The Affective Politics of Police Mediation: <i>Renqing</i> , Resistance and Governance in Grassroots China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines how “human affect” ( renqing ) – the interplay of affect, moral obligation and social legitimacy – operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of contestation in police mediation in contemporary China. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police stations in Zhejiang province, I conceptualize renqing as an affective grammar: a system of emotional expression and recognition that structures interaction across interpersonal and institutional settings. The party-state’s revival of the Fengqiao model has transformed renqing from a micro-political norm into an institutionalized instrument of affective governance. Mediation formalizes affect through contracts, scripted performances and service quotas, stratifying emotional legitimacy along lines of class, gender and migration. The article theorizes affective autonomy as participants’ resistance through silence, withdrawal or alternative alignments. It complicates portrayals of policing as purely coercive, highlighting the emotional labour and limits of grassroots governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".