:Disruptions as Opportunities: Governing Chinese Society with Interactive Authoritarianism

How has the Chinese Communist Party managed to remain in power over the last 40 years without democratization, despite the fall of so many other communist states? What is the source of its authori-tarian resilience (to borrow Andrew Nathan ’ s term)? How does a non-democratic, top-down state build flexibility and adaptability into its governance practices? In Disruptions as Opportunities , Taiyi Sun offers a compelling answer with his new theory of interactive authoritarianism . Sun ’ s theory is based on an impressive wealth of rigorously analysed empirical data, and the resulting conceptual framework has the potential to be of great use for researchers studying state – society relations in China. According to Sun, the strategy of interactive authoritarianism has three stages: toleration, differentiation and legalization. He illustrates the framework through three case studies: civil service organizations in Sichuan, social-media publications censorship and rideshare protests in Hangzhou. The first stage is toleration . When state actors become aware of a new type of civil society organization or activity, their first reaction is to wait and see – even if these new activities are technically illegal. This allows local governments to collect information on the new organizations and allows them to develop to the point where they could be potentially useful. The toleration stage explains why Chinese NGOs were allowed to proliferate in the early 2000s, even though most of these organizations were in violation of laws and regulations. When rideshare drivers demonstrated against officials who tried to arrest them in the 2010s, the state did very little to intervene. Instead, state actors chose to sit back to see how the industry would develop. In the second stage, differentiation , state actors sort out the new organizations, determining their capabilities and