In her new book’s preface Diana Fu tells her readers that as a child, her mother urged her to “set off my own kind of fireworks.” Bursting as it is with intellectual originality and ethnographic insight, Mobilizing Without the Masses abundantly fulfills that promise. She unearths the hard and hidden work that labor organizers perform behind the scenes for urban migrant workers in China—not just in mobilizing contention, but at containing it. Her expert account makes it impossible to watch the unfolding noisy drama that is Chinese labor politics without considering the quieter acts of resistance clandestinely occurring backstage.

What exactly are these quieter acts? And what manner of resistance do they constitute? In Fu’s telling, labor organizers in China play a pedagogical role, prior to protest, that has heretofore been unappreciated. Before migrant workers can confront an authoritarian Leviathan, they need a tutorial; before stepping onto the contentious political field, they need a coach. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that workers find their power in numbers and lose their power as individuals, she reveals that labor organizers counsel and train workers, ironically, not to organize at all. To amass in large numbers is to invite repression. To supplicate oneself to the state as an individual petitioner or as part of a small group of claimants is to have at least an outside shot at success. The result is a middle range of protest between disorganized individual contention and organized collective contention: the “mobilizing without the masses” of her title. Protest is not collective, but it is coordinated. Individual protesters get connected, even without being collected into aggregates. It is on these subtle and thought-provoking distinctions that the novelty and ingenuity of her account ultimately rests.

The first half of the book is largely dedicated to detailing how this unfamiliar mode of protest has been able to come into being in China. Fu argues that the Hu Jintao administration’s (2003–2013) adoption of a “flexible repression” approach provided a necessary window for organizers of migrant workers to become more creative and maneuverable in their tactics. In essence, these first empirical chapters perform the vital task of establishing the wider political ecology in which mobilizing without the masses has arisen as a novel form of advocacy and activism. The analytical approach in these opening chapters is largely descriptive, albeit still analytical, detailing the fine-grained differences between state-labor relations in Beijing and the Pearl River Delta. As such, these chapters on state control will probably generate more lessons for a China audience than a theoretical audience, essential for the chapters to follow as they may be.

It is in the book’s second half, when Fu shifts her attentions from state control to popular contention, that the fireworks truly start cracking. Mobilizing Without the Masses is a creative labor of love about those who challenge state power, not those who exercise it. She offers a fresh perspective in her approach to migrant workers’ organizations as social movements in at least three ways. First, her work does not obsess over the perennial question of whether a social movement works to change outcomes. For her, protest is an outcome in its own right that should be examined and explained on its own terms, whether it reshapes how labor is governed in an authoritarian setting or not. Second, Fu transcends the typical focus in the social movements literature on framing, and uncovers the prior work of coaching that needs to occur before workers can project their claims in a coherent and effective manner. If framing is public and easy for scholars to identify, coaching is private and much harder for a researcher to see; it is a bit like the necessary collection of wood before a wooden frame can be assembled. This points to a third way in which Fu’s approach feels fresh, especially as a work of political science. Rather than depending on anonymous surveys to track attitudes in a wide but thin way, she apprehends the development of “citizenship consciousness” through close human contact. It is her ethnographic insights into the backstage work that social movement organizations do for migrant workers that make Mobilizing Without the Masses such an extraordinary achievement.

The book will also hopefully serve as a role model for ethnographic case-studies of worker organizations in other authoritarian settings beyond China. Organization is emphatically at the heart of Fu’s study, which is very much a political sociology of activist advocacy. Whether migrant workers are effectively organized or not makes an enormous difference in her account, since she posits and demonstrates an inverse relationship between movement organization and disruptive tactics. Worker organizations channel not just contention in China, but also constraint. In this respect Fu’s work echoes the central theoretical lesson of Wendy Pearlman’s book on the Palestinians’ two intifadas (Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian Nationalist Movement, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Movements lacking cohesion struggle to remain peaceful, while more organized movements can keep unhelpfully disruptive elements in check and maintain a peaceful yet determined unity.

This presents a paradox for the authoritarian rulers who try to govern restive populations, from Chinese apparatchiks on the urban shop floor to Israeli occupiers in the West Bank. Organization is essential for movement strength, so allowing opponents to organize is obviously risky. Yet organization is also necessary for movement restraint, so preventing opponents from organizing carries risks as well. This book thus advances the notion that authoritarian regimes must not simply choose between repression and concessions when confronting challengers. They also need to decide whether to pursue a strategy of protest management that has the atomization of activists or the moderation of activists as its ultimate goal. Future research should be attentive to this difficult tradeoff.

Another area where Mobilizing Without the Masses signals the need for more research is on the two words Fu consistently combines, yet the rest of us should consider disaggregating: “migrant worker.” For her, migrant is always an adjective, modifying worker. But migrant is not just an adjective but a noun. Whether we view migrant workers as primarily the former or latter has enormous consequences. Whereas workers typically must confront their employers, migrants more often need to seek redress from the state. Disaggregating the category of migrant worker should thus invite us to pay keener attention to how protests not only vary in their scale and tactics, but in their targets. Migrants’ movements should also possess a cross-class potential that workers’ movements usually will not. In a world where anti-migrant sentiment is everywhere fueling authoritarian attitudes, and where states rather than employers provide most of the services that poor people need, the category of migrant should no longer be hidden under the Marxist-derived—and perhaps increasingly outdated—category of “the worker.”

Finally, Fu’s book helpfully invites more collective discussion of just how dramatically China has changed without changing either regime type or even ruling party. Seventy years after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led the greatest communist revolution in history, labor organizations are somehow still struggling to raise workers’ collective consciousness. What would Mao say?