The Moral-Procedural Straitjacket: Party-State Co-optation and Repression in China's 2018 Campus #MeToo Movement

This dissertation analyzes the #MeToo movement in Chinese higher education as a revealing site for examining how the Chinese party-state manages contentious politics through the dual logics of moralization and securitization. I focus on the Shen Yang Incident at Peking University (PKU) and Nanjing University (NJU) in April 2018. In 1998, Shen Yang, then a PKU professor, allegedly sexually assaulted his student Gao Yan, who died by suicide soon after. The case was never seriously investigated, and Shen was never punished. Twenty years later, an accusation by Gao's friends and family ignited a wave of campus \#MeToo activism that escalated from online outrage into organized collective action.

The dissertation examines how and why the party-state both co-opted and repressed this activism, which was inspired by recent Western social movement repertoires and liberal rights discourse, inside a political system usually described as ideologically disciplined. More specifically, it concerns how a centralized authoritarian regime, committed to a unified governance vocabulary, handled contention that arose within its own elite institutions and that drew on the procedural and moral commitments the regime had cultivated for its own legitimation.

Part I traces the institutional terrain. Building on Party documents, policy directives, university regulations, and media coverage, I show how several developments converged in the years just before 2018: campaigns for "people-centered" governance, intensified ideological control in higher education, the expansion of digital surveillance and propaganda, and the consolidation of the Party Center's disciplinary authority through centralized inspection. Together these produced institutions charged at once with projecting moral and procedural legitimacy and with maintaining ideological and political control—the structural conditions under which contention is both enabled and contained. One institution I trace in depth is the political counselor system, the frontline instrument of ideological control on Chinese campuses; I reconstruct its seventy-year history in what is, to my knowledge, the first systematic account of the system in English. The party-state's 2018 response thus rested on institutions built over decades, not on improvisation.

Part II turns to the incident itself. Using process tracing, I reconstruct the exchanges between protesters and university authorities by the day, the hour, and at times the minute—a granularity rarely achieved in the study of authoritarian repression. State responses appeared not as a binary outcome—repression or tolerance—but as an interactional process in which local actors navigated moral, procedural, and security pressures under uncertainty and time constraint. The interaction moved through two phases. University authorities first answered with swift moral gestures—statements, disclosure of disciplinary records, dismissing Shen—signaling responsiveness while deflecting institutional responsibility. The turning point came when PKU students repurposed the university's own open-governance rules to file formal information disclosure applications, converting individual grievances into rule-based collective mobilization. That procedural escalation triggered securitization: the crisis was reclassified as a stability emergency, political counselors summoned students for "tea chats," and censorship spread beyond the campus. The coercive turn reframed the movement. What had begun as a campaign for anti-sexual harassment reform evolved into a rights-based critique of state power. The radicalization of rhetoric and repertoire culminated in the appearance of a big-character poster at PKU’s former Democracy Wall, an exceptionally rare protest form since the Tian'anmen Protest. This escalation drew a final wave of repression that blacked out the online contention and silenced the movement.

These dynamics expose the bind in which local agents work, which I call the moral-procedural straitjacket. Cadres must perform two legitimations at once. On the moral side, they must show the Party governing through reason and accountability, addressing rightful claims and demonstrating institutional propriety. On the procedural side, they must act within the dense field of regulations, systems, and laws the Xi-era state has built out, generating the documentation through which compliance is audited upward. Procedure is at once a public signal of legitimate authority and a real operational demand. The two requirements can pull against each other, and it is in that gap that co-optation and repression are produced together.

The arrangement that channels these demands I call ideological subcontracting. Extending control rights theory, it names a distinct allocation of authority: the Party Center keeps target-setting and inspection over ideological mandates while delegating execution to local Party committees, here the universities, on the principle of territorial responsibility. Two features set it apart from ordinary administrative subcontracting: its targets are constitutively unquantifiable, approached only through proxies such as the absence of incidents, formal compliance, and performed vigilance; and it works by post hoc evaluation that activates only once an incident arises, and the incident's political meaning is fixed after the fact, when a higher organ chooses to intervene. Cadres answer not to a standard they can measure themselves against but to a judgment rendered later, on criteria they cannot anticipate, with their political survival at stake.

Following Weber's routinization of charisma and office charisma, I argue that the party-state grounds its authority in the office charisma of the Party Center, in what I call a bureaucratic monarchy. The Center has long held charismatic authority over its bureaucratic subordinates; under Xi's personalized leadership that authority has grown far more salient. The configuration holds a standing tension between the personalized authority of the principal and the semi-autonomous logic of the agents he depends on. Read together, these concepts cast moralization and securitization as two faces of a single project of legitimation, and show how the procedure-based norms of liberal governance can be absorbed and redeployed inside a non-democratic system, coexisting there with performance-based and charisma-based legitimation.