Navigating Repression: Visibility and Scales in Migrant Workers and LGBTQ+ grassroots Organizations

Activists in grassroots organizations in authoritarian regimes often develop cumulative knowledge as to how to interpret the broad spectrum of state actions and the “mixed signals” they send in contexts marked by ambivalence (Stern and O’Brien 2012). This paper examines how grassroots organizations of rural migrant workers and LGBTQ+ rights advocates in China have managed not only to persist over more than a decade but occasionally to thrive within an increasingly repressive environment. It addresses the following questions: What forms do social movements take when public spaces for assembly and for the expression of public demands are constrained by heightened actual and potential repression? How does the organization recalibrate the scale and visibility of its actions in response to tightening political configurations? This paper documents how these two groups navigate mixed signals in both shared and distinct ways: both cultivate strategies that balance online and offline engagement to advance social justice agendas, yet differences in their constituencies, social networks, and issue visibility lead to different patterns of risk management and signaling. We explore how, rather than confronting directly the dominant system, these organizations engage in a dynamic dialectic of more and less visible actions, gatherings, interactions, and claims. Therefore, rather than being in a position of chiefly reacting to and interpreting the state’s mixed signals, we show how grassroots organizations themselves have been keen and creative at sending out a wide range of signals, acting and engaging with the party-state in equally complex and at times ambivalent ways.