Yuyao Yi on Watchful Awakening: Rights, Oppression, and Relational Legal Consciousness in Chinese Students’ Anti-Sexual Harassment Mobilization (Law & Social Inquiry)

"Watchful Awakening: Rights, Oppression, and Relational Legal Consciousness in Chinese Students’ Anti-Sexual Harassment Mobilization"
Yuyao Yi (PhD Candidate)
Law & Social Inquiry
Published online: 7 August 2026

Abstract: This study examines how Chinese university students’ legal consciousness is shaped by the tension between rights empowerment and repressive control in the context of anti-sexual harassment mobilization. Drawing on relational legal consciousness scholarship and extending work on relational repression, I argue that the legal dualism of the authoritarian state, which promotes rights through legislation while suppressing their assertion through stability maintenance, reaches students through their relational networks. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-eight students and seventeen institutional actors, supplemented by participant observation, this study identifies “concern for rights” and “concern for oppression” as two competing forces generated and transmitted through relationships. Contrasting these two forces, I propose a two-dimensional framework that maps four states of legal consciousness. Among them, “watchful awakening,” where students are fully aware of rights violations yet strategically constrained by oppression, emerges as predominant. The study traces how relational variables, including student positionality, institutional dependency, and university hierarchy, shift the relative weight of these concerns and propel students between different states. This framework reveals how the state’s contradictory signals are reproduced at the individual level through the very relationships that individuals depend on for support, solidarity, and survival.