Chapter 16 of DYB introduces a range of relief policies to succour the victims of natural disasters that Qiu Jun considers should be developed by the Ming state. His references go back to the Rites of Zhou and include a significant amount of Tang and Song precedents. He particularly insists on preparedness measures and on the pre-eminent role of the state to store the surpluses produced by society and redistribute them in years of famine – hence, for example, his reservations regarding public granaries run by local notables – and, more generally, to preserve the stability of local communities confronted with subsistence crises. If Qiu’s recommendations do not seem to have had much impact, if any, on Ming relief policies, several of them anticipate the setting up of a centrally controlled and fairly efficient system of famine relief under the Qing.

Why do most migrant workers still lack access to urban public services despite national directives to incorporate them into cities, reported worker shortages, and ongoing labor unrest? How do policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them? This opening chapter maps out the challenge of urbanization as development and situates the concept of political atomization and the main findings of this book in the larger context of inequality and authoritarian distribution. The concept of political atomization helps us understand four phenomena better: how authoritarian regimes exercise social control beyond coercion, why the perceived exchange of promised services for loyalty bolsters authoritarian resilience, how public service provision works without elections, and why there have been new gradations of second-class citizenship and structural inequality in China. To show how political atomization works, this book tracks the dynamics and consequences of the process from the state’s perspective through migrants’ points of view. This book uncovers emergent and evolving sources of embedded inequality, social control, and everyday marginalization in China.

The second chapter identifies and conceptualizes political atomization. Political atomization explains two outcomes better than existing literature: why incremental expansions in social policy can entrench inequality and how authoritarian states sometimes use public service provision as a tool of social control. It also accounts for how policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them in China. Alternative explanations are inadequate, and the research design, methods, and sources of the book offer different insights. The theory of political atomization is situated within the literatures on authoritarianism, immigration, and welfare states and elucidates in detail how the process works and why it persists. There are trade-offs and risks to this approach, but embedded inequality ultimately serves the state. Unpacking political atomization illuminates how everyday marginalization of people works on the ground in their lived experiences.

The final chapter concludes with broader implications. After recapping how the previous chapters fit together to form a larger window on social control beyond coercion, it scrutinizes the limits of political atomization with a focus on perverse outcomes that result from the accumulated effects of individualization. Next are implications for China for inequality, the economy, migrant welfare and citizenship, and the authoritarian state’s social control toolbox. China is not alone in using political atomization, and a comparative perspective can spur future research on how the phenomenon already exists in not only other developing and authoritarian countries but also in democracies and developed countries. It ends with an examination of inequality and the state, noting that individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization to address the entrenchment of inequality in social policy.

Although rural migrants are frequently deflected and only selectively incorporated into urban public benefits, they have ways to undercut elements of social control and attain some education and health care. Resourcefulness and practical priorities help them find bureaucrats who practice co-migrant empathy and work within existing formal institutions to pry open what institutional leeway they can. When those are insufficient or inaccessible, they create and turn to private alternatives to get health care and education in the city. “People-run” schools are informal institutions that fill the gaps of public service provision, enabling migrants to keep their jobs when they get sick or have families in their destinations. However, because they are makeshift and typically operate on the outskirts of cities and in the shadows of legality, they can become subject to sudden intervention or regulation by the state. At other times, the government allows them to operate. The subversion of control is possible but not without the risk of being reverted into a target of the state.

This chapter analyzes the regulation of sexual desire as one aspect of the process of progressive centralization through which the papacy affirmed its control over the Catholic Church and society across the centuries. While the accusation of homosexual behavior was increasingly associated with forms of religious and social nonconformity, the prohibition of homosexual intercourse became an instrument for encouraging ecclesiastics’ and lay people’s increasing examination of their individual consciences. The control of same-sex desire thus favored the internalization of a disciplinary attitude that hierarchically emanated from the center to the periphery. As a response to the increased visibility of sexual and gender minorities, nowadays the issue of same-sex marriage is demanding increased attention. The issue has never been discussed more thoroughly by popes as it has been in the last decades. Despite some significative epistemological shifts, however, the doctrinal approach towards this matter has remained strikingly consistent, and homosexuality is still condemned by the Catholic Church as a disordered inclination.

The transition from a foraging lifestyle to structured political systems is one of the most momentous changes in the history of our species. This chapter reviews the various parameters that changed as a result of the transition to agriculture, including health, wealth, and power structures. There are a considerable number of debates over this transition, as researchers studying health, violence, political and personal power, and gender equity have studied it, with significant political implications in disciplines such as anthropology, economics, political science, and gender studies.

Chapter 8 discusses the processes involved in building and maintaining satisfactory relationships.It covers politeness theory, facework, morality, and how these contribute to relationship homeostasis.

How did the Gestapo enforce laws governing criticism? Recent historiography highlights denunciation driven policing as well as the overrepresentation of Communists and Jews in cases taken to trial. A system of selective enforcement is well-established fact, but the dynamics remain unclear. Enemies of the People randomly samples two categories of “criminal opinion” to capture the changing decision-making processes behind routine investigation, interrogation, and enforcement practices. Five arguments take shape. First, a conscious policy of selective enforcement based on political reliability as defined by standing within the Nazi people’s community. Second, the system punished subversive motive rather than actions. Third, political police viewed targeted minorities as subversives, privileged minorities as supporters, and carefully investigated “politically colourless” Germans. Fourth, from 1935 to 1944, the Gestapo behaved as an ordinary detective service when investigating individual Germans. Fifth, selective enforcement involved state prosecutors and the Party through five configurations. The violence of revolution and collapse were bookends on a decade of much cooler suppression.

After Stalingrad, the Gestapo only dealt with critics the Party identified as threats. Case load dropped 76 per cent while charges under capital offences rose to a rate of one-in-three. Yet selective enforcement continued. Each institution took on different roles. The Gestapo relied on political officials to warn loyal offenders and identify subversives. The Party singled out repeat offenders when education failed, and case officers rubber-stamped their preliminary investigations. The judiciary could then punish anything that filtered up with lengthy deterrent sentences. New roles shaped new standards and practices. The damning classification of “doubtful attitudes” blurred lines between defeatism and subversion. Distinctions between actions and motive disappeared for repeat offenders. Investigation practices also sharpened as focus narrowed to targeted minorities and opinionmakers. Surveillance and torture were used in any case with the slightest hint of organized resistance. Sentencing practices followed in step. Leftist slogans were once again treason, and Marxists who encouraged surrender risked execution. The dangers multiplied for a select few deemed opponents by the Party.