Construction workers in both Beijing and Delhi face challenging working and living conditions. In my ethnographic study, I find that Beijing workers are more likely and able to self-organize and fight against precarious conditions. This is puzzling, given China’s authoritarian state limiting social activism, and India's subordinate groups devising innovative forms of mobilizing. Challenging the relationship between democracy and civil society strength, I argue that the greater ability of Beijing workers to advocate for themselves can be traced to the greater infrastructural power of the Chinese state. While infrastructural power has often been used to examine how authoritarian regimes exert control, my work highlights its potentials of empowering citizens to make demands on the state.

Irene Pang is an Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Colombia. She is a political sociologist who studies issues of labor, rights contestation, and state-society relations in contemporary China and India.