Hengyang County, in China's central agricultural belt, has a long tradition of resistance to local authority (O'Brien and Li 2004; also see Bernstein and Lü 2003). But constrained by the “cellularization” of rural China under Communist rule (Shue 1988), until recently farmers mainly limited their claims to complaint boards or poured them into frustrated rage against official wrongdoers. Their protests seldom rose to a higher level. But in the 1990s Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li began to observe a shift in the scale of mobilization. “Activists,” they observed, “increasingly speak of a common cause and identify themselves as members of a larger community of aggrieved local people. … As a result of trading stories and getting to know each other while lodging complaints at the municipal or provincial level, they have punctured the ‘cellularization’ … of rural society. In so doing, they have sometimes come to recognize that they must join forces and organize for self-protection” (2004: 16). “Local struggles,” O'Brien (2002: 228) concludes, “begin in enclaves of tolerance, spread when conditions are auspicious, and evolve into inclusion in the broader polity.” This is the process I call “scale shift.”