelist power in authoritarian regimes rely on the construction of relational networks that establish network alliances.

In both cases, these networks serve as the infrastructure through which the state translates its interests into terms that align with the interests of its citizens. Yet this translation is bidirectional: citizens, in turn, use this same network to negotiate with the state, reinterpret alignment of interests, or voice dissent. While authoritarianism is often conceptualized as a system in which the state penetrates society, this dissertation shows that “society” also penetrates the state—not through institutionalized civil society, as in democracies, but through the very networks that the state itself assembles to implement its authority.