Viewing Persistent Individual Complainants in China Through the Lens of Everyday Politics

This study addresses how and why individual complainants with limited resources can relentlessly challenge a muscular state and what consequences the process delivers. In order to work the system to minimize inherent disadvantages, some complainants go to great lengths to identify shortcuts, to demean themselves, and then to find an appropriate outlet to cut their losses, while others remain stuck in the agonizing process, ending up as resolute idealists, unreasonable profit seekers or anti-social individuals. While complainants are empowered by the positive signals from the state, the negative aspects of the system can also subtly transform them, making them cynical or extreme. Their resistance, born out of life experience, thus carries some features of rightful, routine, and everyday resistance, but is distinguishable from them by other key aspects.