We study whether collective action can influence public policy in autocracies and, if so, under what conditions. Existing literature suggests that authoritarian governments can respond to the particularistic demands of ordinary people who take collective action. However, it is unclear whether such collective action can push authoritarian governments to make or adjust public policies that go beyond particular contention and apply to a broader population. We argue that ordinary people acting collectively can pressure local governments in autocracies to make policy concessions. Specifically, ordinary people taking collective action in autocracies have deep-rooted grievances over local living conditions. These grievances give rise to morality- or reciprocity-based demands, making it difficult for officials in local governments to repress ordinary people or ignore their demands. Moreover, officials in local governments have career incentives to reduce the likelihood of collective action driven by localized grievances, and they have discretion over the details of policy implementation to make concessions to ordinary people. We plan to empirically examine the arguments by studying the relationship between strikes initiated by workers and labor and social policy made by prefectural governments in China. We have collected data on the frequency of strikes at the prefecture level and are collecting labor policy documents issued by Chinese prefectural governments. We will run a two-way fixed-effects model with the panel data, and we plan to consider an instrumental variable strategy for causal inference. This project's findings will shed light on the consequences of contentious politics and the dynamics of policymaking in autocracies.