"If you have ever wondered how [a totalitarian] regime can maintain control without breaking a sweat—or a rib—Hamilton College’s Alexsia T. Chan’s “Beyond Coercion: The Politics of Inequality in China” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025) offers some clues about the art of bureaucratic suffocation. Forget tanks in Tiananmen or surveillance drones buzzing overhead. The Chinese state, Chan argues, has perfected a quieter, more elegant form of repression: political atomization. It’s repression by red tape, domination by document, and inequality by design."
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Massimo Introvigne, "Inequality with Chinese Characteristics: How to Atomize a Nation Without Firing a Shot", Bitter Winter (December 1, 2025)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bureaucracy
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Bureaucracy
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