From Mass Line to Institutionalized Mediation

The Fengqiao experience, or Fengqiao model, emerged during the “socialist education” campaign (1962–1966) in Zhejiang province as the Party sought to identify “class enemies” while avoiding the uncontrolled violence of earlier campaigns. It operationalized mass line principles through nonviolent, community-based “reasoned struggles,” during which cadres mobilized residents to persuade and surveil their neighbours.Footnote ¹² This method of resolving “contradictions among the people” proved so effective that Mao Zedong 毛泽东 endorsed it in 1963 as a model of grassroots governance.Footnote ¹³

Rather than a judicial or mediation practice, Fengqiao functioned as a policing discourse grounded in Maoist principles of proactive control and mass-line engagement.Footnote ¹⁴ Although it receded from national discourse during the early reform era, the model was locally revived in the 1990s as a cost-effective strategy for dispute resolution and petition prevention and was formally reintroduced by the Ministry of Public Security as part of a broader push for pre-emptive, non-escalatory governance.Footnote ¹⁵ Under Xi Jinping 习近平, it has since been reframed as a model of “modernized” community governance. The continuity of Fengqiao across political eras illustrates how emotional and relational scripts have been retooled to serve shifting governance logics. This evolving framework laid the foundation for affective governance in which renqing would be institutionalized not through revolutionary mobilization but through state-contracted emotional labour embedded in grassroots bureaucracies.Footnote ¹⁶

In cities like A, local governments purchase mediation through a bidding process called “purchase of services” (goumai fuwu 购买服务), formalizing dispute resolution as performance-based service work. The incorporation of mediation as a bureaucratic tool reflects a wider shift towards “a mass line concept without the masses.”Footnote ¹⁷ The affective infrastructure of governance is thus not abandoned but repurposed. Composed of institutional outsourcing, scripted performances of harmony and routinized displays of emotional propriety, it now relies on calibrated affective labour to sustain social cohesion, displacing the earlier model of mass participation.

From Mobilization to Management: Mediation and the Politics of Affect

The shift from mobilizing the masses to employing service providers reflects a fundamental transformation in how the state governs through affect. Under Mao, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) developed elaborate techniques to channel not just cognitive ideology but also affective knowledge forms – embodied experiences of revolutionary intensity, such as “lumps in the throat, goosebumps on the skin, or the pounding of a revolutionary heart.”Footnote ¹⁸ These experiences were designed to generate political believers through emotionally charged collective rituals. This mass mobilization of emotions contrasts sharply with the present,Footnote ¹⁹ where governance targets a population disembedded from traditional community structures yet still responsive to emotional appeals.

Emotion work, or “the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling,”Footnote ²⁰ was central to the CCP’s revolutionary success and underpinned everything from anti-Japanese resistance to land reform campaigns.Footnote ²¹ Affect under Mao was overtly political and collective. The invention of “Mao-speak,” for instance, created not only a lexicon but an emotional structure for expressing class feeling – a dual sentiment consisting of horizontal, fraternal love among the proletariat alongside intense hatred directed towards class enemies.Footnote ²² Mao’s own account of political conversion, in which he trades bourgeois feeling for proletarian identification, illustrates how political subjectivity was forged through feeling, rather than ideology alone.Footnote ²³

Today’s mediators are no longer revolutionary mobilizers but affect managers tasked with regulating emotion and producing administrable outcomes. Disturbances are processed through monetary settlement, documentation and procedural closure. This shift reflects what Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang term “bureaucratic absorption,” in which “officials … rely on the effects of bureaucratic procedures to buy time and reduce the visibility of unrest,” demobilizing resistance rather than politicizing it.Footnote ²⁴ These procedural effects enable an affective transformation, or “change with continuity” (biantong变通), in which Maoist-style thought work is reconfigured through state-led psychotherapy and traditional moral vocabularies to ease governance and optimize citizens as social resources.Footnote ²⁵ The conversion of emotion into labour and justice into transaction thus signals a new turn in affective rule, one that manages feeling through compensation and service delivery.

The mediation room itself embodies Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope – a space–time configuration that structures social action. In her work on legal spaces, Mariana Valverde shows how chronotopes mediate governance by temporally delimiting permissible actions: “Penal codes act as a temporal hinge … connecting the past with the future, retribution with prevention.”Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, the mediation chronotope imposes a compressed spatio-temporality in which disputants must express, process and resolve emotional grievances, particularly volatile ones like resentment, within a single session. “The law does not make sense to someone who is worked up,” Old Wang explained. “Reasoning in legal language only adds more resentment.”

The mediator’s task is not transformation but containment, involving the channelling of affective energy into legible, controlled expressions that meet bureaucratic expectations. This marks a shift in the state’s engagement with affect: from revolutionary mobilization to professional management, from intensification to containment, from collective transformation to individualized settlement. The mediation room embodies a compressed present shaped by bureaucratic scripts, exemplifying a “present [that] is not at first an object but a mediated affect … a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now.”Footnote ²⁷ Here, disruptive feelings like resentment must be resolved not across time but within the highly compressed “now” of the session.

Through the purchase of mediation services, the state has transformed revolutionary mobilization into a contractual service relationship. In Andrew Kipnis’s terms, this facilitates “feeling” (ganqing 感情) avoidance, or strategies for managing relationships without generating authentic emotional bonds.Footnote ²⁸ Ganqing, the affective component of interpersonal ties, typically develops through sustained interaction and is central to renqing practices. In other words, good ganqing emerges from “the stable mutuality between people within the networks over a long period,” a continuity of give-and-take that signals relational depth and authenticity.Footnote ²⁹ Mediation disrupts this temporal logic: it enacts renqing through tact, empathy and emotional scripts, yet truncates the duration necessary for ganqing to form. Disputants do not return; relationships do not develop; the possibility of affective accumulation, vital for solidarity or resistance, is foreclosed. Renqing becomes aesthetic and rhetorical, stripped of affective weight.

This containment functions on three levels. First, it prevents the formation of authentic emotional bonds between the state and its contracted affective labourers. Mediators perform their duties not out of revolutionary commitment or moral obligation, but for monetary gains, around 2,000 yuan monthly plus 100 yuan per resolved case. Second, it limits ganqing development between disputants by prioritizing settlement over relationship repair. Third, and most critically, it ensures that no meaningful ganqing develops between mediators and disputants. Although the state recruits individuals with strong community ties to navigate both bureaucratic and interpersonal domains, their work becomes transactional. Mediators must draw on their embeddedness to resolve disputes, but the compensation structure renders these interactions more instrumental than expressive, resembling the calculated ties found in “interpersonal relationship” (guanxi 关系) networks. Each case, therefore, becomes a discrete unit of compensated labour. Some disputants even mistake mediators for police, underscoring their quasi-bureaucratic role.

This setup emphasizes a reconfiguration of prior mediation practices rather than a break from them. Traditional village mediation relied on the unpaid labour of elders whose authority stemmed from moral standing and kinship ties, while revolutionary mediation mobilized ideological fervour and class sentiment. Contemporary mediation draws affective authority from both approaches but delivers it through a service-oriented logic. In cities like A, mediation services are procured through a bidding process. To compete in the process, practitioners have established formal organizations, such as the Mediators Association. Most mediators are middle-aged men native to the area, often drawn from low-level state-affiliated roles such as court clerks, village cadres or the military, or informally selected for their local embeddedness and dialect fluency over any formal credentials. While they are required to be Party members and familiar with the law, there is no standardized training or appointment process. Their authority depends on local trust, which they must translate into state-aligned performance. This ambiguous position – contracted yet liminal, connected yet transactional – makes them ideal instruments for affective governance.

In this context, renqing becomes less a foundation for social life than a technology of governance.Footnote ³⁰ Its ethical force is neutralized; its relational potential confined. Mediators perform care, but their conditions of employment ensure it remains instrumental and ultimately non-threatening. Beneath the appearance of depoliticized service provision lies a deeply political technique: absorbing social elites into the state’s machinery to ensure that no one who is embedded enough to mobilize remains outside it.

This evolution mirrors broader shifts in China’s affective governance under Xi Jinping, where emotional performance has become a measure of political loyalty. Xi’s dictum that “All people must have grateful hearts” (suoyou ren dou yao you gan’en de xin 所有人都要有感恩的心) makes clear that emotional disposition is no longer merely a personal trait but a political obligation.Footnote ³¹ Mediation becomes a site where such affective expectations are staged. Institutional affect management signals both continuity and rupture: the state still governs through emotion, but the mode has shifted from revolutionary transformation to bureaucratic pacification. This mode of grassroots governance, according to Christian Sorace, constitutes “affective sovereignty” where “the party-state claims sovereign jurisdiction over people’s emotional life” and revitalizes its authority “through its extraction of affective energy.”Footnote ³² As legal meaning is increasingly negotiated through relational and moral scripts, sovereignty is enacted as much through centralization as through everyday language. Mediators act as affective brokers, performing “juris-diction,” shaping legal authority through emotional labour and speech.Footnote ³³

Differential Experiences of Renqing: Locals, Migrants and Urban–Rural Hierarchies

While renqing serves as the ethical substrate of mediation in contemporary China, its operation is far from egalitarian. Culturally and bureaucratically, it functions as a differentiated mode of incorporation, selectively extending affective recognition along existing social hierarchies, including distinctions between long-term residents and migrants, as well as gendered and urban–rural divides. As Yunxiang Yan observes, in rural China, guanxi networks constitute a “local moral” world wherein renqing provides the governing ethics, fusing obligation, emotional attachment, reciprocal recognition and, in their extended form, exchangeable resources and instrumental relations.Footnote ³⁴ In A city, claims to renqing depend not only on shared cultural norms of reciprocity but also on proximity, including linguistic, geographic and genealogical ties.

State actors attempt to formalize renqing as a governance tool, but its circulation reveals an “affective economy,” where emotions “stick” to some bodies more easily than others, granting moral weight to certain claims while rendering others unintelligible.Footnote ³⁵ Locals whose dialect, kinship ties and community embeddedness align with institutional expectations are more likely to have their emotions read as authentic and culturally appropriate. But for those positioned outside these normative frameworks – migrants, women and residents from less prestigious rural areas – renqing is often withheld or redirected as a disciplinary tool. Their emotional expressions may be misrecognized as defiance or ingratitude, while their failure to conform to dominant scripts marks them as morally suspect or socially out of place.

This stratified affective logic parallels what Aihwa Ong terms “graduated sovereignty,” a flexible configuration of state power that governs different populations and spaces according to their perceived value to the broader political or economic project.Footnote ³⁶ While Ong developed this concept in the context of South-East Asia, similar dynamics operate within China’s mediation system. Here, affective recognition is shaped not by fixed categories but by one’s social position within intersecting hierarchies of urbanity, gender and local belonging. While renqing presents itself as a shared moral ground, its deployment by mediators often reinforces existing hierarchies. It adheres most readily to those whose identities conform to local norms of propriety, while those at the intersection of migrant status and gender, especially young migrant women, are often treated as problems to be contained or corrected. In this way, the bureaucratization of renqing produces a form of “inclusive exclusion” – it incorporates subjects into institutional processes while simultaneously reaffirming their marginality.Footnote ³⁷ The result is a governance technology that sustains affective inequality under the guise of cultural continuity.

Although the institutionalization of mediation has transformed conflict resolution, the cultural specificity of emotional expression endures. Renqing continues to function as a moral system regulating interactions across both informal and bureaucratic contexts. Within the mediation room, these cultural patterns form what I term an affective grammar: a system that governs how emotions are expressed, by whom and with what social consequences. This formulation resonates with Axel Honneth’s understanding of the “grammar” of social struggles as fundamentally moral, rooted in the intersubjective conditions for self-realization.Footnote ³⁸ For Honneth, “the feelings of outrage and indignation driving [social struggles] are generated by the rejection of claims to recognition and thus imply normative judgements about the legitimacy of social arrangements.”Footnote ³⁹ Yet in Chinese police mediation, this affective grammar is not grounded in mutual recognition but in a stratified logic of legitimacy that privileges certain emotional claims over others. Building on approaches that treat emotion as socially managed,Footnote ⁴⁰ shaped by expressive regimes,Footnote ⁴¹ and circulated to reinforce collective boundaries,Footnote ⁴² I trace how renqing structures affective expression while reinforcing hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion.

This grammar becomes visible through ritual practices that structure mediation from the outset. Mediators routinely open sessions with the seemingly casual question, “Where are you from?” While administrative records already contain this information, the verbal inquiry allows for real-time affective calibration, establishing commonality or difference before any discussion of the case. Language choice is also central. In A city, with its four local dialects, mediators selectively code-switch to establish rapport with locals, often ensuring that “private” consultations occur out of earshot. By contrast, when one party is a migrant and the other a local, mediators frequently hold these conversations in front of both parties, creating informational asymmetries that favour those who share the dialect or understand the local context.

Embodied rituals likewise encode renqing into gendered hierarchies. Offering a cigarette, a common ritual in the mediation room, circulates almost exclusively among men. Although I identify as non-binary, I was consistently perceived as a woman in these settings and was therefore limited to a respectful verbal greeting and excluded from these exchanges. During my entire fieldwork, I was offered a cigarette only once. Notably, it occurred when I was temporarily positioned as “part of the team,” not as a woman. These bodily interactions reveal how renqing, far from reflecting spontaneous emotional connection, operates through gendered scripts that facilitate strategic bonds while reinforcing normative exclusions.

Even the temporal structure of mediation – presentation of accounts, private consultation, negotiation and agreement – imposes a sequential grammar on emotion. Specific emotional responses are expected at each stage: indignation or sorrow during accounts, receptivity in consultation, compromise in negotiation, and closure, satisfaction or resignation at agreement. Yet these expectations are unevenly applied. Mediators often structure the space asymmetrically, instructing one party to “speak” while telling the other to “listen quietly,” a dynamic that manages emotional pacing while signalling whose voice holds moral legitimacy. These patterns are repeated throughout mediation: disputants’ affective expression is permitted or restricted not only by the procedural stage but also by how their social identity aligns with local norms and the mediator’s authority. Emotional disruptions to this sequencing are rarely accommodated and are often read as resistance rather than legitimate affective response.

These affective scripts take on different meanings, depending on who enters the mediation room. For local residents embedded in community networks, mediators draw on shared norms to encourage resolution. Consider Little Chen and Little Li, a married couple whose dispute centred on the husband’s drunken assault on his father-in-law. When Little Li approached Old Wang, she engaged in “speaking bitterness” (suku 诉苦), a Maoist-era performative script once used to mobilize class resentment and moral authority through expressions of suffering.Footnote ⁴³ Although distinct from truth-telling, suku centres on “constructing one’s own version of truth” through emotionally resonant appeals.Footnote ⁴⁴ By invoking “swallowing bitterness” (chiku 吃苦) and returning to her natal home, Little Li situated herself within a familiar affective grammar of female endurance. Her distress, although culturally legible, did not elicit empathy or protection.

Old Wang responded with sympathy and deflection: “It’s unfortunate this handsome young man becomes a monster when he drinks. But as mediators, we always ‘encourage reconciliation over separation’ (quanhe buquanfen 劝和不劝分). Think about the ganqing you share!” By framing marriage as a container for ganqing, a relational bond presumed to hold enduring value, Old Wang reinterpreted her suffering as evidence of relational depth, not harm. The mediation script required her to perform injury in a legible way, only to have that performance reabsorbed into a normative structure of forgiveness and family preservation. This case shows how renqing’s affective grammar legitimates women’s emotional expression only when performed within relational duty and restraint, recognizing it not as a claim to protection or accountability but as a gesture towards reconciliation.

This redirection of emotion into a script of familial endurance reflects broader patterns in Chinese kinship and social organization. As Fei Xiaotong notes, traditional family structures prioritize stability over affective connection, suppressing what he calls “ordinary emotions” like spontaneous affection, anger or distress.Footnote ⁴⁵ Within these hierarchies, emotional legitimacy is uneven: men are permitted volatility, while women are expected to manage their feelings to preserve relational order.

Traditional kinship and family relations, which are organized around generational rank, age and gender, set moral expectations and shape emotional conduct.Footnote ⁴⁶ The mediation room reproduces these hierarchies, as seen in Old Wang’s framing of forgiveness as women’s moral duty. When an auxiliary officer later joked to Little Chen, “You shouldn’t come here so often,” he invoked a masculine script of understanding, at the expense of accountability. This homosocial alignment was reinforced when Old Wang offered Little Chen a redemption narrative, while Little Li was expected to absorb harm “for the sake of the child.” The interaction exemplifies how affective grammar is unevenly distributed: men’s transgressions are contextualized within narratives of repair, while women’s suffering is folded into scripts of reconciliation and endurance. Despite shedding revolutionary connotations, techniques such as “speaking bitterness” continue to follow gendered patterns: women’s affective labour remains vital to social reproduction yet devalued in public discourse.Footnote ⁴⁷

For migrants excluded from local networks, the affective grammar of renqing often functions as a structure of illegibility. In one mediation session, a dispute between a local man and an unhoused, non-local migrant escalated into physical violence. The migrant repeatedly stated only one thing: “I’m hurt, I need to see a doctor.” Yet instead of responding to his claim as a legitimate expression of pain, both the mediator and the police officers framed him as “insane” (shenjingbing 神经病), a colloquial term here deployed to undermine his credibility. Throughout the session, the local and Old Wang spoke in the regional dialect, which the migrant could not understand, creating not only a linguistic exclusion but also an affective one. Unable to participate in the shared affective grammar that dialect embodies, the migrant remained physically present but affectively sidelined, his claims neither taken seriously nor granted moral weight.

Even after receiving medical treatment, the resolution was framed not in moral terms but as “bad luck” (daomei 倒霉), a narrative that displaced accountability and reaffirmed the migrant’s status as a source of inconvenience over injury. In this context, renqing does not circulate to generate empathy but rather to enforce emotional boundaries. The migrant’s repeated expression, “I’m hurt,” failed to activate the affective script required to receive recognition: no apology, no shared dialect, no moral positioning. Again, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, affect “sticks” to certain bodies in ways that mark them as threats or burdens.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here, the sticky associations of mobility, poverty and mental health attached to the migrant, rendering his pain suspect and his presence socially volatile. The affective grammar of mediation thus became a mechanism of containment – not to facilitate relational repair but to process emotional illegibility into administrative closure.

For migrants, then, renqing becomes not a resource for inclusion but a structure of exclusion – either withheld or instrumentalized as a disciplinary tool. Rather than fostering empathy, it is invoked to highlight their vulnerability and to reaffirm their distance from local moral worlds. This differential interpretation reveals the central paradox of China’s managed individualization: the state promotes mobility while simultaneously withdrawing the welfare protections that once accompanied collective belonging, leaving migrants “forced to fall back on the family and personal network or guanxi.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet these networks are often unavailable or inaccessible to migrants, especially in conflict situations. As a result, migrants are subject to mediation processes that demand emotional performances they cannot authentically provide, such as scripts of remorse, gratitude or shared affiliation that presuppose the very forms of social embeddedness from which they have been structurally severed.

The affective grammar of renqing also calibrates emotional value upwards, privileging those whose social status aligns with the mediator’s aspirational or strategic interests. In one traffic accident case, a local scooter owner faced a woman from Hangzhou, the provincial capital, whose car had badly damaged his vehicle. During mediation, the local man sat quietly while the mediator focused almost entirely on the woman. Their conversation, conducted in Mandarin instead of the local dialect, centred not on the accident but on her life in Hangzhou, her property purchases and the mediator’s son, who also lived there. These exchanges followed a script of aspirational affiliation, positioning renqing as a tool for networking and upwards identification. Eventually, the mediator urged the local man to accept a settlement of just 300 yuan, telling him he should be “grateful” not to have been injured. Renqing was present but unequally distributed: the woman received empathy and formed an informal rapport with the mediator, while the man was cast into a script of stoic acceptance and discouraged from expressing grievance, reinforcing a deferential posture within the mediation hierarchy.

The Hangzhou woman’s urban status granted her conversational privilege and structured the entire affective framing of the dispute. In a city like A, situated mid-tier in China’s developmental hierarchy, mediators often treat visitors from more prestigious urban centres as socially valuable. Her ease in the room contrasted sharply with the local man’s marginality. The mediator framed the local man’s material loss as insignificant in light of his “good luck” at avoiding injury, even though the scooter had been completely written off and 300 yuan fell far short of its value. These affective preferences align with a grassroots governance model increasingly shaped by performance and accountability. As mediation becomes a contracted service, mediators manage emotional effort strategically, offering renqing where it promises social or institutional return. The mediation room functions simultaneously as a site of conflict resolution and a space where affective value is unevenly distributed according to urban privilege.

Gender further compounds the marginalization of migrants in mediation spaces. When teenage migrant girls were brought into the station, wearing revealing clothing and displaying tattoos, officers assumed surrogate patriarchal roles. One remarked, “If I were your dad and saw you like this, I’d break your damn leg,” asserting paternal authority that regulated behaviour through control over appearance and sexual propriety. This paternalism, framed through the language of renqing, mobilized traditional gender norms to regulate young women deemed morally deviant, showing how state authority operates through the sexualized control of female bodies.

Female mobility in China has long been governed by tightly regulated pathways, primarily through marriage arrangements between natal and marital families.Footnote ⁵⁰ Women’s movement outside these channels has been viewed as threatening to social order. Young migrant women thus occupy a precarious position, which is compounded by stereotypes of rural women in urban spaces. Often labelled as “third parties” (di sanzhe 第三者), or mistresses threatening family stability, they are confronted with “surveillance and control over their behaviors and bodies” as well as gossip that damages their reputation and future prospects.Footnote ⁵¹ The officers’ reaction to the tattooed teenagers illustrates how state actors invoke patriarchal authority to regulate female autonomy, especially when self-expression shaped by market-oriented individualism appears to challenge the moral norms that bind female respectability to family discipline and reproductive order.

For the young women, who were outside of both home and local networks, the officers’ paternal language functioned not merely as discipline but as affective intervention, seeking to reattach “unbound” bodies to normative kinship roles and moral expectations. Emotions work to align bodies with social norms, “creating the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds” and shaping not only what is felt but who is permitted to feel it.Footnote ⁵² In this context, the figure of the unattached young woman becomes a site of moral anxiety, her visibility prompting improvised fatherly authority aimed at restoring familial control where kinship ties are absent. These young women were granted no emotional subjectivity of their own.

This gendered approach to affective governance was further reinforced when officers, before releasing them, instructed the much older local man accompanying them to “look after them,” transferring supervisory responsibility without acknowledging the power dynamics of the relationship. While male migrants may be marginalized through economic or legal means, female migrants are subject to affective and moral containment, governed through scripts that conflate care with control and autonomy with divergence.

Far from serving as a universal moral framework, renqing emerges across these cases as a stratifying mechanism calibrated to social position. In the mediation room, what appears as a culturally familiar practice functions as “cultural intimacy” – an affective space where normative gestures conceal power’s reproduction.Footnote ⁵³ This dynamic reflects the Fengqiao model’s transformation from revolutionary mobilization to outsourced affective labour, with professional mediators deploying culturally resonant scripts to manage disputes while preserving hierarchies. The state’s embrace of renqing-based mediation acknowledges that bureaucratic procedures alone cannot resolve conflicts rooted in inequality. Yet by outsourcing affective labour to actors embedded in these same structures, mediation often reproduces the very exclusions it seeks to resolve. By repackaging renqing as tradition, the state governs through intimacy while maintaining the appearance of moral neutrality.

Resistance Within the Mediation Room: The Limits of Affective Governance

If renqing operates as an affective grammar, structuring who can express which emotions, when and in what form, then resistance often takes shape as misalignment with these emotional expectations. While police mediation mandates physical presence, compulsion extends only to the body, not emotional participation. Within the chronotope of the mediation room, a bounded space–time shaping social action, what unfolds is shaped not only by institutional scripts but also by participants’ affective choices. In a system reliant on calibrated performances such as remorse, gratitude and receptivity, some participants resist incorporation into the moral order of renqing.

Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of emotional regimes as normative structures that define which feelings are appropriate, legible and politically safe, I develop affective autonomy to describe how participants, especially those excluded from local networks, refuse to align with expected emotional scripts.Footnote ⁵⁴ These refusals often take subtle and strategic forms – silence, withdrawal, non-recognition or engaging alternative affective registers – paralleling what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As Saba Mahmood has shown, autonomy need not imply liberal self-possession but can emerge through affective constraint, embedded in “the grammar of concepts within which it resides”: the institutional and semantic structures making possible particular ways of relating to people, norms and the self.Footnote ⁵⁶ Rather than expressing remorse, gratitude or reciprocity in the renqing-based grammar of mediation, some participants withhold emotional participation or cultivate alternative alignments. These refusals may not register as resistance in a conventional sense, but they destabilize the emotional regime by interrupting the circuits through which emotions acquire social and political force via repetition and attachment.Footnote ⁵⁷ By resisting emotional incorporation, participants reveal the limits of affective governance: emotions may be channelled but not fully contained.

These forms of affective autonomy manifest through diverse strategies across different populations in the mediation room. The migrant workers’ case exemplifies withdrawal as a form of autonomy. Brought to the station after a late-night altercation, both men maintained rigid postures throughout their session, refusing eye contact with either Old Wang or each other. When the mediator attempted to establish common ground by noting that they came from neighbouring villages in the same province, neither acknowledged this connection, effectively rejecting the manufactured solidarity based on shared outsider status. Their responses were limited to monosyllabic utterances or complete silence.

After an entire morning of attempted engagement, one individual requested administrative detention, choosing formal punishment over participation in a mediation system that held little emotional resonance for him. In doing so, he refused both the moral obligations embedded in renqing-based mediation and the affective grammar through which the Fengqiao model enacts governance at the grassroots level. These refusals highlight a disalignment from the emotional regime that governs mediation, where expressions of remorse or gratitude are expected to reaffirm normative attachments.Footnote ⁵⁸

The refusal to perform the expected emotional scripts directly challenges the institutional management of affective labour described earlier. While mediation has been reconfigured from revolutionary mobilization into contracted governance, its effectiveness still hinges on participants’ willingness to engage emotionally. When migrants choose silence over participation, they expose a central contradiction in the commodification of affective labour: emotional resonance cannot be compelled, and scripts based on local renqing logics are not universal. These refusals force mediators to confront the limits of governance strategies that rely on emotionally persuasive authority, particularly when applied to individuals severed from traditional networks of obligation.

Such affective autonomy presents practical challenges to the mediation system’s internal logic. When participants remain disengaged, officers face a bureaucratic dilemma: unresolved disputes risk escalating up the administrative hierarchy, drawing scrutiny from superiors and undermining performance evaluations. Strategic non-participation thus pressures mediators to choose between prolonging ineffective negotiations or converting cases into formal administrative punishment – an outcome that contradicts the Fengqiao model’s foundational promise to “resolve minor matters at the grassroots” without burdening higher levels of governance.Footnote ⁵⁹ These dynamics are well documented in studies of bureaucratic anxiety and risk aversion in local governance systems, where officials strive to avoid “trouble” that could threaten stability targets.Footnote ⁶⁰

Yet not all resistance takes the form of silence or withdrawal. As seen earlier with the tattooed teenage girls, affective autonomy may also involve the creation of parallel emotional worlds within the visible space of mediation. While they outwardly complied with officers’ paternal disciplining by nodding at advice and avoiding confrontation, they also exchanged whispers, stifled laughter and shared glances, cultivating an intimate affective space that remained inappropriate yet unintelligible to institutional authority. These performances did not openly defy gendered scripts but rather mobilized them strategically; the appearance of innocence, deference or emotional pliability served as camouflage for quiet affective refusal.

Feminist scholars have long noted that women navigate patriarchal structures through open resistance and calculated compliance, adopting seemingly naïve or obedient roles to deflect attention, avoid punishment or pursue alternative goals.Footnote ⁶¹ What appears as acquiescence may in fact be a tactical inhabiting of normative femininity. This aligns with work on situated knowledge in feminist epistemology, which emphasizes how marginalized subjects develop subtle, embodied strategies for manoeuvring within systems of control.Footnote ⁶² In this case, affective autonomy emerges as much through the careful modulation of emotional expression as through the avoidance of direct refusal, allowing for relational solidarity while minimizing institutional intervention.

The officers’ closing gesture of assigning responsibility for the young women to a much older man, without addressing the power imbalance, further underscores the patriarchal logic underpinning renqing-based mediation. This moment functioned to reaffirm heteronormative norms of male guardianship while rendering the emotional agency of the young women illegible. Yet within that illegibility, these women cultivated a space of mutual recognition and autonomy. Their resistance was not against discipline per se but against the “regularities of capture,” the “structures of oppression” that draw power not from coercion but from “feeding off the energies of collective life,” despite having “no motive force of [their] own.”Footnote ⁶³ This parasitic logic depends on capturing and redirecting affective energies.

Additionally, affective autonomy can also involve the deliberate amplification of emotional expression, turning affect into a resource for political negotiation. When Old Ding’s family staged daily silent protests, publicly displaying his portrait at the construction site where he died, they transformed private grief into a visibly politicized force. Their actions blurred the line between mourning and dissent, creating an emotionally charged atmosphere that exceeded the procedural logic of the legal-mediation system. Unlike the migrant workers’ withdrawal or the teenage girls’ creation of a parallel affective world, this strategy centred on emotional visibility: a form of “grief work” that, through its intensity, demanded recognition and compensation without relying on compliance. Grief thus becomes “a resource for politics” when it forces institutions to reckon with forms of loss that do not fit neatly within established regimes of intelligibility.Footnote ⁶⁴

In this case, the family’s sustained public mourning, which was initially dismissed as excessive or disruptive, ultimately secured an increased compensation package, rising from an initial 100,000 yuan to 250,000 yuan following police involvement. Their strategic display of loss mobilized affect in a way that exceeded containment, exposing how institutional anxieties about maintaining social stability can be leveraged from below. Within this mode, affective autonomy is exercised through emotionally saturated presence, an assertion of moral legitimacy that reframes grief as both relational and confrontational.

Together, these cases illuminate how affective autonomy functions as a multi-dimensional form of resistance within the structures of China’s grassroots governance in the context of frontline policing. Whether through withdrawal, the creation of parallel emotional spaces or the strategic amplification of grief, mediation participants engage affect not simply as expression but as a mode of negotiation, refusal and world-making. These practices do not necessarily reject the moral logics of renqing-based governance outright; however, they reconfigure the affective terms on which incorporation is accepted, deferred or denied. In doing so, they expose the fragility of a governance technology that depends on the legibility and management of renqing to secure social order. Yet affective life is never fully capturable by institutional scripts; it leaks, distorts and exceeds.Footnote ⁶⁵ Affective autonomy thus exposes the limits of governance by making visible the minor, relational and often gendered ways individuals reclaim the capacity to feel otherwise, even within tightly managed spaces.