Contingent Symbiosis and Civil Society in an Authoritarian State: Understanding the Survival
of China’s Grassroots NGOs
Author(s): Anthony J. Spires
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 117, No. 1 (July 2011), pp. 1-45
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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AJS Volume 117 Number 1 (July 2011): 1–45 1
᭧ 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0002-9602/2011/11701-0001$10.00
Contingent Symbiosis and Civil Society in an
Authoritarian State: Understanding the
Survival of China’s Grassroots NGOs1
Anthony J. Spires
Chinese University of Hong Kong
In the study of civil society, Tocqueville-inspired research has helped
illuminate important connections between associations and democracy,
while corporatism has provided a robust framework for
understanding officially approved civil society organizations in authoritarian
regimes. Yet neither approach accounts for the experiences
of ostensibly illegal grassroots nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) in an authoritarian state. Drawing on fieldwork in China,
I argue that grassroots NGOs can survive in an authoritarian regime
when the state is fragmented and when censorship keeps information
local. Moreover, grassroots NGOs survive only insofar as they refrain
from democratic claims-making and address social needs that
might fuel grievances against the state. For its part, the state tolerates
such groups as long as particular state agents can claim credit
for any good works while avoiding blame for any problems. Grassroots
NGOs and an authoritarian state can thus coexist in a “contingent
symbiosis” that—far from pointing to an inevitable democratization—allows
ostensibly illegal groups to operate openly while
relieving the state of some of its social welfare obligations.
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
In a one-party authoritarian state that maintains a strong public security
apparatus and bans all associations operating without official supervision,
how do some ostensibly illegal organizations survive? This article ad-
1
I would like to thank Deborah Davis for her patient guidance and detailed comments
on earlier drafts of this article and for her encouragement throughout the research
process. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Kai Erikson, Ron Eyerman, John Nguyet
Erni, Ling-Yun Tang, Kin-man Chan, Rachel Stern, Eli Friedman, my colleagues at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong Center for Civil Society Studies, and the AJS
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American Journal of Sociology
2
dresses this question and aims to explain how unauthorized grassroots
NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) maintain their existence in what
most observers consider a politically hostile environment. I begin by considering
two related literatures. First, I discuss neo-Tocquevillean theories
of the relationship between associations and democracy, particularly regarding
the ways the state can become vulnerable to citizen control
through civil society organizations. I then consider theories of state corporatism
that emphasize how authoritarian states attempt to fend off
political challenges and control society through restrictions on and oversight
of citizens’ associations. While these two literatures offer insight into
democratic societies and government-approved associations in authoritarian
regimes, they are both inadequate for understanding the existence
and experiences of grassroots civil society organizations that are neither
pressing for radical democratic transformation nor serving as approved
arms of an authoritarian state. Instead, I argue, ground-level observations
reveal a situation best characterized as “contingent symbiosis,” a concept
that captures the fragility and mutual benefits that characterize the NGOgovernment
relationship.
I begin by considering the contributions of Tocquevillean and corporatist
perspectives on civil society in authoritarian regimes. I then introduce
the specific case of China, discussing the definition of “grassroots groups”
as used here and giving a fuller introduction to the phenomenon of contingent
symbiosis.2
From there, I turn to the empirical data, focusing on
the implications of fragmented governance, information restrictions, and
the practice of giving “political face” to government officials. Next, I
discuss the mutual suspicion and mutual need that permeates the NGOgovernment
relationship. By way of conclusion, I revisit the literatures
on civil society, democracy, and corporatism and consider the implications
of this study for future research on NGOs in China and in other authoritarian
states.
reviewers for their excellent suggestions for revision. I regret that I cannot thank by
name the numerous people in China who shared their time and perspectives with me.
Any inaccuracies or omissions are entirely my own. The research was supported in
part by the Yale Council on East Asian Studies Dissertation Fellowship. Direct correspondence
to Anthony J. Spires, Department of Sociology, Fourth Floor, Sino Building,
the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong. Email:
ajspires@cuhk.edu.hk
2
Appendix A describes the methodology and data used in this study. In order to protect
the identities of the government officials and the grassroots NGO participants who
shared their experiences with me, in this article I do not use any identifiers, including
dates. However, a descriptive overview of these groups and individuals is provided
in appendix B.
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Contingent Symbiosis
3
INTERROGATING THE DEMOCRACY–CIVIL SOCIETY
CONNECTION
Since the publication of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the connections
between civic associations and democratic political life have commanded
the attention of several generations of social scientists.3
As an
early scholar of the American experiment in democracy, Tocqueville was
particularly impressed by what he saw as the self-governing character of
American society. “Americans combine,” he wrote, “to give fetes, build
churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals,
prisons, and schools take shape in that way. . . . In every case, at
the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the
government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States
you are sure to find an association” (Tocqueville 1988, p. 513). When
confronted with communal problems, he believed, Americans’ first instinct
was to handle them through local collective action, rather than look
to government to devise solutions. In the United States, he observed, “if
some obstacle blocks the public road halting the circulation of traffic, the
neighbors at once form a deliberative body; this improvised assembly
produces an executive authority which remedies the trouble before anyone
has thought of the possibility of some previously constituted authority
beyond that of those concerned” (p. 189).
Free and voluntary association, Tocqueville ultimately concluded, was
the bedrock on which American democracy was built.4
But what are the
implications of associational life in authoritarian regimes? As Fung notes
in a sweeping review essay of recent literature, there is a commonly held
view that “especially in political contexts of tyranny or deep injustice, the
central contributions of associations have been to check illegitimate political
power, to offer resistance, and to check official power” (2003, p.
516).5
Similarly, Foley and Edwards, in their critical review of the broader
civil society literature, have identified a version of civil society theory,
3
Berman (1997), e.g., distinguishes two influential “waves” of interest in Tocqueville
during the 20th century, from the mass society theorists of the 1950s and ’60s (including
Kornhauser 1959 and Arendt 1973) to the more recent revival by Fukuyama (1995),
Putnam (1996), and others concerned about issues such as social trust and social capital.
4
This powerful analysis of the dynamics and implications of a self-organized civil
society has in recent years given birth to a voluminous body of research addressing
the contemporary United States (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Putnam 2000;
Andrews et al. 2009) as well as other developed democracies (e.g., Putnam, Leonardi,
and Nanetti 1993). Warren (2001) has crafted a broad theoretical treatment of the
various connections between associations and democracy.
5
Gramscian conceptions of hegemony and counterhegemony abound in this literature,
although sometimes not explicitly acknowledged. To be sure, while I believe applying
a Gramscian analytic to China’s NGO development would prove revealing, such an
undertaking is beyond the scope of this current article.
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American Journal of Sociology
4
developed in studies of Poland in the 1980s and Latin America, that “lays
special emphasis on civil society as a sphere of action that is independent
of the state and that is capable—precisely for this reason—of energizing
resistance to a tyrannical regime” (Foley and Edwards 1996, p. 39). These
studies suggest that in “contexts of democratic transition . . . autonomy
from traditional politics seems to be a prerequisite for oppositional advocacy.
In such contexts, civil society is treated as an autonomous sphere
of social power within which citizens can pressure authoritarians for
change, protect themselves from tyranny, and democratize from below”
(p. 46).
The perspective Foley and Edwards summarize is rooted in Tocqueville’s
analysis of civil society and democracy in the United States. Such
extensions of Tocqueville’s theses have led some to posit a “natural” or
inevitable connection between civil society and transitions to democracy.
Indeed, Alagappa (2004) points out that in much neo-Tocquevillean literature,
for countries with democratic aspirations, the promise of civil
society is almost boundless: “Civil society is viewed as a supporting structure
to democratize the state. Associational life is thought to provide the
social infrastructure for liberal democracy, supply the means to limit,
resist, and curb the excesses of the state and market, present alternatives
when they fail, facilitate service delivery at the local level, assist in conflict
management, deepen democracy (by cultivating civic virtues, establishing
democratic norms, and spreading democracy to more domains of life),
offer a voice to disadvantaged groups, and promote economic development”
(p. 41). In recent years, these myriad expectations of civil society
and NGOs have motivated research agendas on popular associations in
sharply differing contexts, from Algeria and Saudi Arabia (Elbayar 2005)
to China (Hsu 2008), Iran (Katirai 2005), and Korea (Kim 2004). To be
sure, some scholars have convincingly argued that civil society organizations
have played a key role in the democratic transitions of some
authoritarian states. Fan’s (2000, 2004) observations of Taiwan and Kim’s
(2004) analysis of political change in South Korea offer compelling cases
for the role of civil society in transitions from authoritarianism in Asia.
Others, however, have argued that despite the power of Tocquevillean
insights, civil society organizations need not necessarily foster democracy
and may, under certain conditions, support the survival of authoritarian
regimes. “Civil society,” Alagappa reminds us, “is an arena of power,
inequality, struggle, conflict, and cooperation among competing identities
and interests. It is populated by diverse formal and informal organizations
with widely varying structures, resources, purposes, and methods” (2004,
p. 46).
Indeed, an active and “strong” civil society does not always lead to a
strong democracy. Groups that are founded on particularistic identities,
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Contingent Symbiosis
5
for example, can exacerbate social divisions. In Berman’s (1997) study of
Weimar Germany, she found that “Germany was cleaved increasingly into
distinct subcultures or communities, each of which had its own, separate
associational life” (p. 426). Such cleavages, she argues, undermined the
country’s fledgling party system, with dire consequences for democratic
development. Similarly, Aspinall (2004) found that a fractious Indonesian
civil society in the 1950s and 1960s, far from having a democratizing
effect on society, helped usher in the authoritarian regime of Suharto in
1965. “In the 1950s and 1960s,” he explains, “most large civil society
organizations were affiliated to political parties that aimed to hold or seize
political power. Civil society became a mechanism, not for generating
civility and ‘social capital,’ but rather for magnifying sociopolitical conflict
and transmitting it to the very bases of society” (p. 62). In concert with
these analyses, Riley’s (2005) study of the origins of fascism in Italy and
Spain shows how dynamic civil societies, rather than pushing a society
toward democracy, can set the stage for authoritarianism. Taken as a
whole, notes Gallagher (2004, p. 421), studies such as these suggest that
“civil society’s relationship to democratization is highly contingent.”
In this article, I use data from China to ground this notion of contingency
in empirical reality and further challenge the assumed linkages
between independent associations and democracy. In doing so, I contend
that, especially for bottom-up grassroots organizations, a single-minded
focus on such groups’ potential ability to promote democracy obscures
the first-order question of their precarious existence. Rather than look for
the immediate democratic implications of associational growth, then, the
central puzzle driving this study is as follows: In a repressive authoritarian
political context where, by very definition, unauthorized organizations are
potential threats to the ruling power, how do such groups survive? Only
by first addressing this question and understanding the context and conditions
of their existence can we begin to consider grassroots groups’
potential to help democratize an unwilling state.
CORPORATIST THEORY AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN AUTHORITARIAN
STATES
Corporatism has been applied to understand variation in associational
life in many different eras, and in the hands of different scholars, the
analytic lens and causal arguments have varied. One group of scholars
(Malloy 1974; Newton 1974; Wiarda 1974; Lehmbruch 1977) approached
corporatism primarily through the lens of political economy, trying to
understand how capitalism and modern nation-state consolidation challenged
traditionally powerful corporate identities and organizations. A
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American Journal of Sociology
6
second group asked under what conditions do powerful states create or
incorporate organizations to direct citizen energies and then use such
organizations to solidify their political power. Schmitter (1974) applied
such an understanding to the fascist governments of Mussolini and
Franco, autocrats who saw corporatism as “providing for superior governability
in the national interest” (Streeck and Kenworthy 2005, p. 444).
Building on Manoilesco’s (1936) thinking, Schmitter developed the concept
of “state corporatism” as a system in which “singular, noncompetitive,
hierarchically ordered representative ‘corporations’ . . . were created by
and kept as auxiliary and dependent organs of the state” (Schmitter 1974,
pp. 102–3).6
As Unger and Chan (1995) point out, “corporatist mechanisms . . . do
not define a political system: a polity can contain corporatist elements and
at the same time be a dictatorial Communist Party regime, or an authoritarian
Third World government, or a liberal parliamentarian state”
(p. 31). Western European democracies and Australia have relied on “peak
associations” to allow the government to deal with one representative
voice of particular societal interests (most commonly labor). Whereas the
leadership of associations in democratic countries is seen as first and
foremost accountable to its members, through the late 1980s authoritarian
regimes like those in Taiwan (Tien 1989), Poland (Ost 1989), and Romania
(Chirot 1980) preempted the rise of autonomous organizations by either
incorporating preexisting groups or establishing new ones under state
control and banning all others.
In the 1990s, as the Cold War seemed to end with a decisive victory
for capitalism in the economic realm and for democracy in the political,
scholars turned to the corporatist framework again to help make sense
of the seemingly tremendous changes taking place in post-Soviet Eastern
Europe (Ost 2000) and—in a very different way—in China, the world’s
largest remaining authoritarian country. The idea of corporatist organization
as an “instrument of state rule” (Streeck and Kenworthy 2005, p.
444) has since motivated much inquiry into associational life in China,
beginning first with industrial associations organized by the state to ensure
Communist Party control even under economic decentralization, then
turning to the state’s efforts to create and control charitable organizations,
sporting groups, collectors’ associations, and other groups not directly tied
6
Schmitter’s own definition of corporatism describes “a system of interest representation
in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular,
compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories,
recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate
representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing
certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and support”
(1974, pp. 93–94).
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Contingent Symbiosis
7
to economic interests. As I shall show below, studies of both economic
and noneconomic organizations in China also find inspiration in Tocquevillean
analyses of the democratic potential of civic associations. Paradoxically,
however, this literature’s emphasis on state-created, state-controlled
organizations has obscured from view the existence and political
significance of grassroots organizations.
In the pages that follow, I contend that neither Tocquevillean nor corporatist
analyses can adequately address the situation of ostensibly illegal
grassroots organizations in an authoritarian state. Before focusing my
attention on these groups, though, I first consider the contributions of
extant studies of associational life in China.
Corporatist Theory and the Search for an Autonomous Civil Society in
China
The scholarly search for civil society in China began in earnest in the
immediate aftermath of the violent suppression of protests in Tiananmen
Square in June 1989. Motivated by the explosive social unrest made visible
by the demonstrations, in 1993 the journal Modern China brought together
historians and social scientists to explore the applicability of the
civil society concept and the significance of emergent nongovernmental
organizations in China (e.g., Chamberlain 1993; Huang 1993; Madsen
1993; Rankin 1993; Rowe 1993; Wakeman 1993).7
Since then, others have
continued the effort to assess the potential of what appears to be a rapidly
growing Chinese civil society (e.g., Unger and Chan 1995; Unger 1996;
White, Howell, and Shang 1996; Brook and Frolic 1997; Saich 2000;
Zhang 2001; Ma 2002, 2006; Wu 2002; Economy 2004; Gallagher 2004;
Wang and He 2004; Zhang and Baum 2004; Chan 2005; Stalley and Yang
2006).
Given the violent suppression of a (potentially) nascent civil society that
initially created so much interest in the topic, it is somewhat surprising
that published studies of associations in contemporary China have focused
predominantly on GONGOs, those oxymoronic “government-organized
nongovernmental organizations” the Chinese government began to create
7
Calhoun, a witness to the Tiananmen Square events, also wrote in 1993 that discussions
of civil society’s history and potential rise in China “commonly focus on the
mere presence of institutions outside the realm of the state rather than on the question
of how social integration is accomplished and whether those extrastate institutions
have substantial capacity to alter patterns of integration or the overall exercise of
power” (1993, p. 278). Although subsequent studies began to focus on issues of autonomy
and influence, most of these did so within the framework of corporatism, generally
assuming that the authoritarian state was cohesive enough to effectively eliminate the
space for viable autonomous organizations.
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American Journal of Sociology
8
in the late 1980s (see, e.g., Pearson 1994; Unger and Chan 1995; Unger
1996; Chan and Qiu 1999; Saich 2000; Foster 2001, 2002; Wu 2002; Ma
2006).8
Over the past two decades, China has established a panoply of
GONGOs, including sports associations, business associations, academic
associations, and groups dedicated (at least in name) to other fields of
activity.9
According to official statistics, at the end of 2007 there were a
total of 386,916 registered “NGOs” in China (Ministry of Civil Affairs
2008)—most of which are widely assumed to be GONGOs.10
The Chinese
government has been quite happy to present these organizations as NGOs
to foreigners, in order to attract foreign funding and boost the legitimacy
of its GONGOs in the eyes of the world (Zhang 2001; Economy 2004;
Zhao 2006). But within China, the government has chosen to equate the
English term “NGO” with the Chinese term minjian zuzhi (roughly, “people’s
sphere organization”), a rendering that it finds preferable to the literal
translation of “nongovernmental organization” ( feizhengfu zuzhi), as the
prefix “non” ( fei) can be interpreted in Chinese as “anti” ( fan).
Given the rapid increase in registered NGO numbers over the past two
decades, one might be tempted to conclude that China has experienced
an “associational revolution” akin to that identified by Salamon and Anheier
(1997) in other areas of the world. However, government regulations
require that all NGOs, in order to be registered, must first find a supervisory
agency (zhuguan danwei) within the government—an arrangement
designed to allow the government to regulate, organize, and monitor
NGOs better. This requirement is widely seen as the biggest legal obstacle
to grassroots groups that wish to become properly registered NGOs.11
Consistent with the analysis of authoritarianism put forth by Schmitter
(1974) and affirmed by Streeck and Kenworthy (2005), scholars have iden-
8
I note this more as an observation than a criticism. Conducting research in an authoritarian
state on potentially destabilizing independent organizations is obviously no
simple matter. However, for one of the few contrarian views against the consensus
depictions of Chinese NGOs as “bridges” to the state (Unger 1996) or of GONGOs
that are embedded within government agencies (Wu 2002), see Zhang and Baum (2004).
9
Economy (2004) points to various motives for this phenomenon, including finding
resting spots for retired cadres and redundant staff whose jobs were cut during government
downsizings in 1998 and 2003.
10
The regulations set out by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs (MOCA) establish three
categories of minjian zuzhi: social organizations (shehui tuanti), which are supposed
to be membership based; private noncommercial enterprises (minban feiqiye danwei),
or simply nonprofit organizations that are allowed to conduct business; and foundations
(jijinhui). Adding some confusion to the terminology, in late 2007 MOCA’s Bureau
of NGO Management began referring to all these organizations as shehui zuzhi (also
rendered in English as “social organization”), not as minjian zuzhi.
11
There are also financial requirements, membership requirements, and a limit on the
geographic area within which the NGO is permitted to operate.
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Contingent Symbiosis
9
tified China’s GONGO establishments as an example of “state-led corporatism”
in which the state recognizes only one sectoral organization and
aims to use that organization to maintain communication with that sector
of society (e.g., Chan 1993; Pearson 1994; Unger and Chan 1995, 2008;
Wu 2002; Economy 2004; Yu 2007).12
Although the corporatist nature of official civil society growth in China
seems to have led to a consensus that autonomy is limited, many studies
are rooted in a Tocquevillean tradition that expects associations to have
a democratizing effect on the state (Foster 2001). Such democratic hopes
are evident in the growing chorus of scholars who have suggested that
groups closely aligned to the government may also push forward the
development of civil society and open the political system to more voices
(see, e.g., Saich 2000; Ma 2002; Wu 2002).13
Rather than view the requirement
to have a supervisory agency as an enervating control mechanism,
for example, the former head of the Ford Foundation’s Beijing
office (and political scientist) Tony Saich (2000) suggests that registered
NGOs can operate within the constraints of the regulations in a fairly
efficacious, albeit not completely independent, manner. Saich, as others,
argues that such organizations benefit from the legitimacy and protection
extended by their sponsoring agency and may also be granted greater
access to decision makers as new policies relevant to the field of their
activities are formulated.
Although the autonomy of GONGOs remains a subject of debate, the
corporatist framework clearly works well to describe much of modern
China’s experience with associational life. After the collapse of the Qing
Empire in 1911, reformers on the left and the right turned to corporatiststyle
unions, youth groups, and professional associations as “transmission
belts” between national leaders and local bodies. Both the Nationalists,
who lost the civil war in 1949, and the Communists, who won, adopted
a Leninist party structure in which mass organizations were central. Years
before China’s economic reforms began taking shape in the early 1980s,
the Chinese government had established several “mass organizations” that
it would later claim to be the equivalent of the civil society associations
so socially and politically important in the United States and other devel-
12
Kang and Han (2008) have called for a modification of this general understanding,
arguing that the government’s official approach has been one of “graduated controls”
in which different types of organizations are subject to varying degrees of governmental
supervision.
13
Due to the general restrictions on survey research and the political sensitivity of this
particular topic, to date there has been no comprehensive survey of registered organizations,
but it is a common consensus among Chinese government officials, academics,
and NGO participants that GONGOs comprise the overwhelming majority of
registered groups.
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American Journal of Sociology
10
oped democracies. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU),
the All-China Women’s Federation, the Communist Youth League, and
other mass organizations were established under the strict control of the
Maoist party-state. Although in practice these were one-way conduits for
instructions from the top to the bottom, rhetorically such groups were to
be the special representatives of their various constituencies, bringing the
needs of society up to the attention of the leadership while conveying
policies and ideology downward to the masses. Detailed studies of these
organizations and their successors allow Unger (2008) to conclude that
“China’s major associations were in fact founded by the state and today
remain firmly under the control of a state or Party agency. In short, they
are state corporatist” (p. 9).
Yet over the past decade we can also observe the emergence of real
grassroots NGOs that do not fit within the corporatist framework, groups
that have been neither created by nor officially incorporated into the partystate.
In the remainder of this article, I depart from current practice to
focus attention not on corporatist GONGOs but rather on these unofficial,
“bottom-up” grassroots NGOs (caogen zuzhi). Located outside the vertical
control mechanisms the party has tried to impose, grassroots groups are
formed by Chinese citizens without the government’s initiative or approval,
congealing in the social spaces where the government is absent,
impotent, or unwilling to act. Of course, despite the opening (and filling)
of these spaces, the extreme political sensitivity of true civil society associations
in China and in any authoritarian state should not be underestimated.
Because NGOs potentially provide alternative spaces for political
organizing and mobilization, they are viewed by some in the Chinese
party state as a serious threat.
Identifying Grassroots Groups
One may reasonably ask, what exactly is meant by “grassroots”? As one
sociologist writing about the United States noted recently, “few words in
the English language conjure up such dramatic images of populism and
authenticity as ‘grassroots’” (Walker 2009, p. 85). In this study, grassroots
organizations are defined by the characteristics attributed to them by my
informants. They are not government creations or spin-offs of some government
agency looking to push cadres into early retirement or to create
an NGO “hat” for officials to wear when traveling overseas. By and large,
they receive neither funding nor tangible assets (like free office space)
from government agencies. They are run by local Chinese people and do
not answer to headquarters in some other country. They may receive
funding from foreign governments or foundations or locally from their
founders, volunteers, or members. They may be organized by social elites
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Contingent Symbiosis
11
or by people without a high-school education. They may operate under
top-down power structures and clear hierarchies, or they may show a higher
degree of internal democracy. They may be composed of staff, of volunteers,
of members, or of some combination of the three. Finally, they may be
registered with the government as legal NGOs (minjian zuzhi) or as businesses,
or they may not register with the government at all, in any form.14
In the words of one labor NGO leader, “Very grassroots groups are
groups of people without any money trying to help other people without
any money!” More commonly, people in grassroots NGOs characterize
themselves and their groups as distinct from “those government-run
groups” (guan ban de neizhong) or groups “with a government background”
(you guanfang beijing de). The English-language term “NGO”
holds currency as well for grassroots groups who know it. Until coming
into contact with similar organizations, however, some NGO participants
are not sure what to call themselves. They only know that they are providing
a much-needed service to people like themselves or to others.15
“Before I met [another NGO leader],” explains one labor group leader, “I
didn’t know what an NGO was. It’s English, so I didn’t understand what
it meant at first.” With time, however, he, like many grassroots NGO
leaders, has come to use the term to identify his work to himself and to
others.
In sharp contrast to corporatist analyses, the defining characteristic of
China’s grassroots NGOs, as understood by people who use the term
caogen zuzhi, is that to be grassroots means to have neither official government
ties nor official government support—to have no choice other
than “to live or die on one’s own” (zisheng zimie). This lack of official
sponsorship and approval constitutes the puzzle at the heart of this article—How
do ostensibly illegal grassroots organizations survive in an
authoritarian state?
CONTINGENT SYMBIOSIS AND THE LOGIC OF SOCIAL LIFE IN AN
AUTHORITARIAN STATE
To summarize the theoretical discussion with which this article opens,
extensions of Tocquevillean theory suggest that autonomous NGOs can
14
Unregistered groups run the political risk of being branded “illegal organizations,”
while those registered as businesses risk being shut down for fraudulently presenting
themselves as nonprofits to their funders and the public.
15
The groups in my study, and indeed the groups that people in China refer to most
commonly as grassroots NGOs, generally provide some sort of social service in fields
including health and disease, labor rights, environment, education, and others. Some
also engage in advocacy or, oftentimes, blur the distinction between advocacy and
social service delivery.
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pressure the state in a way that enhances democracy and accountability
or, in the case of authoritarian regimes, in a way that pushes the state to
democratize. Corporatism, however, leads us to expect a strong authoritarian
state to restrict freedom of association and channel citizen energies
into officially approved organizations and toward official goals. Yet both
of these theories fall short in helping us explain the survival of grassroots
organizations in an authoritarian state.
In the following sections, I develop a concept of “contingent symbiosis”
to explain the relationship between ostensibly illegal grassroots NGOs
and the government in an authoritarian state. This concept is constructed
around the logic of social life in an authoritarian regime and emerges
from two main sets of observations. The first set concerns the reality and
implications of fragmented governance and policy enforcement. The second
set centers on the mutual suspicion and mutual need that permeates
the NGO-government relationship.
These ground-level realities construct a relationship that is symbiotic
in that NGOs are looking to meet social needs, while government officials,
especially at the local level, seek to make sure all “problems” in their
jurisdictions are dealt with in ways that do not attract unfavorable attention
from their higher-ups. When cooperation on mutual goals is
achieved, NGOs can continue their work, and local government officials
will ignore their illegality. Yet clearly such a relationship is both fragile
and contingent. If NGOs keep their operations small and make no calls
for political representation or democratic reform, officials can turn a blind
eye and claim credit for any good works the NGO does. But if an NGO’s
work draws too much attention to the failings of local officials or if it
oversteps a fuzzy and frequently shifting political line, the organization
can be disciplined or even closed down. As the data presented below
make clear, although the relationship can be mutually beneficial (and thus
symbiotic), it is also unequal. The government always holds the upper
hand because of its constant threat of repression.
Although the evidence presented here is drawn only from China, other
modern repressive regimes share with China core political features such
as official censorship, criminalization of public protest, and repression of
independent civic associations. These similarities would suggest that when
government agents in any such regime are charged with meeting social
welfare needs (whether to maintain social stability or to shore up the
regime’s legitimacy) yet denied sufficient resources, entering into a relationship
of contingent symbiosis with unofficial NGOs is a potentially
reasonable course of action. At the same time, for NGOs in any authoritarian
regime, the line between addressing social needs unmet by the
government and criticizing or challenging the state is likely to be as
blurry—and as dangerous to cross—as it is in China.
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13
FRAGMENTED GOVERNANCE AND ENFORCEMENT
Corporatist analyses assume that governments in authoritarian states are
able to act uniformly to ensure control over civil society. Yet it is important
to recognize that despite the persistence of single-party rule, there is no
single government in China today. Unlike the Maoist years, where national-level
politics and party concerns permeated down into virtually
every level of society, in today’s China the central government in Beijing
enjoys much less control over the provinces. Each level of government—
central, provincial, local (and there are various levels within “local”)—
has its own set of concerns. Sometimes these concerns match those of
other levels; sometimes they are in conflict.16
Differences between higher and lower levels of government exist in
terms of both policy and implementation. When the central government
proclaims policies that are more liberal than local officials are willing to
implement, some Chinese NGOs actively seek to make allies out of enlightened
higher-ups. As one NGO activist put it, in a somewhat public
forum, “People need to understand that the government is not one [single]
thing!”17
The leader of one grassroots environmental NGO in southwest
China exploits the power of the central government to his advantage as
much as possible. Having studied the displacement of people caused by
one of China’s major dam-building projects, he explains, “We issued a
report and sent it up to the central government. . . . They were very
concerned and got [the] provincial government to give another [US$9
million] for placement of displaced persons.” The process by which this
is done, however, is not by walking in “the front gate” of central government
offices but by enlisting the support of well-placed individuals at
Beijing-based NGOs. In his assessment, “environmental NGOs in Beijing
can’t do much, but because of their backgrounds they can talk to their
friends and classmates in the central government.” When he encounters
16
The literature on “fragmented authoritarianism” in China (Lieberthal and Oksenberg
1988; Lieberthal and Lampton 1992) is in part the inspiration for this concept of
fragmented governance, although that earlier literature focuses on cleavages in institutional
authority structures and bargaining between different government agencies
as a key feature of policy making. This fragmentation, however, does not imply a
weakening of the party’s political monopoly. Landry (2008) has shown that while fiscal
decentralization is comparatively high in China, it has not led to political liberalization
because party control over the appointment and promotion of officials constrains local
officials to upholding the broader goals of the central leadership.
17
The speaker was trying to make the point that NGOs should not be afraid of the
government but rather try to identify sympathetic officials who would act as allies in
their efforts to improve society. In Chinese, however, to say a person is “not a thing”
is an insult, so when this speaker said “the government is not a thing” (zhengfu bu shi
yige dongxi), the room of mostly NGO activists took it as a double entendre and
erupted in laughter.
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resistance at the provincial government level, “I contact them and explain
the situation, and they help me by telling their friends in the central
government, who in turn put pressure on the provincial government.” In
this way, he explains, “we have a division of labor. NGOs in Beijing can
do the advocacy, and we here in [the province] can do the actual work.
We use each other’s strengths.”
Yet the central government, or indeed any higher level of government,
is not always successful at asserting its authority locally. A labor NGO
leader explains that he has found allies within the official ACFTU but
that hierarchical divisions of authority within the administrative structure
limit their power: “Provincial and city-level unions are directly appointed
by the union authorities one level above them. Many people in these levels
want to do good work for laborers. They often have annual quotas, with
a goal of say establishing 100 new unions in a given year. But they can’t
tell the local-level union chiefs what to do.” While O’Brien (1996),
Straughn (2005), O’Brien and Li (2006), and others concerned with contention
under repressive regimes have mostly focused on particular instances
or acts by individuals, one would reasonably expect that more
formalized organizations could also use both legal and moral (legitimacy)
arguments to press their case with higher levels of government when
facing opposition at the local level. What the two examples above show
is that this is indeed done, although without a guarantee of efficacy. These
divisions along vertical lines are not unexpected. What Chinese NGO
experiences also point to, however, is that a key survival tactic is to identify
and exploit differences of opinion both between different levels of government
and within any given level.
Successful alliances are possible, but they are also contingent on each
side’s calculation of need, risk, and benefit. Unlike the environmentalist
and labor activists cited above, one HIV-AIDS group found that villagelevel
officials, because of their close ties to the community, can sometimes
be more helpful than county- or provincial-level officials who would rather
keep news of the problem from spreading to Beijing: “What many people
don’t realize is that at the lowest levels of government, where people are
actually doing real work, you can find officials who want to cooperate
[with NGOs]. They welcome us in, because they want to deal with some
of the problems they face, and they need our help. . . . But at the higher
levels they’re more eager to cover up problems and suppress the news,
not to let outsiders know what’s happening.” At any and all levels, grassroots
NGOs, registered or not, may be able to find individual government
officials who support them. Conversely, where others expect them to find
help, some may meet with resistance. What is clear, though, is that understanding
and support come from individuals within the government,
not “the government” more generally. Moreover, within the same level of
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government, there can be differences in support, although, again, these
are often only single individuals, not even a particular office within a
particular level of government.
One NGO leader from Shanghai posited that the complexity of government-NGO
relations may vary by region, while acknowledging that
even within the one city, there are differences: “I think NGOs in Shanghai
are in a better position all-around than NGOs in other places like Guangdong
and Beijing. Even grassroots NGOs like ours can find both more
money and more government support than in other places. Many people
in the government here are sympathetic to what we want to do. It’s not
ideal, though. Individuals in the government can be very supportive, but
the government policies themselves prevent them from taking action to
support us sometimes. The law just doesn’t allow much support yet.”
While some NGOs have discovered these distinctions and work them to
their advantage, because of the many other obstacles in NGO-government
relations, some purposely avoid government contact. One sympathetic
government official sees himself playing an educational role for the NGOs
he champions: “The one thing most NGOs don’t understand is that ‘the
government’ is not monolithic. There are many different branches to the
government, and people within government agencies that have different
agendas. NGOs often don’t understand the role of the party in the government,
either. So I try to help them see the government more clearly—
as a complicated thing, not as one simple thing.” One activist media
organization of elites met with mixed results when it tried to register as
an NGO. When they met with lower-level government officials from the
provincial MOCA office, the group’s leader told me, “They thought it
was a good idea and supported it. But when it got to the head of the
office, he stopped it. He said, ‘Oh? What’s this?’ He has to put his seal
on it, you know, but he wasn’t supportive.” It took them two years to
find an organization they could affiliate with, and even then “we were
able to register only because we had the support of a former [high-level
MOCA official]. He made a phone call to the current head, and that was
that. In China that’s the only way you can get anything done.”
For grassroots NGOs that are registered as businesses, the tax implications
of their registration status can be particularly worrisome. Since
they generally have no product and no revenue, per se, they also have
no money to pay government licensing fees or taxes normally levied on
businesses. The solution to this problem, for some such groups, is finding
a sympathetic ally in the taxation office: “There aren’t laws and regulations
for us to register as a nonprofit company, so we’re using the traditional
Chinese method of finding a person we know. . . . The tax rate
is 5.3%–9.1%. Everybody’s trying to find some way to avoid taxes. The
national and local tax offices are in the same building. Although in name
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they’re separate, the people are the same!” By using contacts they have,
or sometimes even by describing their work and pleading their case to a
receptive tax officer, some groups are able to have their tax forms stamped
“tax exempt,” even though in reality they are not registered as nonprofit
entities. As one NGO leader explains, whether an organization is properly
registered or not sometimes does not matter. “It’s not about policies, it’s
about relationships.”
Many Chinese people and other more casual observers are inclined to
attribute such success stories to China’s rich history of using interpersonal
connections (guanxi) for personal gain, on which there is an extensive
literature (e.g., Bian 1994; Yang 1994, 2002; Gold, Guthrie, and Wank
2002). Yet resorting to guanxi as the explanation for cooperative outcomes
is not sufficient. Indeed, perhaps what is most surprising is that new
relationships are being forged between NGO activists and government
officials who have no prior contact with or commitments to one another.
This often takes place in the context of mutual need, a key aspect of
contingent symbiosis.
An unregistered tongzhi (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people)
organization in Guangdong, for example, has done some educational
work on HIV-AIDS with two neighboring city governments. In “City A,”
they were invited by the city’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) to run
a training program for volunteers. “We also took this as an opportunity
to educate the media about tongzhi issues as well as HIV-AIDS.” I asked
how they got that opportunity. “They sought us out. The government’s
CDC in City A is under a lot of pressure to deal with HIV-AIDS issues,
but they need volunteers to help out. Yet they don’t know where to find
volunteers. So they invited us to help bring volunteers and train people.”
I asked whether the government in “City B” was willing to do something
similar with his organization:
Well, it really varies according to the individual in control of the office. Some
people are more serious about their work, some are more open-minded, some
are less afraid to reach out for help from others outside their office. Actually,
the CDC in City B has approached us about working together on an HIV
testing center for tongzhi. Because some people will feel more comfortable
going to get tested with people like themselves. . . . So we’re looking into
setting that up. . . . We might do it at the CDC itself, actually. They have
a space there that I think is pretty good.
This organization is not alone in its experience. Another recently established
organization focusing on sex worker health and welfare has also
met with great success. Despite moving into an area where the group’s
leaders and staff had no prior contacts, in just one year’s time they were
able to be up and running in cooperation with local health authorities.
Local doctors and even the main hospital administration have been reThis
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ceptive to the NGO’s “cold call” method. Once they understood the
group’s goals and its proposed activities, they offered a variety of support
to the fledgling organization.
Information Restrictions and Risk Assessment
The Chinese government’s restrictions on media also effect contingent
symbiosis between NGOs and the state. At one semipublic salon in 2006,
the leader of an unregistered group was reluctant to give some specific
details of his work to the assembled audience (numbering about 25 people).
The exchange below highlights his concern about exposure as well as the
reality of media restrictions. But as I will next illustrate, the absence of
media coverage can also work the advantage of grassroots NGOs.
NGO Leader: I don’t want to share that information with you here. I’m
not sure who all is in this audience. There may be government people
here, and I don’t want to say anything to get anyone in trouble.
A Local Reporter: I’m a reporter. I’m not here representing a government.
NGO Leader: I’d just rather not have this reported on.
NGO Staff Member in the Audience: Even if she wanted to report on this,
it would never see the light of day (ta zheige yao bao ye bao buliao)!
Audience: (Erupts in laughter.)
In the end, what was becoming an uncomfortable exchange played out
like an interactive comedy sketch, with the audience member delivering
the punch line. The laughter was entirely cathartic, but the need for that
release of tension made the problem of media and control seem even more
poignant. (After this salon officially ended, many people stayed around
and continued to discuss the problems of media and government control
of NGOs.)
The lack of media freedom in China is well documented and, as many
scholars have shown (e.g., Lee 2000), entails an evolving set of complex
dynamics. My observations, however, suggest that for a government interested
in restricting freedom of association, the lack of open information
channels can be a double-edged sword.18
With a ban on “illegal organizations”
issued by the central government’s media authorities in late 2005,
government agencies at all levels were further cut off from information
18
In the late 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party and government in Beijing also
suffered the negative effects of its media policy and the tight control over the social
system it instituted. During the Mao-inspired drive to industrialization known as the
Great Leap Forward, famine began to envelop great swaths of China, yet lower-level
officials, fearful of failure, continued to report bumper harvests to their higher-ups.
Had the reality of the situation been acknowledged sooner, the central government
may have been able to shift its policy focus back to agriculture and prevent the deaths
by starvation of approximately 30 million people.
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about grassroots groups. Many media outlets are quite eager to report on
social service activities of grassroots groups, even unregistered ones. In
separate informal conversations with me, journalists from national, provincial,
and local media outlets expressed a great interest in learning about
and reporting on the work of grassroots groups. But the apparent sensitivity
of such activities means that editors who want to keep their jobs
will most frequently “kill” all such stories.
Contrary to many popular understandings, however, I suggest that in
China today the very definition of “sensitive” activity is elusive and frequently
locale specific. In Guangdong’s NGO community, for example,
it is common to hear that labor issues are the most sensitive area of NGO
work. The reasoning is quite simple. There are tens of millions of migrant
workers concentrated in a string of factory areas located between Guangzhou
and Shenzhen, a distance of only about 70 miles (110 km). With so
many people in such densely packed environments, and with labor conditions
often truly intolerable, it is easy to imagine workers banding together
to make demands of the government. Such a force, it is said, could
challenge not only the government but also the Communist Party itself,
comprising a “true” labor party. Cast against this reality, many people
say, labor issues are the most sensitive (min’gan) of all possible NGO
fields.
However, in other areas of China, the most sensitive issue for NGOs
may be something else. For example, in the areas surrounding the Three
Gorges Dam and in villages located along many of China’s terribly polluted
rivers, activism based on environmental concerns has led to violent
clashes between local residents and business and government leaders. In
still other places, the issue may be something entirely different, like HIVAIDS
in Henan province’s AIDS villages, which have also seen government-organized
violence against NGOs doing social service delivery and
advocacy work on behalf of orphaned children and the dying elderly.
The absence of free information flows directly affects people’s perception
of what is considered risky and sensitive NGO activity. If one does
not know that the authorities or major employers in a neighboring city
or town have forcibly suppressed an organization and imprisoned its
leaders, one may not perceive a great risk in engaging in similar activities
in one’s own hometown. The violent suppression of villager activism in
Guangdong’s Taishi Village and Dongzhou Village in the autumn of 2005
was unknown to many NGO participants in other Guangdong cities when
I returned to continue my fieldwork in early 2006. Although I had seen
reports of both incidents in the U.S., Hong Kong, and UK press, the news
had been suppressed by Chinese authorities. When a U.S.-based funder
learned that many in the NGO community had not heard of these events
until I told them, her reaction was condescending—“Well, they must not
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be very hard-working NGOs.” But her comment more accurately revealed
her failure to see the actual context of NGO work in China. People are
not as connected as outsiders might imagine, in part because of media
restrictions, in part because of trust issues, and in part because of financial
and workload considerations that make it difficult for people to travel.
In short, the nature of political sensitivity and risk is not as clearly
defined as people with one geographic or issue-based perspective may
imagine. Rather, diversity of accommodation and conflict in governmentNGO
relations suggests that the potential for repression by authorities is
set by whether or to what degree local NGO activities clash with local
political and economic interests.
Media controls act as a double-edged sword for authoritarian regimes.
While they help prevent radical forces from “linking up,” they also keep
segments of the ruling elite ignorant of ground-level dynamics and realities.
Gross’s (1979) study of Poland under German occupation offers
an insight into the predicament of authoritarian regimes that is well suited
to China:
Authoritarian governments, particularly those that were introduced by a
totalitarian revolution, find themselves in a serious predicament. For they
are, figuratively speaking, cut off from their own societies. Insulated by powerful
bureaucracies that are interested primarily in self-perpetuation, they
know less and less about the true nature of the interests, aspirations, fears,
and preferences of the existing and newly forming social forces in the complex
modern societies over which they rule. . . . Consequently, with the passage
of time, the authorities have a completely distorted representation of reality,
and . . . they cannot do anything about it because accurate information
regarding important resources in such a society is simply not available. (Gross
1979, pp. 305–6)
In China, the lack of a free media means that the higher levels of government
must rely on nonmedia sources of information about grassroots
organizations. That is, they must rely on reports from local-level officials.
However, as was the case with the HIV-AIDS NGO leader quoted earlier,
oftentimes local-level officials are more concerned with protecting their
positions and advancement opportunities than telling their superiors about
problems occurring on their watch.
This feature of authoritarianism creates a peculiar sort of microlevel
“political opportunity” that allows grassroots groups to conduct their work
in relative security. As many NGO activists suggested, in almost identical
terms, “as long as you don’t get too big, you can do anything. But once
you get big [and attract attention], you’ll run into trouble.” In a regime
where politics is a process decidedly not open to newcomers, this conventional
wisdom—founded in lived experience, to be sure—serves as a
common constraint on large-scale action. Indeed, as the following section
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argues, the state’s tolerance for illegal NGOs is intimately linked to locallevel
politics.
Political Credit (Zhengji) and Giving Face to Government Officials
In the absence of democratic oversight mechanisms like regular elections,
government officials in authoritarian states are accountable only to their
superiors. Their personal and political fortunes are determined by how
“those above” judge their accomplishments and their failures. The dependency
of lower officials on their own superiors also contributes to a
symbiotic relationship with local NGOs. In today’s China, most government
officials are charged primarily with meeting economic growth rate
targets and ensuring “social stability.” It is here that they find some NGOs
useful to their own survival.
Especially at lower levels, there is a great need for government agencies
and individual officials to earn political credit (zhengji) in order to be
judged favorably by their superiors. For an individual, to work for the
public good without thought for political credit (or recognition) is considered
a high virtue. On the face of it, “political credit” is quite ambiguous
in its moral implications, but in common usage it frequently has negative
connotations. For many grassroots NGOs, successful relations with the
government depend on how or whether the particular government officials
or agencies concerned are able to claim political credit for any good works
the NGO performs in their jurisdiction. Conversely, officials are also concerned
about any negative news that NGOs might expose about government
performance failures.
One activist working in the HIV-AIDS field explains how political credit
functions as a core dynamic in his rocky relations with the local govern-
ment:
We have some allies in the government, especially in Beijing, who support
us. . . . But the government at the local level in [his province], they’re totally
different. Even if you find people there who support you, everyone has to
consider their political credit [zhengji]. And there’s no need to even mention
the bad ones. They’re all concerned about zhengji—they would much rather
suppress any and all news of the problems with AIDS orphans and education
than work with an NGO to resolve the problem. Because once they admit
the problem, if they handle it badly, they’ll lose political favor and maybe
lose their job. They all want to seek promotions, to take care of their own
self-interests and their family.
As an example of how local officials behave, the activist then explained
to a skeptical (and somewhat naive) student with whom we were talking,
“Like in [a southern Chinese province], the head of the provincial party
committee told hospital administrators in [a particular] county that if they
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21
reported one case of avian flu they would be fired. What does that mean?
It’s quite clear. If you report any cases—not if you have any cases, but
if you report any cases—you’ll lose your job. That’s how they try to protect
themselves, by suppressing information. Anything that will reflect badly
on them never gets out.” Political credit can, however, also act as an
incentive to governmental cooperation with NGOs. When another young
activist scholar was trying to convince a local government authority to
allow his group to run a program for the children of migrant workers,
he initially met with a great deal of resistance. After much cajoling and
assurances that the program would cost the local officials nothing, “the
deal clincher, the most important thing was that we said our goal was to
provide support for 400 people. . . . That gave them something to report
that they had accomplished” as a part of their zhengji.
The idea of political credit is closely akin to the idea of “face” (mianzi),
which is perhaps more familiar to many outside China than zhengji. One
might understand zhengji as “political face.” For example, when one registered
NGO attempted to run a training program, an activity deemed
“outside your area of operations” by provincial MOCA officials, the
NGO’s head was threatened with sanctions. However, when the NGO
submitted to the government’s demands and cancelled the training, explained
the NGO leader, “they got a lot of face from us and totally changed
their tune. Now it became ‘Oh, the next time you want to do a training
like this, just let us know ahead of time [gen women shuo yisheng]. There
will be no problem! This is good work you’re doing, after all!’ They were
thrilled.”
The case of one education NGO is also instructive in this regard. This
volunteer-based group organizes trips during university holidays and summer
to poor villages in rural parts of the province. Camping in the village
for three or four weeks at a time, among other activities, they offer special
education programs for children in art or music, as well as help rural
teachers update their own teaching skills and knowledge. Involving large
numbers of youth, the group has been both welcomed and rejected by
local village officials. Where they are welcomed, one of the leaders explained
to me, local government officials have seen them as useful. On
these officials’ annual reports to their superiors, they can write, “I mobilized
30 volunteers from XYZ University to come to my village and
improve the quality of our education,” taking credit for the good deeds
of the NGO. In the villages where they are denied entry, however, a local
official may be worried that such “outsiders” will only bring attention to
the fact that education in his village is being handled poorly or that
portions of his annual budget seem to have disappeared.
Theoretically, corporatism should institutionalize and routinize the generation
of political face/credit. For grassroots groups, however, political
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face arrangements are always tenuous, contingent on a continuing perception
of mutual benefit. In the example cited just above, for any future
training programs, by knowing about them in advance, the MOCA officials
could count them in their reports to “those above” (shangmian) as
part of “their” effort to nurture local NGOs, thereby bringing more political
credit to themselves.19
In short, to minimize conflict with government
agents, many experienced NGO leaders have learned they must
manage the dynamics of political face. The better they are at giving
political face to government officials, the better their chances for survival.
“Lawlessness” Can Mean Opportunity
By law, all NGOs must register with MOCA and accept “supervision”
by a government agency related to its field of work (e.g., an education
NGO should be supervised by some office of the Ministry of Education).
But, as shown above, the Chinese government has not succeeded in incorporating
all grassroots energies into properly registered NGOs. Some
NGOs thrive even though they are completely unregistered or registered
as businesses, all the while presenting themselves as NGOs to the broader
community and operating, for all intents and purposes, as legitimate nonprofit
organizations. How do organizations like these and others operating
on the edge of the law manage to survive and even grow in a political
context that, by most outside accounts, would seem to preclude their very
existence?
To be sure, government repression of NGOs does occur. In the leadup
to the Beijing Olympics, organizations of all stripes came under the
gun and were either shut down or warned to cease or curtail their activities.
Two publications, the Beijing-based China Development Brief and
the Guangzhou-based Minjian, were forced to close in late summer 2007.
Also in 2007, an AIDS group working with children in Henan’s AIDS
villages was told it must cease operations. According to many sources,
the repression of these and other NGO activities was conducted at the
behest of central government authorities in Beijing. Foreign media like
the New York Times or the Guardian regularly report on NGOs and
activists who have been shut down or convicted of “revealing state secrets”
or “subversion” by a frequently opaque Chinese legal system.
While repression is a fact of life, people unaware of the NGO-govern-
19
The irony of it all was not lost on the NGO leader, who related the story with more
than a little bitterness in his voice. “Through the whole thing I was thinking, ‘the
work we do—this stuff—this is what you’re supposed to be doing! But since you aren’t
doing it, we have to do it.’ And then they have to go and make it as difficult as possible
for us to work.”
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ment dynamic in China sometimes fail to appreciate the opportunity
China’s relative lawlessness creates for socially progressive activities. For
scholars and observers in the United States, there is a great deal of concern
about improving “the rule of law” in China (China Rights Forum 2003).
At Yale University, for example, since 1999 the China Law Center has
supported exchanges of legal scholars and a wide variety of programs and
initiatives aimed at changing China’s legal system. Newspaper reports
and scholarly accounts of contemporary China point to a weak rule of
law as a hindrance to social justice and a range of social ills, even economic
growth. Of course, better rule of law—depending on how the law is
structured—could expand space for all NGOs to operate. And, in some
fields, stronger legal structures would help address some of the issues
NGOs currently work on. On paper, for example, China’s labor law offers
great protection against some common forms of abuse and exploitation.
Likewise, environmental protection rules, if enforced, could help curb
pollution.
For grassroots NGOs, however, the relatively lax enforcement of law
actually helps keep them running. As one activist explains, even at her
properly registered organization they push the limit where possible: “In
China, if the government doesn’t say ‘no,’ you can experiment and understand
their failure to say ‘no’ to mean ‘yes,’ or you can say ‘I thought
since you didn’t say no, I could do this.’ That’s the way things work
here. So we do take some risks here in our work.”
The leader of a labor group in Shenzhen echoes that view, explaining
that they have taken advantage of the situation to conduct their work:
The way our legal system is set up, as long as the government law doesn’t
prohibit it, we can do it. . . . The government isn’t involved at all in what
we do, and the government doesn’t interfere with anything we do. . . . We
don’t work with the ACFTU on anything. They don’t interfere with us,
either. Why should they? We’re not organizing workers into unions. The law
only allows one union, as you know. But you can bring workers together in
other ways to accomplish similar functions to a union. You just can’t call it
a union, because that would be illegal.
Enforcement requires both will and capacity. According to one Chinese
scholar of NGOs, “at the provincial level, some MOCA staff are tiny—
ten or less, or 20 or less.” The head of one registered NGO was emphatic
about her provincial MOCA office’s inability to manage the supervision
workload:
The MOCA at the provincial level has one deputy head who’s responsible
for NGOs. But this doesn’t mean anything. How can one person take care
of these things? Ha! So I guess this is why the government and the China
Charity Federation want us to self-regulate. They can’t do it. . . . There are
only three people in the provincial government’s MOCA office responsible
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for registering NGOs—one for social organizations, one for foundations, and
one for private non-commercial enterprises. It would only seem reasonable
that if they’re responsible for registering organizations, they should visit those
organizations. But with over 9,000 organizations registered at that level, how
could they ever do that?
As with virtually all the registered grassroots NGOs I spoke with, this
group had very little contact with its designated supervisory agency: “Once
a year I give them a report on what we’ve done, and that’s it! They don’t
bother us at all. We never see them. . . . We have another government
relationship—the director of [a government office] is our honorary legal
representative, but if I seem him more than once a year it’s a rare thing.
The [supervisory agency] head never sends anyone to our activities or
events, and he never comes around, either.” To be sure, the lack of enforcement
is visible in many fields and at many levels. One grassroots
NGO registered at the provincial level, for example, is restricted by the
official regulations to working in that particular province only. Yet in
actuality it has established offices in two other provinces where it carries
on regular work. “We haven’t been able to register [in the other two
provinces] yet,” explains the NGO’s leader. “Of course, what we’re doing,
by going out of the province, is illegal. The governments there won’t let
us register—no one is willing to be our supervisory agency. But they don’t
oppose our working there, either. They actually need us, and we’ve cooperated
with them on several public activities before.”
A broader indication of lax enforcement is found in the requirement
that all registered NGOs with three or more Communist Party members
on staff must form a party cell within the organization. Nationally, in
2007, about one-fourth (26%) of all NGOs were required to establish
internal party cells. However, in practice not even half of those (44%)
were in actual compliance with this requirement. NGOs registered directly
under MOCA—those with national-level operations—faced the highest
requirement for party control; 96% of them were expected to establish
party offices. Yet even at this level, there was some noncompliance; only
81% of those had in fact established such offices by the end of 2007
(Ministry of Civil Affairs 2008). One high-ranking MOCA official acknowledged
this as a problem, saying, “Well, they really should establish
party cells so that their staff can know what the party’s latest directives
are. But sometimes there’s no one there to make sure it actually happens.
It’s an enforcement problem.”
Even at the highest levels, oversight and “management” of NGOs is
hampered by a lack of capacity. The central government’s NGO Management
Office is charged with overseeing the 1,800 NGOs registered
directly under the MOCA. Each of these 1,800 is authorized to operate
across the entire country, but with a staff of fewer than 50 people, the
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government has difficulty overseeing them. Complicating their task, as
one official explained, is that “all those organizations have branches and
sub-branches around the country. We totaled it up and it came to between
9,000 and 10,000 organizations. How can we manage [guan] all those?
We don’t have enough people on our staff to do it.” Moreover, because
the NGO Management Office is not organized in a vertical chain of
authority, provincial and lower-level offices report not to the ministry in
Beijing but rather to the MOCA office at their own administrative level,
which, in turn, often fails to “report up” information to Beijing. The result
of such a system is that there is no centralized clearinghouse of information
about even registered organizations, much less commercially registered
or unregistered NGOs.
Aside from the well-funded Ministry of State Security, perhaps no other
organization in China has very detailed knowledge on either GONGOs
or grassroots NGOs. MOCA officials are subject to the same political
pressures and constraints as officials in other branches. Policy makers and
policy implementers at the highest level are generally unaware of the
ground-level realities experienced by NGOs. In late 2008, for example,
one lawmaker indicated a total lack of knowledge about China’s first
officially registered environmental NGO, Friends of Nature (FON). FON
was founded by a prominent intellectual, is based in Beijing, has been
registered since the early 1990s, and has won recognition both domestically
and internationally for its contributions to environmental protection issues.
Yet this official had never heard of the group, even though he represents
the agency responsible for NGO regulations and laws.
Another official responsible for implementation, in a more candid moment,
emphatically acknowledged that she had little to no knowledge of
grassroots groups. “Do you mean those NGOs that weren’t created by
the government, that don’t get any government money or support, those
self-started NGOs?” I was asked. “Yes, those are what I mean by grassroots
groups,” I replied. “You know, that research you’re doing is extremely
important. Chinese scholars don’t look into those much, I think.
They always just tell us about these big GONGOs, and they always tell
us how great they are. But I’m skeptical, and I don’t find that research
very useful for policy purposes. There are lots of grassroots groups, I
think. Isn’t it funny that we’re responsible for making and implementing
policy for NGOs, but even we don’t know much about them?”
In sum, inaction on the part of government agencies is matched by
action on the part of grassroots groups. To borrow from social movement
theory, this situation constitutes a kind of political opportunity that is
sometimes skillfully exploited to the benefit of NGOs. One could, however,
argue that rather than conceive of this as political openness—which Chinese
leaders, on the whole, are still unready to offer—it is simply a vacuum
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of engagement and enforcement created by a lack of resources and awareness,
not by active intent. Nonetheless, many NGOs—whether registered
or not—are able to operate far beyond what the letter of the law allows,
by taking advantage of the often lax enforcement of NGO regulations.
Although Yu (2007) seems to view GONGOs as the main instantiation
of China’s emergent civil society, his observation that “the space the system
permits [for NGOs] is far smaller than the actual space that exists”
(p. 21) is perhaps most relevant for China’s grassroots organizations. As
one government official summed it up for me, “Don’t look at whether the
government supports NGOs publicly, look at whether it opposes them.”
MUTUAL SUSPICION, MUTUAL NEED
As the above quote suggests, support and opposition are two sides of the
same coin. The contingent symbiosis that characterizes grassroots groups’
relations with government is built on a shifting sand of mutual need and
mutual suspicion. In this section, I first highlight the ways in which mutual
suspicion permeates the NGO-state relationship, even for registered
NGOs. I then turn attention to how the state’s retrenchment from welfare
provision creates space for grassroots NGOs and bolsters the social legitimacy
of their work.
Mistrust and Avoidance
In contrast to the findings of political scientists who have suggested that
political trust in China, at least toward the central government, is quite
high (Bernstein and Lu¨ 2000; Shi 2001; Li 2004), my data point to a
distinctive lack of social trust in China, not only toward government
agents and agencies but also among citizens.20
This mistrust can severely
hinder cooperation between NGOs and government agents and lead to
mutual avoidance. One NGO leader made the case for this most clearly:
The biggest problem is the lack of trust. It has been destroyed in China. We
used to have it, with farmers’ cooperatives in rural areas and other things
in cities. You know, Chinese people talk about hospitality, and taking care
of their bigger families, and things like that. Our history is not devoid of
social trust. . . . But ever since 1949, from ’49 to ’89, you know . . . over
and over again, the turmoil people faced, the government turning people
against each other, and the government forcing people to turn against the
government, everyone attacking each other and struggling against each other.
That’s what’s led to this situation today where the government doesn’t trust
20
For an excellent discussion of issues of response bias in surveys on trust in China,
as well as for insights into the linguistic and cultural difficulties of cross-national
quantitative studies of trust, see Dalen (2005).
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the people, the people don’t trust each other, and the people don’t trust the
government, either.
My field notes are replete with examples of people describing their suspicions
and mistrust of others, in matters both small and large.
Although it is beyond the scope of this study to conduct an in-depth
exploration of these problems, I hypothesize that social trust is a particular
problem for those generations who participated in or came of age during
the multiple political campaigns that swept the nation between 1950 and
1976.21
While China’s economic reforms have created new concerns about
social stability, the younger generations have lived largely free of the sorts
of mass political mobilizations that engulfed most of China in their parents’
and grandparents’ youth. As a result, younger NGO participants
may be more successful at making change in the long run than those 10–
20 years their senior.
For NGOs, then, especially those composed of people born before the
1980s, this generalized lack of social trust has direct implications for their
willingness to even approach government officials and their ability to win
support for their work. Its most frequent expression is found in the fear
that NGOs—registered and unregistered—often have of any interaction
with government agencies. Fear of “what they might do to you, no matter
what the law says, or what they should do” to support a socially legitimate
NGO is the underlying concern preventing many NGOs from reaching
out to government. At the same time, the lack of trust and openness
functions as a mechanism for plausible deniability for officials, who can
claim no knowledge of a “problem” organization in their jurisdiction.
After one registered NGO ran afoul of MOCA officials unhappy with
an event the NGO had planned, I spoke to the group’s middle-aged leader
to ask if he had encountered this type of problem with the government
before. The short answer was no, but the long answer was much more
revealing:
I’ve always tried to avoid the government altogether. Maybe this is my
problem. But I think that the less you involve the government the better. If
you don’t tell them about something you’re doing, and as long as in the
process of doing it you don’t create any trouble, you’ll be fine. They don’t
care. But the moment you tell them about something, they feel they have to
21
These particular experiences reflect a general belief that trust bonds were decimated
by political turmoil in the latter half of the 20th century. As Madsen (2000) has so
succinctly described it, “During the Maoist era . . . successive political campaigns
targeted an ever-wider array of victims. The bureaucratic apparatus expanded and
ramified. Megalomaniacal mismanagement led to the Great Leap Forward, which led
to a massive famine. Infighting at the top led to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
By the end of the Maoist era, much of the Chinese population had experienced new
forms of starvation and anarchic violence” (p. 313).
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approve it. And then they’ll usually want to reject it. If they approve it, they
have to take responsibility for whatever happens with that activity. But if
they don’t approve it, they can be seen as actively doing their job. So my
approach has always been to simply not tell them. That way, I can do what
I want to do, and they don’t have to absorb any risk. If something goes
wrong with it [the clear implication here is politically wrong, not operationally
wrong], they can say they didn’t know about it and that therefore you were
engaging in illegal activity. Then they can shut you down. But by operating
in this way, I’m the one bearing all the risk. I’m willing to do this, though,
I guess because I’m sort of a risk-taker. Besides, if I don’t take risks, nothing
will get done.
Not seeking out government officials and not bringing attention to oneself
are strategies consistently preferred by many grassroots NGOs. “It’s not
because I don’t want their support, but because I don’t know what they’ll
do [to me],” explains another NGO leader. With the media, as well, many
NGOs are extremely reserved because of fear of the government’s reaction.
Before opening a public exhibition about his NGO’s work, another
middle-aged NGO head explained it this way:
I recently had a reporter repeatedly pressing me for an interview and I kept
telling him “No.” At one point he said, “But you don’t understand me, what
I’m doing.” And I replied, “I don’t want to understand you. I haven’t even
held one [event] yet, and if I talk to you now, if you report on me, I may get
closed down before we can even open.” I don’t want to take that kind of
risk. . . . I would rather the media not report at all, and just have people
walk by and find out about it, than have reports done that just bring trouble.
This fear of government suppression is substantiated by actual incidents
in which NGOs are shut down or “asked to move” to another location.
Conversely, government officials, even those who “in their hearts may be
supportive,” are still sometimes afraid of NGOs, worried that an NGO
could cause a social disturbance or incite violence in their jurisdiction.
One supportive government official explains the suspicion from the government’s
perspective as follows: “Not enough government officials know
anything about civil society. Some of them are very afraid of it, wondering
what it is and what political motives people have. . . . But I think that
the government needs to understand that civil society in China today is
not political. These NGOs, the grassroots NGOs who are mostly registered
as businesses, they’re outside of the civil affairs system, but they’re not
looking to do anything political. They’re trying to help alleviate poverty
or provide educational assistance or help people with diseases. . . . This
is something the government needs to understand.” Ironically, the occasion
of my conversation with this official also offered a lesson in trust and
suspicion. While we were talking in the coffee shop where we had met,
a young man sitting very close to us, but with his back to us, turned
around a few times and glanced back at us both. A couple of hours into
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our conversation, the official said to me in English, “Just a moment,
please.” He then took out a business card, flipped it over, and wrote in
Chinese “This person may be listening in and monitoring our conversation.”
I read it, and said, “I know.” His next question for me (in Chinese)
was, “Who do you expect to be meeting with during the rest of your time
here?” Noting the aforementioned concern to myself, I replied, “Oh, really
no one, just the folks at the university. I don’t have anything special to
do on this trip, but I would probably like to see some other old friends.”
Vagueness and generalities are always safest, it seems. By asking me
whom else I intended to meet, he was doing his official duty of helping
to “monitor” the foreigner asking about politically sensitive issues. And
by replying in vague terms, I was offering him plausible deniability and
assuring him (and our presumed listener-spy) that I had no ill intentions
and was acting completely aboveboard. It was a dance I had performed
multiple times already, and I felt it was quite well executed that day,
whether or not there was really an audience.22
Government Management (Guanli) of Properly Registered NGOs
Government fears of unofficial NGOs—and even registered NGOs—doing
something “bad” create a subtle, sometimes overwhelming, constraint
on NGO action. For the few grassroots groups who do manage to obtain
proper NGO registration, they often play a sort of cat-and-mouse game
to avoid being “managed” by their supervisory agencies. Due to the many
restrictions placed on registered groups, ones that started out as a bottomup
effort to meet pressing needs often find themselves bumping up against
official constraints if they do manage to register with a supervisory agency.
More than a few of these groups insist on doing things their way to meet
the needs of the population they are serving, even if that means going
beyond their approved field of work or geographic location.
But with official recognition can come greater scrutiny, and thus begins
NGOs’ efforts to avoid being managed. The Chinese term guanli is generally
translated as “manage” (as in, the managing of a business). Yet, as
one European corporate social responsibility (CSR) consultant noted at a
gathering about labor issues, when she visits factories in China to talk
about improving labor conditions, “it seems that when I say ‘manage,’
the factory owners and managers hear ‘rule over the workers and make
22
When we finished our conversation, the official left and I stayed on to type up some
notes. From what I observed later of the man behind us, he was simply a university
student borrowing the space to catch up on homework while waiting for his girlfriend,
a waitress, to finish her morning shift. Perhaps it was unnecessary to end our conversation
the way we had, but who knows?
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them do what we want.’ I think we have a very different definition of
management.”
Factory bosses’ definition of the word guanli (to manage) holds true
for NGO-government relations, as well. The first character of the term,
guan, is used as a verb in a variety of ways both alone and combined
with other characters to mean to control, to take care of (children, housework,
etc.), to administer, or to discipline. In short, it is a word with broad
applications. The second character, li, has the connotation of “to put things
in order” and presupposes a “correct” order or arrangement.
On the face of it, guanli need not be normative in intent. But in common
usage, as the CSR consultant quoted above discovered, the word and its
main verb, guan, imply strong, hierarchically structured power dynamics.
In official government rhetoric, guan is used in discussions of the government’s
“need” to “add and strengthen management” (jiaqiang guanli)
over and of NGOs. “Supervisory,” in the official term for “supervisory
agency” (zhuguan danwei), features the word guan, and the office within
MOCA that is responsible for administering NGOs is a “management”
office (guanliju).
In short, in the formal language of government, the verb guan is ubiquitous
and bureaucratically rational. But in the everyday language of
society, “to guan” is to put your nose in matters that are not your concern
or to attempt to exert power and control over others. When asked about
government supervision, the head of one registered education-related
NGO became downright indignant:
How can they guan us! These are things they should be providing themselves,
as the government. If they haven’t provided these things themselves, how is
possible for them to supervise us? On what basis could they judge our performance?
. . . Of course, if I lose a kid on the street or something awful,
that’s an obvious problem. But if we’re just going on with our work, on a
daily basis, and nothing extreme happens, how can they say whether we’re
doing a good job or not? Humph! . . . The government is used to being allpowerful.
So even when they don’t know what they’re doing, some officials
will still try to guan you. It’s a habit they can’t break!
While challenging the legitimacy of government’s impositions is one
way NGOs may respond to top-down efforts to manage them, communicating
one’s needs and circumstances to government officials is another.
One registered NGO leader explained that his experience with the NGO
Management Office was far from positive and that he wished the officials
there would “come out of their offices” to learn more about what NGOs
actually do.
It’s not that we’ve never wanted to talk to the government, but simply that
we’ve never before had a way in. The conference [held recently] was a big
help. . . . But other than [one government official], the only other government
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person who attended was a [a lower-level official]. And he just came to make
an appearance—he gave a talk and then left right afterwards. He didn’t hear
any of the voices he needed to for it to make a real difference for NGOs.
. . . The people I wish would have attended are those people at the NGO
Management Office. They’re the ones who could make a difference for us.
But, at this point in time, trying to talk with them as equals is impossible.
They talk to us [NGOs] like “You can’t do this. . . . You need to do this.
. . . I’m warning you, be careful. . . .”—like they’re up here [he holds his
right hand up high in the air] and you’re down here [moving his hand lower],
like you’re beneath them. It’s that attitude that makes it impossible for us
to have any real dialogue with them.
Even one sympathetic government official admitted: “People in the
government are of the mentality that they’re providing a service, not
delivering what people have a right to obtain. At the extreme, this mentality
shows itself in the expression ‘I’m an official. You’re a plebeian.
I’m bigger than you!’ [wo shi guan, ni shi min. wo bi ni da]. This problem
is visible in virtually every government office.” One former government
official turned NGO activist insisted that by improving communications
with government officials, NGOs could lessen the risk of being controlled
(guan-ed) by them.
Some NGOS that are in a rush to “get things done” act without first thinking
about how to handle the government. That can be bad for their organization.
Once you start doing something on a large scale and get the government’s
attention, you risk having your organization “managed” [guan] tightly by the
government or even completely shut down. Sometimes lots of people are
doing things in small ways first, then the government notices it and asks,
“Hey, what’s this all about? What are you doing?” If you let the government
know—for example, by bringing them in to participate in conferences like
this, where you tell them about what you’re doing and how you’re doing
it—your organization has a better chance of survival.
At a small gathering of academics, activists, and government officials,
one scholar-activist worried that under the current system, the government
risks “managing” NGOs “to death” (guansi ta le). Another injected some
humor into a very serious discussion by summing up the situation this
way: “I think there’s a fundamental problem [in the government’s approach
to NGOs]. Although our government agencies all have a sign
hanging up that says, ‘Serving the People’ [wei renmin fuwu], in reality
it’s more like the government is ‘Managing the People’ [wei renmin
guanli].” Indeed, in an authoritarian state, pervasive restrictions on freedom
easily give the lie to beneficent government slogans.
The Social Legitimacy of Grassroots NGOs
While the mutual suspicions described above highlight the many contingencies
inherent to the NGO-government relationship, a focus on the
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legitimacy of NGO work reveals the symbiotic nature of these ties. The
onslaught of social changes brought about by China’s economic reforms
has been well documented. Whether in labor, health care, education, the
environment, or many other fields, Chinese society underwent many dramatic
changes in the last two decades of the 20th century and into the
2000s. Not only particular goods but whole areas of life once managed
exclusively by the government have been subjected to privatization and
market forces (see, e.g., Davis 2000). With these changes, new problems
have arisen, some of which the government is either unwilling to address
or incapable of resolving effectively. It is precisely these problems that
grassroots NGOs strive to address, problems that emerge off the official
media’s radar screen or in the gaps between government rhetoric and
people’s lived realities.23
Indeed, at all levels of society and in all walks of life, many Chinese
people are aware and concerned about these new social problems. So
while the technical legality of a commercially registered or unregistered
grassroots organization may be questioned, the social legitimacy of NGO
services goes virtually unchallenged. Reasonable people at all levels see
the need for action and sympathize with the causes championed by grassroots
groups. The lack of government approval and official sponsorship,
although a reality about which many potential supporters are aware, is
not necessarily a reason to withhold support from such groups. As one
liberal-minded member of China’s newly rich class put it, “They may not
be legal [hefa], but they’re entirely legitimate [heli]!”24
At a commercially registered international NGO focused on CSR in
labor practices, the leadership walks a fine line but believes its function
is complementary to the government’s policies and China’s social needs:
We’re not giving out legal advice or anything. And we’re not inciting any
workers to riot. Of course, if we went to a factory to do a training, then the
next day that factory’s workers went out on the street protesting for something
23
Democratic countries have, in recent decades, undergone a not too dissimilar restructuring
of the state-society relationship but with differing impacts for NGOs. Ullman
(1998) found that in France, “decentralization . . . brought the crisis of state
capacity to local government. Newly burdened with responsibility for difficult social
problems, these local governments often delegated their new tasks to nonprofit organizations”
(p. 100). In a democratic state like France, such a delegation is politically
possible (even though perhaps difficult). For an authoritarian state, however, widespread
delegation to nongovernmental, non-party-controlled groups is a politically
unacceptable solution to the problem of social service delivery. For this simple reason,
if none other, experienced NGO participants often see keeping a low profile and not
making political demands as crucial to their continued survival.
24
I have considered carefully how to best translate the term heli into English. Typically,
it is translated as “reasonable,” but because of the way it is used in reference to the
larger social context of NGO work, I believe “legitimate” is more appropriate.
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or another, the government might come looking for us. But that’s very unlikely.
All we do is focus on communication-building. We give factory management
and workers a new way to talk to one another. Typically if a worker
has a complaint or a suggestion they write a letter or fill out a “comments”
card. Or managers simply say, “Just come talk to me if you have anything
to say.” But this is very ineffective for really passing along problems and
ideas. What we offer them is another option for transmitting different views.
Whether in health, labor, education, or another field, the legitimacy of
grassroots work can be leveraged by both the government and NGOs
themselves in a way that allows them both to achieve related goals. Some
environmental NGOs, for example, are allowed to exist, even when technically
illegal, because they help bolster the case of a local Environmental
Protection Bureau (EPB). As one government official explains, “The EPB
needs NGOs to voice their concerns. Without them, when the EPB tries
to tell other government officials or units to take some action to protect
the environment, the response is always ‘But is there really a need for
that?’ So the EPB wants NGOs to speak loudly, because then it can say
‘Well, of course. See, society is demanding it.’ It’s more persuasive when
NGOs give voice to these problems, because many government agencies
are extremely concerned about meeting demands voiced by society. If they
don’t respond to these needs, things might get out of control.” The government,
again, has multiple layers, divisions, and personalities. One labor
NGO focusing on workplace injuries has met with both resistance and
support from local government but no denial of the fundamental need
for their work: “One time a factory owner who didn’t like what we were
doing complained to the local government. Then the local health department
officials came to us and said we’d have to leave the area, but
they offered to help us find another location close by. It’s to their advantage,
too, because if we can help lower the incidence of work injuries,
local factories can keep more workers and the health department has
fewer headaches. And we can help educate workers about what to do if
they run into health problems, which helps the local offices, too.”
The political scientist Mary Gallagher (2004) explains well why the
state is unwilling to formally recognize the sorts of groups I describe here.
As she notes, “Corporatist incorporation [would entail] the legitimation
of these groups and at least some degree of recognition that their interests
are justified and should be represented in policy debates. Such legitimation,
however, remains anathema to the Chinese party-state” (p. 436).
Yet while this assessment of the political threat is within all reason, it is
difficult for individuals within the party-state to deny the social legitimacy
of these groups. In offering to help “find another location close by,” local
officials such as those described above are recognizing the contributions
of grassroots NGOs, although, as Gallagher correctly points out, they may
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34
not be able (or willing) to grant such organizations formal recognition. In
short, it is partially with these individual officials’ support, or through
their willingness to turn a blind eye to unauthorized activities, that grassroots
groups are able to survive and even grow.
In addition to NGOs’ ability to find allies within various government
agencies who acknowledge the legitimacy of their work, it is also to the
benefit of grassroots NGOs that many express no antistate, antiparty
political agenda. This was the case with the groups I found in Guangdong.
As patriotic progressives pushing to realize the egalitarian goals of the
Chinese communist revolution, they present no explicit political threat to
the established order. And unlike the Falungong, which was suppressed
after being labeled an “evil cult” by the central government in 1999,
grassroots NGOs in Guangdong displayed no ability or inclination to
mobilize large numbers of people, nor were they linking up in any regular
way. Moreover, some key staff and volunteers are themselves Communist
Party members.
“I’m actually not an anti-party person,” emphasized one non-partymember
NGO leader in his mid-20s. He, like many others, can be very
critical of the government and find fault with the party on many levels,
but such criticism is often predicated on a belief that the current system
cannot be changed radically to any good end. The fear of “chaos” often
cited by Chinese leaders and scholars seems to be shared as well by
participants in China’s nascent civil society.
One recent university graduate who led an NGO as a student chose to
take a job at a government agency. He wants to work within the system
to promote a progressive social agenda and the stable development of
NGO-government relations: “I try to tell people in NGOs to be calm and
not too extreme. The kinds of protests and actions taken by NGOs overseas
simply won’t work in China. Because extreme groups who call people
onto the streets or whatever will just be shut down by the government.
But the government needs NGOs, so as long as an NGO doesn’t incite
people to illegal protests, the government won’t oppose it.” The image of
patriotic progressives is actively cultivated by some NGOs. The leader
of an education-related NGO in Beijing emphasized in a discussion of
his work that “I prefer the NPO [nonprofit organization] term, because
when you say ‘NGO’ people of think of ‘anti-government,’ but NPO
presents it in terms of ‘compared to for-profit organizations.’” In Shanghai,
the leader of a registered grassroots NGO voiced a similar concern: “In
China, if you use ‘NGO,’ people think ‘anti-government organization,’
so we say ‘public welfare organization’ [gongyi zuzhi] instead. Even within
our circle, we also introduce ourselves as a public welfare organization.”
This type of framing, or self-presentation, is not uncommon with Chinese
NGOs. Keech-Marx (2008) found in her study of three women’s
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Contingent Symbiosis
35
organizations in Beijing that “by representing their activities as complementing
existing government services, popular women’s organizations
portray themselves as a useful component of Chinese society, rather than
as a threat to the Chinese state” (p. 193). Although the groups she studied
had much closer personal and official ties to the state, for grassroots
groups, too, using the rhetoric of the state fits well with their own selfimage.
On the whole, virtually all of the people I talked with who were
engaged in NGO work, however critical they may be of government
inadequacies, corruption, or other problems, remained uninterested in
political action that would destabilize the regime. “We just want to do
some things, not oppose the government,” emphasized one of my closest
NGO contacts. “I’m not fundamentally opposed to the party,” says another,
“I just think the government needs to improve things in some crucial
ways.” Indeed, in meetings with government officials, in private, and in
public forums, a common refrain of NGO activists is that “we hope the
government is clear that we’re not doing anything bad, we’re just trying
to help people in need.” In more candid moments, many present themselves
as critical thinkers, patriotic progressives who dare to pursue the
promises of socialism that the government has seemingly abandoned in
the name of economic reform.
CONCLUSION
Tocqueville-inspired work on the connections between associations and
democracy suggest, on the whole, that civil society organizations play key
roles in supporting democratization processes and in maintaining democratic
regimes. In line with recent analyses of other authoritarian states,
the evidence presented in this article acts as a corrective to these views,
cautioning that we should not assume that NGOs in an authoritarian
state, even independent grassroots organizations, are working toward
democratic purposes. While NGOs’ individual or collective impact may
certainly lead to democratic pressures, this is far from guaranteed.
Other scholars have described how authoritarian states may pursue a
corporatist strategy in hopes of fending off democratic demands and ensuring
tight control over newly emergent social issues and interest groups.
While this may reflect the relationship between government and official
NGOs—GONGOs, to be more accurate—corporatism cannot be suitably
applied to understand the existence and survival of ostensibly illegal grassroots
organizations.
As my data show, in an authoritarian state where independent organizations
are a potential threat to official power holders, grassroots groups
can survive, but they exist only under a constant threat of suppression.
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36
Within such a precarious existence, these groups are far too weak to be
the natural agents of democratization that casual observers might presume
them to be. Indeed, grassroots NGOs survive only insofar as they limit
any democratic claims making and help promote the social welfare goals
of the state. Broader contextual factors such as the weak rule of law, the
social legitimacy of NGO goals, the lack of media reporting on NGO
activity, and a general fragmentation of governance and enforcement allow
NGOs to operate and relationships to develop between NGOs and
particular government officials. Despite widespread mistrust between government
and “illegal” organizations and a tendency to mutual avoidance,
local government officials are willing to turn a blind eye to ostensibly
illegal organizations as long as those organizations’ good works can be
appropriated by officials and contribute positively to their annual performance
reports. The symbiosis that characterizes these relationships,
however, remains contingent on the political calculations of government
officials. Suppression always remains an option (and an official obligation)
for officials who deem it prudent. Keeping this in mind highlights the
fragility, and the unequal power balance, inherent in the NGO-government
relationship. In sum, the contingent symbiosis that characterizes
relations between grassroots NGOs and the authoritarian state suggests
that NGO development in such environments takes on a self-limiting
character. Unless there is a fundamental shift in broader political arrangements,
the threat and reality of repression will remain a key constraint
on the development of grassroots associations.
Further empirical research is essential to deepen our understanding of
the phenomenon of contingent symbiosis. Yet there are tremendous difficulties
to studying associations in any authoritarian regime, and there
are many additional questions that I am unable to answer with my current
data. Is there a particular combination of strategies, for example, that
might account for the long-term survival of particular NGOs or success
in particular realms of activity? Given the fragmentation of governance,
are there particular institutional circumstances in some cities or provinces
that permit greater or less NGO freedom than in others? Do small communities
promote NGO growth because of the (presumably) stronger levels
of social trust in those communities? Are GONGOs less or more successful
than grassroots groups at negotiating with the state for autonomy?
Future research that takes any of these issues and compares strategies
and outcomes across a sample of organizations would provide a wealth
of insight relevant to not only the civil society debates but social movements
and other literatures concerned with state-society relations.
Additional research is needed to determine how the performance of
contingent symbiosis might vary, but given similar political arrangements
and concerns, one would expect the core logic of contingent symbiosis to
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Contingent Symbiosis
37
hold true across a variety of authoritarian regimes. Government agents
in North Korea, Cuba, and Burma, for example, may grant some degree
of tolerance to unauthorized organizations that contribute to the social
welfare goals of the state. Such toleration would likely vary according to
the size and complexities of the society in question, its historical experience
of unofficial associational life, and the presence or absence of other large
institutions that might compete with the state as an organizing force (e.g.,
the Catholic Church in Cuba or Buddhism in Burma).
Regardless of where in the world we look, those interested in civil
society in authoritarian states would do well to move beyond the conventional
corporatist model and toward the concept of contingent symbiosis,
a concept that acknowledges the real-life microlevel negotiations
that take place between the state and bottom-up associations. It is in these
details that we can start to understand both the possibilities and the limits
of political life in an authoritarian regime.
APPENDIX A
Methodology and Data
Selecting a site in China for this research was not a smooth process.
Contacts in Beijing and Shanghai were understandably reluctant to officially
vouch for an American conducting research on a topic they themselves
had been warned to avoid. Eventually, however, I was granted
access and an affiliation with a university in Guangzhou, the capital of
southern China’s Guangdong province. Between 2005 and 2008, I interviewed
and conducted participant observation alongside a varied group
of Chinese government officials and leaders, staff, and volunteers in Chinese
GONGOs and grassroots NGOs. These comprise the research data
on which this article is based. The data presented here are drawn primarily
from intensive fieldwork conducted over a 15-month period between 2005
and 2007, with some follow-up work continuing into 2009. In total, over
120 people assisted in this research by sharing their thoughts and experiences
in interviews, informal conversations, and numerous NGO gatherings
and activities. The organizations on which my analysis is based
include 31 grassroots NGOs, mostly located in Guangdong but also including
some in other regions. By simple virtue of the fact that I found
them, these organizations are “successful” organizations.25
25
For some scholars of organizational growth, this study, which focuses on survival
strategies, may naturally raise the question of organizational death. My data reflect
the fluid situation in China today. Rather than organizational death, NGOs frequently
experience a process of birth, death (e.g., being shut down by authorities), and rebirth
under a different name. This process, however, is a topic for future study.
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38
While space constraints prevent a detailed discussion of the difficulties
of conducting research in an authoritarian state, a brief note is in order.
In most societies, the study of illicit activity is rife with methodological
and ethical difficulties. In an authoritarian state like China, restrictions
on freedom of association and freedom of speech make such a study all
the more challenging. Ensuring the safety and confidentiality of my informants
and managing my own personal and political risks were everpresent
concerns that undeniably shaped the research process itself and
my perspectives on the data I collected. Virtually all the interviews and
conversations described here were held in Chinese, and all translations
are my own.
Despite the dearth of generalized social trust that I found in my research,
building relationships with NGO participants, although not immediate,
took surprisingly little effort. People were eager to tell their
stories, to express their frustrations and anxieties, and to encourage others
to take up similar efforts. Being non-Chinese, moreover, I was not suspected
as an internal Chinese spy or security official come to check up
on them. Yet as a U.S. citizen, I walked a political tightrope between
Chinese government authorities afraid of grassroots groups and on the
lookout for American spies and U.S. government officials seeking to encourage
and support NGO expansion. Ultimately, several key Chinese
government officials came to see my research as nonthreatening, a judgment
that allowed me to continue my inquiries and activities and provided
me access to higher-level government offices. Nonetheless, trust building
sometimes requires a multilayered unfolding of relationships. I frequently
treated initial conversations and meetings with new people as only hints
into their experience and views, data that were then confirmed or modified
through subsequent interactions.
APPENDIX B
Profiles of Grassroots Organizations and Individuals Included in This
Research
Participants from a total of 31 different grassroots NGOs were interviewed
as a part of this research. These NGOs’ fields of activity are roughly
categorized in table B1.
Supplementary Notes on NGO Categorization
Many of the organizations involved in this research engage in multiple
activities. Due to the dynamic nature of Chinese society in this current
period, some groups shifted their focus frequently, depending on their
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Contingent Symbiosis
39
organizational resources, their perceptions of local need, and their own
ambitions. As an example, one group working with female sex workers
shifted from providing psychological counseling to focusing on education
about sexually transmitted diseases and then later yet to education about
protecting against violent clients and police exploitation. Another group
working mostly with people affected by leprosy also began to shift part
of its focus to supplementary education for children in impoverished rural
villages. Despite the difficulties such changes pose to easy categorization,
in describing the grassroots NGOs listed above I have tried to capture
what I believe to be the main focus of their activity during the time
covered in the fieldwork. Given the small numbers of NGOs that were
active during this period, to be more specific about the individual groups’
activities would put them at risk of being identified and subjected to
official harassment, investigation, or suppression.
Supplementary Notes on NGO Participants
During the course of fieldwork, paid staff sizes changed according to the
resources and circumstances of the organization. At one point in the study,
three organizations had no paid staff, while one (of exceptionally large
size) had over 30. Throughout the study, however, most organizations had
fewer than four full-time paid staff. In addition, some NGOs had “volunteers”
and “members,” although due to a lack of consensus over the
meaning of “volunteer” (How frequently do they lend a hand? Are they
financially compensated or not?) and “membership” (Are they dues paying
or just frequent joiners?), staff within the same NGO often offered different
estimates. Popular understandings of the term “volunteer,” for example,
were affected by previous government-led campaigns to force “volunteers”
into public action and by workshops organized by local and
foreign elites that brought NGO leaders together and in contact with
academic and overseas understandings of these terms.
Supplementary Notes on NGO Financial Resources
As with the actual programs of the grassroots NGOs that inform this
research, the financial resources of these groups were ever shifting. Funding
models included membership fees, fees for services, gifts from individuals
(both Chinese and foreign), grants from international NGOs (in
rare cases), self-funding by NGO founders (through savings, earnings, or
some other means), and self-funding by volunteers. For the few organizations
that had regular sources of income, of the budget numbers I was
able to obtain, the wealthiest organization had an income of about 3
million yuan (approximately US$440,000) in one year. On the lowest end,
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40
the groups without paid staff were entirely self-funded, whereas at least
three organizations with paid staff survived on meager resources of less
than 100,000 yuan per year (approximately US$14,000). Again, however,
as resources shifted every few months for many of the groups, I did not
keep a running tally of their budgets. In retrospect, taking a periodic
“snapshot” of financial resources may have been a more prudent approach.
Supplementary Descriptive Information on Interviewees and
Participant Observation Cojoiners
During the main part of the fieldwork, between 2005 and 2007, interviews
were conducted with 101 people, 43 of whom were interviewed more than
twice, nine of whom were interviewed twice, and 49 of whom were interviewed
once. These include NGO participants, GONGO staff, government
officials, and a handful of representatives of foreign-based NGOs
or foundations with programs operating in mainland China. Another 20
people were also regular joiners in the participant-observation activities
I took part in. Although I did not formally interview them, informal chats
with these people were frequently illuminating and informed my understandings
of the dynamics at play.
Of this 121-person total, 69 were male, and 52 were female. The age
distribution of all 121 is given in table B2. As most of my interviewees
were found through introductions by others, these descriptive statistics
should by no means be understood as a representative sample of China’s
civil society participants. However, for reasons that cannot be elaborated
here due to space constraints, it does seem likely that participation in
China’s NGOs would skew to younger generations, if a broader survey
were to be conducted.
TABLE B1
Nongovernmental Organizations by Activity
Field of Activity No. of NGOs
Capacity building ... 2
Education ............ 8
Elderly ............... 1
Environment ........ 1
Health ................ 9
Homeless ............ 1
Labor ................ 7
Media ................ 1
Other ................. 1
Total 31
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41
TABLE B2
Interview Subjects by Age Cohort
No. of Respondents Age Range (2005–7)
50 ................... In their 20s
34 ................... In their 30s
27 ................... In their 40s
6 .................... In their 50s
2 .................... In their 60s
2 .................... In their 70s
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