Impact Awards—
2024 Insight Award winner: Lynette Ong

Lynette Ong is a Canadian researcher and author whose passion, perseverance and curiosity around state repression in China traces back to her childhood.

“I came from a very conformist family and culture. There was a lot of pressure to do well academically,” says Ong, whose family emigrated from southern China to Southeast Asia in the early 21st century, and to Canada more recently. “I think that created a rebellious streak in me to take the unbeaten path.”

Ong is a first-generation scholar. A political scientist and distinguished professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, she has spent two decades deeply immersed in the web of China’s authoritarian regime. Her brave, contentious and often dangerous research, funded by SSHRC, has taken her into China’s cities and rural towns to study how the Chinese state manipulates and represses its citizens.

“If you lift the facade of a country, you’ll see the darker side. I spent a lot of time in those less glamorous places. In some localities, I did think about my safety,” she admits, recalling the tensions of protest sites and surveillance. “In China, repression often happens in invisible ways, involving social pressure exerted by people deeply embedded in the community.”

Her groundbreaking book, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press 2022), explores how the Chinese state uses non-state actors, including violent street gangs and grassroots networks like village “aunties”, to coerce and control its population, particularly in land evictions.

“That kind of psychological coaxing and intimidation makes people comply without even realizing they are subject to repression,” Ong explains. “It’s a privilege to be trusted enough to hear these emotional stories of harassment and repression.”

Since its release, Outsourcing Repression has won five international awards. Ong has testified before the House of Commons and the United States Congress. Her research has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, PBS and the BBC.

Ong says academia has given her the freedom to be bold and creative. “In this political climate, when research in China is increasingly challenging, if not near impossible, I’m enormously grateful for the funding to do this work.”

Receiving the SSHRC Impact Award in the Insight category was a “pleasant surprise” for Ong.

“I’d like to thank the people who have helped me along the way,” she says. “As an inherently private person, I need to adjust to this public recognition. I just hope I can pay it forward and mentor other young researchers.”