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Patricia Thornton

Assistant Professor
Trinity College, Department of Political Science
Cybersectarianism in Transnational China: Repression, Resistance, and Subversion
United States

Patricia M. Thornton is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she teaches comparative politics, including courses on East Asian politics, political corruption and social revolution.

Professor Thornton's research centers on contentious politics and collective action in modern and contemporary China, as well as on the practices and institutions of the Chinese state that have engendered social protest. Her interest on protest and resistance drew her to the study of syncretic sectarian groups in contemporary China, and, most notably, to the wide variety of popular qigong-based groups and practices that flourished during the post-Mao reform period. Her current project seeks to explore how syncretic sects in contemporary China have made use of high-tech resources-such as the worldwide web, Internet, and email-to subvert state repression and control.

Professor Thornton received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, and a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Washington in Seattle. After receiving her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, she spent one year as an An Wang Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. In addition to teaching, she has also served as the Director of Asian Programs and the Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Program at Trinity College.

Selected Publications:

"Syncretic Sects in Contemporary China: Old Wine in New Bottles?" In Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, 2nd ed. London and New York, Routledge, 2003. (Forthcoming.)
"Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy." The China Quarterly, September, 2002.
"Insinuation, Insult and Invective: The Thresholds of Power and Protest in Modern China." Comparative Studies in History and Society, July, 2002.
"Beneath the Banyan Tree: Bottom-up Views of Local Taxation and the State during the Republican and Reform Eras," Twentieth Century China 15:1 (November), 1999): 1-42.
"Discerning the Public from the Private: A Lexicon of Political Corruption During the Nanjing Decade." Indiana University Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China, No. 8 (Spring),1996.

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Cybersectarianism in Transnational China: Repression, Resistance and Subversion

The general relaxation of political and social controls during the post-Mao reform era, combined with rising economic disparities and the pressures of a rapidly commercializing society, has led to a resurgence of popular interest in religious traditions and spiritual practices. The broadly syncretic sects of contemporary transnational China weave together salvationist teachings, esoteric practices and high-tech organizational strategies, with some groups increasingly relying upon new internet-based transnational methods of recruitment, transmission and resistance that have proved stubbornly resistant to the efforts to eliminate and contain them. The technological resources at the disposal of these groups facilitates the development of a particular organizational form, and one that is also much in evidence among other radical sectarian groups, some of whom have been linked to terrorist and anti-state violence across the globe: highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of beliefs, practices and/or texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader.
Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in collective study via email, Online chat rooms and web-based message boards.

This project defines and explores this new form of politico-religious mobilization, which I refer to as cyber-sectarianism, and maps their deployment of what some have referred to as "repertoires of electronic contention." Within transnational China, such repertoires have already shifted the balance of state-to-state relations between China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Western nations; similar high-tech repertoires of political contention will surely have a dramatic impact of global political stability in the future. I seek to develop general comparative models that link the growth and collective behavior of traditional syncretic sects who deploy such repertoires to acts of anti-state violence.

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