Affective Politics at the Grassroots: Renqing, Resistance, and Police Mediation in China
This article examines how renqing (人情) – the interplay of affect, moral obligation, and social legitimacy – operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of contestation in police mediation in contemporary China. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police stations in Zhejiang province, it conceptualizes renqing as an affective grammar: a structured system of emotional expression and recognition that organizes interactions across interpersonal and institutional contexts. The findings show how the Party-state’s revival of the Fengqiao model has transformed renqing from a micro-political force embedded in personal networks into an institutionalized instrument of affective governance. Mediation formalizes affect through contracts, scripted performances, and service quotas, stratifying access to emotional legitimacy along intersecting hierarchies of class, gender, and migration. The article further develops the concept of affective autonomy to theorize how participants resist incorporation into these emotional scripts through silence, withdrawal, or alternative affective spaces. By foregrounding these quiet mechanisms of control and refusal, the analysis complicates dominant portrayals of Chinese policing as solely coercive, drawing attention to the emotional labour, stratified recognition, and limits of affective governance at the grassroots.