This chapter studies the interaction between human rights lawyers and activists and political policing in China. While coercion is key to authoritarian governance, coercive and repressive measures in and of themselves do not produce regime resilience and deliver orders, compliance, and effective governance that is commonly observed in China. This chapter examines the systemic use of “soft repression,” which is preventive and preemptive in nature, characterized by surveillance, early intervention, and political persuasion. The process is informal and interactive i nwhich the Chinese political policing systems bring government pressure and other non-state forces to bear on target groups and individuals to achieve compliance. Subtle intimidation, consent under duress, relational repression, and voluntary detention, all hallmarks of China’s political policing, which is referred to as coercive political persuasion, have worked to constrain legitimate advocacy without frequently resorting to direct violence or blatant violation of legal rules.

Scholars of authoritarian resilience are often preoccupied with studying macro-events and institutions to explain regime durability. This book has, however, argued that studying the more mundane practices embodied in police management of common interpersonal disputes and problems can tell us much more about the social order that underscores regime survival, and about challenges to that order. This concluding chapter of the book considers the rise of ‘neoliberal securitised policing’ which has resulted from Jordan’s opening up over recent decades to globalisation and privatisation, and the increased importance the regime has accorded militant (and often Islamist) threats to national security. These trends clearly invite comparative and transnational analysis, but ultimately, it is argued, their iterations in the Jordanian context can be best understood at the micro-level, using a legal anthropology lens. The chapter also reiterates the utility of using a Gramscian framework to understand the construction, and undermining, of social order, in which a variety of strategies are used to arrive at consent.