When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? When activists are detained for coordinating protests, are their hands ultimately tied? Diana Fu from the University of Toronto reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. Based on political ethnography inside both legal and illegal labor organizations in China, this book reveals how state repression is deployed on the ground and to what effect on mobilization. It presents a novel dynamic of civil society contention – mobilizing without the masses – that lowers the risk of activism under duress. This dynamic represents a third pathway of contention that challenges conventional understandings of mobilization in an illiberal state.