Children and youth NGOs in China: Social activism between embeddedness and marginalization

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2014 28: 311China InformationKatja M. Yang and Björn Alpermann

and marginalizationChildren and youth NGOs in China: Social activism between embeddedness

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ATIO

NChildren and youth NGOs in China: Social activism between embeddedness and marginalization

Katja M. YangUniversity of Würzburg, Germany

Björn AlpermannUniversity of Würzburg, Germany

AbstractThe proliferation of civic groups has been one of the most intriguing features of China’s societal transformation over the past three decades. The massive spread of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has given rise to a broad debate among China scholars about the nature of Chinese state–NGO relations. Several authors have developed theoretical concepts that highlight and explain the multifaceted and highly complex nature of relations between civic organizations and the party-state. Against this backdrop we develop the notion of embeddedness versus marginalization to unravel these complexities and clarify ambiguities. Drawing on in-depth case studies of nine Chinese NGOs working with children and youth, this article proposes a comprehensive conceptualization of Chinese civic groups’ political embeddedness versus marginalization. First, we identify three separate indicators of embeddedness: formal registration, informal ties with public authorities, and the political economy of NGO–government relations. Second, we discuss three factors that have a major influence on these indicators of embeddedness. While some of the dynamics discussed might be specific to children and youth NGOs, comparisons with the findings on NGOs working in different fields suggest that the notion of embeddedness versus marginalization may also apply to other sectors of social activism. Therefore, our study offers a more nuanced understanding of Chinese state–NGO relations.

Keywordsstate–civil society relations, social activism, children and youth NGOs, political embeddedness, marginalization

Corresponding author:Björn Alpermann, Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies – Sinology, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany. Email: [email protected]

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312 China Information 28(3)

The proliferation of civic groups has been one of the most intriguing features of China’s societal transformation over the past three decades. Starting with a limited number of organizations that were set up spontaneously in the 1980s, the third sector has seen tre-mendous growth.1 Officially registered civic groups numbered 499,000 at the end of 2012, of which 271,000 were said to fall under the category of societal organizations (社会团体), 255,000 were non-state non-profit organizations (民办非企业单位), and 3,029 were foundations (基金会).2 However, these figures are somewhat misleading. First, they include government-organized non-governmental organizations (官办非政府组织) that are just in the process of ‘stretching away from the state’,3 which raises questions about their degree of independence. Second, Chinese researchers have found that these officially registered organizations are only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, Xie esti-mates that approximately 80 per cent of civic groups are unregistered and remain in legal limbo.4 Their indeterminate legal standing and often obscure registration status are major points of discussion among China scholars with regard to an emerging civil society. This question is dealt with in detail below.5

The second major bone of contention among China scholars is the relationship between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and agents of the party-state.6 There is a well-developed debate on civil society in China, the emergence of which some authors see as challenging the supremacy of the party-state. Others, however, argue that in China’s case, NGOs and party-state actors are not necessarily working at cross-purposes and that a priori assuming an adversarial relationship would lead to a Western bias in the study of Chinese civil society.7 Still others suggest circumventing this question by using less controversial terms such as ‘voluntary sector’ instead of civil society.8

A more promising approach has been to develop theoretical concepts that highlight and explain the ambiguities of Chinese state–NGO relations. The next section presents an overview of pertinent theoretical concepts and discusses how our conceptual model presented here differs. In a nutshell, we are building on the work of other scholars to develop a comprehensive concept of social activism – one that goes beyond the now common dichotomy of registered/unregistered groups, and that takes into account differ-ent dimensions of embeddedness and its opposite, namely marginalization, and the inter-actions between these dimensions. Our primary goal is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the NGO–party-state nexus by examining explanatory variables that may influence a group’s embeddedness or marginalization. Marginalization is seen here as a necessary complementary concept to embeddedness, with a continuum extending between these two extreme poles and comprising various ambivalent permutations of the relationship between civic activists and the party-state. By using the term ‘marginaliza-tion’ we try to overcome the dichotomous distinction between politically embedded NGOs on the one hand and excluded ones on the other. As such, embeddedness or mar-ginalization is a matter of degree. Our analysis distinguishes between three dimensions of marginalization/embeddedness – namely, formal registration, informal relations with the party-state, and the political economy of NGO–government relations. In examining the factors which account for relative marginalization or embeddedness within these three dimensions, we identified three independent variables of crucial importance: issue salience, networking, and leadership behaviour. As we will show, these variables also interact in complex and sometimes unexpected ways.



Yang and Alpermann 313

To develop this conceptual model, this article builds on theoretical findings from the existing literature as well as on case studies of nine NGOs working with children and youth in four different localities. Fieldwork was conducted by the first author in 2009 and 2014. Although the sample is not necessarily representative of all Chinese children and youth NGOs, much less Chinese NGOs as a whole, we argue that our findings indi-cate general patterns of factors that influence embeddedness of civic groups within the party-state. Thus, this article deliberately draws on findings from studies on Chinese NGOs that work in very different topical areas, in an attempt to overcome potential biases in our sample. Most China scholars have focused their research on NGOs working in specific fields, such as the environment,9 women,10 and migrant workers,11 resulting in a dearth of comparative studies.12 Here, we attempt to overcome this limitation.

The article is organized as follows. The next section examines the theoretical concepts in more detail. We then turn to the empirical part of the article and introduce the NGOs in our study. Next, we analyse how the salience of particular issues, national and interna-tional networking, and leadership in an NGO impact on several Chinese children and youth NGOs’ formal and informal relations with different public authorities.

Theoretical background

Previous research has demonstrated that embeddedness of social activism in China is anything but straightforward. There are a multitude of ambiguities as NGOs and state actors mutually accommodate each other.13 Various theoretical concepts have been pre-sented to explain these ambiguities. For instance, Ho has advanced the notion of ‘embed-ded social activism’ to explain how social actors manage to work for public purposes and even influence public policy while at the same time maintaining cooperative and even symbiotic relations with the political system. In his view, the coexistence of enlarged spaces for civic action and an authoritarian political system has created the necessary conditions for this form of embeddedness in China. As the party-state has increasingly acknowledged the usefulness of NGOs in the provision of social goods and – because NGOs supply it with crucial information – in the development of better public policies, social activists have been able to negotiate a symbiosis with the state.14 Ho’s underlying assumption is that every NGO strives for embeddedness in the political system. We ques-tion this assumption since NGOs’ willingness to cooperate with party-state actors highly depends on the type of NGO in question. With her concept of ‘dependent autonomy’, Lu contends that all Chinese NGOs depend on the state, while at the same time they enjoy a high degree of autonomy that stems from the fragmented nature of the party-state as well as from the central government’s limited capacities to control NGOs.15 However, we argue that the dependence of NGOs on the state varies and it is contingent upon their target group. Besides, there are other dimensions of embeddedness that may compensate for a lack of embeddedness in the political system. Thus, we present a multidimensional model of embeddedness versus marginalization.

Our model also differs from Ho’s insofar as we look beyond those NGOs that have managed to be successfully embedded in the Chinese political structure. As argued else-where, embeddedness aptly describes only one extreme end of a continuum of NGO–government relations: the lucky few who have succeeded in integrating themselves




within the official state structures. There are quite a number of social activists who are less fortunate: civic groups that remain in legal limbo because their application to regis-ter as a social organization has been rejected, or those that fail to develop sufficiently close links with officials who can shield them if their activism attracts the wrath of other state actors.16 The consequences of overstepping the invisible line of the permissible can be dire indeed, even in a realm such as environmental protection, which has in recent years received the blessing of the highest political leaders.17 Such civil society actors should thus be considered marginalized rather than embedded.

Having said that, while Ho and others implicitly assume a dichotomy – that is, view-ing NGOs as being either embedded or not – we prefer to comprehend marginalization and embeddedness as two extreme poles of a continuum which comprises various ambivalent permutations of the relationship between civic activists and the party-state. In this respect our model conforms to the idea of ‘graduated control’ proposed by Kang and Han and further developed by Wu and Chan, which emphasizes the graduated nature of state–society relations in contemporary China: NGOs may be either fully accepted or repressed by the party-state, but mostly how they are treated falls somewhere in between. Our own observations confirm this view. However, the graduated control model is rather state-centric, since it assesses NGOs’ relations with the state solely from the govern-ment’s point of view.18 In this approach NGOs appear more passive, while governmental actions seem more strategic than is actually the case, given the frequent episodes of ten-sion between central and local state actors. As we will show, the actual dynamics of NGO–state relations are always a product of ongoing negotiations regarding various aspects of this complex relationship. However, the model of graduated controls – just like Ho’s notion of embeddedness – refers to formal registration as the main marker of state–society relations. In this regard it is similar to Spires’s notion of a ‘contingent sym-biosis’ that highlights the mutual benefit for both sides.19 Again, Spires’s model does not explicitly deal with marginalized civic groups.

In a recent study Hasmath and Hsu suggest that meaningful collaboration between the state and NGOs in China would to some degree be beneficial for both sides. Thus they explain from a neo-institutional perspective that the reason why the scope of such col-laboration is still rather limited is because of the lack of official awareness of NGOs on the side of the state and isomorphic pressures within state–NGO relations.20 In contrast to some of the aforementioned unidimensional models, Hasmath and Hsu touch on many important topics such as informal ties with the authorities, issue salience and networking behaviour, thereby offering support for our findings. Nevertheless, Hasmath and Hsu fail to integrate these aspects into a comprehensive heuristic model.

All of the models discussed try to capture the ambiguities inherent in state–society relations in contemporary China – variously described as a ‘blooming of civil soci-ety’21 or ‘local state corporatism’.22 Going beyond this long-standing debate, Carolyn Hsu proposed studying NGO–state relations from an organizational perspective, thus bringing in a focus on the political economy of the relationship, which we find par-ticularly useful.23 All of these concepts have enhanced our understanding of NGO–party-state relations and contributed to moving the debate on China’s emerging civil society away from narrowly conceived and Western-derived expectations that NGOs lead to more or less immediate political change in the direction of liberal democracy.




A consensus seems to be emerging that NGO–party-state relations are shaped by vari-ables such as type of issue, location, overall political climate, and several contingent factors.24 Over time, the party-state becomes more accommodating, even encourag-ing, towards civic groups – at least those that are seen to play a positive role in social service provision.

Against this theoretical background we endeavour to further develop the concept of social embeddedness within an authoritarian political system, by asking what it means to be embedded, the aspects that this entails, under which circumstances civic groups strive for embeddedness and what strategies they employ to become embedded. Thereby we uncover predictors of embeddedness that have received insufficient atten-tion in the literature on civic organizations. We distinguish the following three dimen-sions of embeddedness.

Registration

One crucial aspect of their relations with the party-state is whether or not existing civic groups are granted official recognition. Registration procedures are ‘troublesome and protracted’ and very often attempts to register fail.25 The current State Council regula-tions require civic groups to have an official state unit as their sponsor. In addition, financial and other requirements create further hurdles for registration as a social organi-zation.26 However, a recently published decision of the Chinese Communist Party states that social organizations in the fields of trade and commerce, science and technology, public welfare and charity work as well as urban and rural community service provision will in the future be able to register directly with the Department of Civil Affairs without a sponsor.27 Registration requirements will apparently remain unchanged for social organizations in other fields.

Failing to obtain proper registration means that an NGO risks impediments to its operation and the possibility of being closed down by state authorities at any time. We argue that this is insecurity by design: it can be seen as a means for the party-state to restrict and control the growth and operations of the third sector. Because proper NGO registration is so hard to obtain, many groups opt for alternative forms of registration to secure some legal recognition. Previous studies, however, have often treated registration as a dichotomous variable.28 This is an oversimplification. Empirically, there is a large grey area, while those NGOs without any kind of registration can be considered com-pletely marginalized in the formal dimension of embeddedness, that is, deprived of legit-imacy and formally isolated from the party-state.

Informal relations

Formal registration is not the only aspect of being embedded. Some NGOs succeed in establishing informal links with the party-state or individual state actors that may supple-ment formal registration, stand in for non-existent registration, or even be a means to obtain registration.29 As we will show later, there is no clear-cut connection between formal registration and informal relations with the party-state. We thus treat these as two separate dimensions.




Political economy of NGO–state relations

A social organization’s ability to receive financial aid from the government is not bound to a certain combination of formal registration status and informal relations with the authorities. Accordingly, we regard the extent of official financial support from the gov-ernment as a distinct dimension of an NGO’s embeddedness in – versus marginalization from – the party-state. Since an organization’s formal institutional set-up, its informal relations with the government, and its financial aid from the government all pertain directly to NGO–party-state relations, we regard these as indicators of embeddedness that operate according to a different logic.

Factors explaining embeddedness and marginalization

Based on our findings we contend that the three aforementioned aspects of the embeddedness versus marginalization continuum crucially depend on the following predictors: (1) issue salience: the salience of a civic organization’s field of activity can play a crucial role in fostering NGO development; (2) networking: links with other civil society actors at home and abroad may directly affect a group’s relations with the party-state and, further, enable it to compensate to some extent for the absence of issue salience; and (3) leadership: depending on the behaviour of the leadership, NGOs may adopt a confrontational or a more cooperative attitude towards the party-state. The different attitudes and stances adopted by those heading NGOs reflect the fact that not all civic organizations depend on embeddedness to the same degree.

In sum, an NGO’s registration status, its informal relations with the party-state, and governmental aid are three dimensions of its embeddedness in or marginalization from the party-state. In our examination of NGOs working with children and youth, three fac-tors were found which explain the outcomes within these three dimensions: issue sali-ence, networking behaviour, and leadership behaviour. We will analyse these variables one by one, exploring their different properties and the interactions between them. First, however, we discuss our empirical data.

Empirical data sources

The fieldwork for this article was conducted in Beijing, Xi’an, Xining, and Jiujiang. Encompassing the national capital, which is located in Northern China, two provincial capitals in the west as well as one smaller city in the south, the composition of field sites aimed at capturing as much variation as possible. We selected three groups of NGOs, each with a different field of activity: schools for autistic children, prisoners’ children’s villages, and centres for mentally disabled juveniles. All our respondents preferred to remain anonymous.

Most of the schools for autistic children in China today were set up after the year 2000, usually by the parents of autistic children themselves. The aim of such schools is to educate autistic children and to train parents to teach their own children. By contrast, prisoners’ children’s villages are homes that provide foster care for indigent children of




convicts who cannot be cared for by their families. All homes provide room and board and round-the-clock psychological counselling and mentoring, but they do not offer reg-ular school education. The centres for mentally disabled juveniles offer accommodation services and individual life-skills training to mentally handicapped juveniles and young adults. Those with only moderate mental disabilities are taught basic mechanical skills to improve their chances of getting a job.

Table 1 shows the distribution of the cases and relevant findings. The first author conducted interviews with the directors, staff, and, where possible, parents of affected children.30 Throughout our discussion we deliberately compare our findings with studies on Chinese NGOs working in other fields in order to provide a more comprehensive and differentiated picture and to overcome potential biases that arise from the type of NGOs in our sample. We do not claim that our findings are statistically representative. Rather, our aim is to present a conceptual model developed from case studies that provide detailed insights into the political realities of social activism in China.31

Between embeddedness and marginalization

Formal registration

Legal registration is a contested field, as is demonstrated by the surprising diversity of institutional set-ups of the NGOs in our sample. At the time of investigation, seven were officially registered as NGOs; however, three of these were registered in sectors that were not their actual field of activity. The remaining two organizations were reg-istered as commercial enterprises. Thus, there is a subtly graded continuum of varia-tions ranging from total embeddedness to complete marginalization, that is, lacking any form of legal status.32 This finding is in contrast to Spires, Hildebrandt, and oth-ers, who conceive registration status as a dichotomous variable.33 Our conception comes closer to the model proposed by Kang and Han. But to our understanding their model seriously overestimates the capacity of the central government to control and manage relations between local governments and NGOs. Moreover, Kang and Han claim that state controls are graded according to the perceived threat civic groups pose to the party-state. However, this is not a plausible explanation for the variation in our cases.

The diversity in registration status is further complicated by more or less minor deviations from regulations governing registration. All the organizations we studied participated in networks in order to share different sorts of resources. In one case, a separate head office had even been established to cross-link the individual units and coordinate their actions, functioning as the headquarters of the whole network, and requiring all member organizations to follow its directions. As the present state regu-lations expressly prohibit NGOs from establishing any kind of regional branch,34 this is a violation of the law. While all participating units have registered with local gov-ernmental departments, the headquarters operates illegally, and in doing so puts the individual member organizations at risk of being closed down because of illegal hori-zontal linkages. However, these social organizations are planning even more integra-tion in the near future.




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Informal relations and registration

All the NGOs in our sample had tried to register formally, but not all of them succeeded immediately. In the latter case, NGOs developed strategies to improve their institutional standing in the absence of formal registration. However, even established institutional relations can be bolstered by informal connections or may even have been made possible by informal ties in the first place. Thus, whether an NGO is relatively more embedded into or marginalized from the political system cannot be deduced solely from its registra-tion status.

The case of schools for autistic children shows how the establishment of personal ties with relevant public authorities may facilitate formal registration.35 The schools in Xi’an and Jiujiang initially faced great difficulty in obtaining proper legal recognition. Due to a lack of clarity regarding administrative responsibilities, neither the local branches of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF) nor the bureaus of education were pre-pared to approve the organizations. Unable to find a professional management unit (业务主管单位) to sponsor them, they operated without registration for four and five years, respectively, marginalized from the official state structures. In their struggle for official registration, both organizations devised similar strategies that eventually proved success-ful: they made their activities transparent and even submitted on their own accord finan-cial reports to public authorities and they invited relevant officials whenever they held public charity activities. They thus gradually established personal relationships. The institution in Xi’an received a letter indicating its acceptance by the local CDPF branch after one year, but it remained unregistered for three more years. In the end, both organi-zations managed to obtain the approval of the local bureau of education – although they would have preferred the approbation of the relevant CDPF branches.36 As the in-depth analysis of the course of action of these organizations shows, other aspects also played an important role in determining the NGOs’ institutional standing: issue salience, net-working, and leadership behaviour. Despite their partial success in obtaining legal recog-nition, both organizations remain slightly dissatisfied with their current registration status as educational institutions, when in practice they provide everyday life-skills train-ing for children with a developmental disorder. This institutional incongruence means that they are not fully embedded.

Counterintuitively, some civic groups may welcome this lack of institutional congru-ence.37 For instance, the organization that runs the prisoners’ children’s village in Xi’an is not registered in its actual field of activity. Its main task is to operate a children’s home. Nevertheless, it is registered as Shaanxi Province Reintegration Research Association, which suggests that its major task is to study the reintegration of prisoners into society – a convenient misalignment as discussed later on.

Similarly, some civic organizations may not even seek legal recognition as non-profit units. In one case, a charity was registered as a for-profit research institute, because its director was already heading another NGO and the law prohibits an individual from chairing more than one.38

However, for many civic groups commercial registration remains an improvised solu-tion; they would like to re-register as social organizations. Likewise, the central govern-ment is aware that the large numbers of commercially registered civic organizations




undermine its ability to monitor them. For this reason, the government required all com-mercially registered research institutes to re-register with their respective departments of civil affairs in 2005. Yet this request did not affect the school for autistic children or the prisoners’ children’s village in Beijing, both of which were unable to find professional management units to sponsor them and thus registered as research institutes with com-mercial enterprise status. The former maintained the status quo while the latter simply changed its name. Therefore, at least based on our sample, the central government’s decree to abolish the widespread practice among civic organizations resorting to com-mercial registration did nothing to change the ambiguous situation on the ground. Nevertheless, recurrent campaigns to clamp down on ‘illegal civic organizations’ are commonplace in China. Thus, the danger of being closed down is permanent and very real for Chinese NGOs, especially the more marginalized ones. This adds to the insecu-rity by design which characterizes the operational environment of civic groups.

As we have seen, the NGOs under study have a wide variety of registration statuses. These institutional relations might also be bolstered by informal connections. For exam-ple, it is a well-known fact that many NGOs invite influential former or incumbent offi-cials to join their management board because of the latter’s power to influence authorities.39 In our sample this applied to the prisoners’ children’s villages in Xi’an and Jiangxi. The latter was able to win over a retired district-level official to become its chairperson right from the beginning. Subsequently, thanks to his connections, the pris-oners’ children’s village in Jiangxi obtained official registration as an NGO without much difficulty. This somewhat resembles the aforementioned case of the schools for autistic children. Accordingly, we regard formal registration and informal relations as two different dimensions of embeddedness, in which informal relationships with the authorities tend to carry even more importance.

Political economy of NGO–state relations

Financial aspects are an important part of NGOs’ relations with the government. While organizations such as prisoners’ children’s villages and the school for autistic children in Beijing are registered as commercial enterprises and are subject to taxation if they draw taxable income, officially registered NGOs are exempt from paying tax and can collect donations. However, an organization may have recourse to financial aid or similar mate-rial support irrespective of its legal status. For example, the prisoners’ children’s village in Beijing receives annual financial aid from the government, and its students are exempt from school fees, despite its official legal status as a commercial enterprise. In contrast, the similarly registered school for autistic children in Beijing has never received any governmental aid. A review of organizations that are officially registered as NGOs reveals the same picture: while some of them, such as the prisoners’ children’s village in Jiujiang or the centres for mentally disabled juveniles in Xi’an and Xining, receive gov-ernmental support, others, such as the centre for mentally disabled juveniles in Beijing, do not receive any public funds.

Surprisingly, even civic groups that lack good personal ties with officials may be able to obtain some public funding. This is demonstrated by a case of another NGO with a confrontational approach and no informal relations with any officials. By threatening the




local government with the prospect of public demonstrations in front of the local People’s Congress, the director of the same NGO managed to convince the relevant officials to grant annual payments in the region of six figures. This demonstrates that an NGO’s formal registration status, its informal relations with party-state actors, and its receipt of official financial support are separate dimensions of an NGO’s embeddedness. Empirically, various combinations of positive and negative relations in these three dimensions can be identified. These aspects are directly influenced by issue salience, an organization’s networking, and leadership.

Here it is important to keep in mind that different departments or levels of govern-ment may have distinct, sometimes even conflicting, interests. As such, an organiza-tion’s relationship with the government is likely to vary according to different party-state actors. Some NGOs may, at least to a certain degree, be embedded at the national level but at the same time be marginalized by the local state, or vice versa.40 The situation may depend on whether a given civic organization’s area of activity is deemed important by the central authorities. Likewise, departments at the same level but with different functions may have opposing interests.41 Exactly where an NGO is embedded in the party-state, which interests the respective government department has, and how far its reach extends are thus factors of tremendous importance to each organization.

As this section has shown, registration status alone is not necessarily the most crucial factor for an NGO’s successful integration into a certain layer of the political system. An organization’s informal relationship with the government and financial aspects of an NGO’s relations with the party-state are also influential and thus need to be considered separately. Thus, existing theories of embeddedness must be modified.

Becoming embedded: Why and how?

As already mentioned, it is not necessarily in the interest of every NGO to achieve com-plete embeddedness within the party-state. Therefore, in this section we look at the cir-cumstances under which civic organizations strive for embeddedness, including the degree of embeddedness, and the strategies they apply to achieve this end. In doing so, we show how issue salience, networks and leadership impact on these organizations’ degree of embeddedness in or marginalization from the government, as well as their general standing in society.

Issue salience

Here we explore the significance of civic organizations’ issue salience vis-a-vis the pub-lic, the sciences, and the government. While the existing literature on Chinese NGOs rarely pays attention to the salience of issues, we are of the opinion that it is highly important to civic organizations in China. We argue that if an issue is not sufficiently recognized in public, academic and official discourses, NGOs emerging in that field will face major obstacles in their efforts to thrive and professionalize. Moreover, issue sali-ence is crucial to an NGO’s formal and informal embeddedness within the party-state as well as whether or not it receives financial aid from the government. Generally, a high




degree of issue salience implies the prevalence of a public, scientific, and government-sponsored discourse on the issue in question.

In the case of China, probably the most widely discussed example of the significance of public discourse for NGOs is the emergence of environmental activism. By ‘enrolling social scientists sympathetic to their cause Chinese CSO [civil society organizations] can forge alliances with the world of academia, which enhances their own credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of local power-holders’.42 The party-state’s growing commitment to environmentalism is displayed by what Ho has termed the ‘greening of the Chinese state’, that is the increased consolidation of the environmental bureaucracy, and the proc-lamation of a huge body of environmental protection laws and regulations since the beginning of the reform and opening policy.43 This trend has been essential to legitimat-ing the activities of environmental NGOs, thus enabling them to operate effectively. Meanwhile, this ‘greening’ of the state has helped increase public awareness of environ-mental issues, thereby supplying the organizations with volunteers. It cannot be stressed enough how important the emergence of these sociopolitical discourses is to the very existence of civil society organizations. Here, our assessment significantly differs from models of graduated controls, which tend to explain NGO embeddedness solely with respect to the state’s perception of threat.44

If little information is available about certain issues, not even the people affected may be clear about the real cause of their problem, let alone how to resolve it. The first step towards handling a particular problem is often simply to become aware of it. A case in point is Milwertz’s account of how Chinese women activists recognized and began to address the problem of domestic violence.45 In the process they experienced not only great difficulties in finding a professional management unit to sponsor them and in reg-istering formally as an NGO, but they also faced incomprehension in the wider society. This is very similar to the experiences of schools for autistic children. The first of these institutions was founded by the mother of an autistic child. Due to the lack of profes-sional knowledge about this developmental disorder, her child was misdiagnosed several times before autism was identified.46 The mother then spent another four years unsuc-cessfully searching for professional help, before deciding to establish an organization on her own in 1993. At the time she was not familiar with the concept of NGOs, so the institution was registered as a commercial enterprise. She later tried to obtain NGO sta-tus, but all her attempts failed, since it was impossible to find a professional management unit to sponsor her organization. The newly founded school also faced tremendous dif-ficulties finding appropriate staff and a suitable location. Between 1993 and 1997 the school had to relocate several times as a result of financial problems or because of com-plaints from neighbours near the school. The latter usually resulted from a lack of under-standing about autism.

With regard to personnel recruitment, there were two main problems. First, it was generally difficult to recruit anyone due to the organization’s small size and the novelty of its focus. Second, while simply recruiting anybody was challenging enough, it was virtually impossible to hire professional staff because of the absence of related voca-tional training or degree programmes in the whole of China, something that indicates the lack of academic awareness about the issue. In fact, no one among the first generations of employees had ever heard of autism before coming into contact with this NGO. To




make matters worse, there was almost no teaching material available in the beginning, so the young organization faced enormous professional challenges. Eventually it managed to successfully develop its own therapeutic technique, thereby becoming a pioneer in its field. It developed a parent-focused training programme, which incidentally gave some participating parents the impetus to establish similar schools in their hometowns. Particularly after 2000 there was a boom of new schools all over the country.

Due to the dearth of professional knowledge, many of the parents in question only learned about their children’s developmental disorder after having undertaken an odys-sey from doctor to doctor across China. After autism was diagnosed, they started search-ing for suitable therapeutic institutions and eventually learned of the school in Beijing, which had a two-year waiting list. As early childhood intervention is crucial in autism therapy, some of the parents founded similar organizations on their own. These newly formed NGOs benefited greatly from the expertise of the pioneer organization in Beijing. Nevertheless, they still face difficulties finding professional management units as spon-sors as well as the resulting registration problems; suspicion and mistrust in communi-ties, as well as general societal rejection; and an absence of qualified personnel.

All of the schools for autistic children we researched have tried to address these problem areas. As already described, they have made their work transparent to public authorities while trying to cultivate informal relations in order to obtain formal registration.47 Their success in this regard shows that where official registration is concerned, marginalization can in some cases be understood as resulting from a lack of knowledge among government officials rather than as their active attempt to keep NGOs at bay. Nevertheless, as we show later, things may differ for other areas of civic activism. With regard to mistrust among members of the community in which an NGO is active, NGOs have tried to overcome prejudice by being exceedingly polite and friendly towards residents and performing unpaid services such as voluntary housekeeping. This seems to have paid off, as all of the schools reportedly now have established quite good relations with their neighbours.

To combat the general lack of knowledge in society about their situation, most of the schools engage in public charity and awareness-raising events. Nonetheless, there are limits to what individual groups can achieve. While these organizations have proven to be quite successful at enhancing their institutional standing, they are appar-ently incapable of affecting the delivery of public educational services such as univer-sity degree programmes. Hence, they have attempted to solve problems concerning the qualifications of their staff through professional training via intrasectoral networking, that is, by utilizing the professional knowledge of long-established NGOs. Thus, schools for autistic children have managed to compensate for the relative invisibility of their core function by networking. In 2007, McCabe argued for international coop-eration, media campaigns, lobbying and training of educators, administrators and poli-cymakers to raise public awareness of autism,48 which is in line with our focus on public, academic and official discourse. In fact, the issue of autism has recently received some official recognition in China. Although the registration status of the schools for autistic children remains ambiguous, the central government launched a nationwide tender for the purchase of social services for autistic children in the spring of 2013. It thus gave various social organizations across China financial aid to provide services for autistic children and youth.




However, if the case of HIV/AIDS is anything to go by, then social attitudes toward autism will be slow to change even if the topic receives the government’s attention. Gu and Renwick remark that ‘a lack of understanding about the virus promotes discrimina-tion, a closure of the discursive community’, thereby significantly compromising China’s ability to fight HIV/AIDS successfully.49 Despite recent shifts in the central govern-ment’s perspective, HIV/AIDS activists are still subject to official harassment.50

By contrast, case studies of the centres for mentally disabled juveniles show that achieving formal registration is much easier for organizations that provide social ser-vices which are acknowledged as lacking. This is because their activities are more likely to fall within the remit of certain government departments. It is therefore easier to clas-sify the kind of activity such organizations carry out. Likewise, they may also have better access to public funds. For example, the local government provided the centre for men-tally disabled juveniles in Xining, which consisted of a new three-storey building, includ-ing a playground, and a vegetable garden, since the officials at the local CDPF branch felt that the organization helped them with their work. In another instance, the municipal government of Xi’an decided to assist service institutions for disabled persons in 2008. The centre for mentally disabled juveniles in Xi’an availed itself of this opportunity and successfully established a joint model project with the local CDPF branch. The existence of a well-established public discourse on disabled people, especially since the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, helps NGOs because it encourages many people to volunteer. Among our case studies, those offering the greatest opportunities as a whole are probably those in which the public discourse is government-sponsored.51 Thus, the head of the centre for mentally disabled juveniles in Beijing can even afford to openly criticize the government every now and then as the government recognizes the organization’s impor-tance to society.

Considered as a whole, it appears that the lack of attention for emergent social issues is a major obstacle to the formation and subsequent functioning of NGOs, most notably in terms of registration problems, societal rejection, and professional challenges. In con-trast, if discourses on an NGO’s field of activity are well established, it not only mitigates these problems but also makes access to resources such as public funds or volunteers much easier. While China scholars in the past paid relatively little attention to this aspect, issue salience proves to be of high importance for NGOs. Thus, NGOs try to increase awareness of topics they care about. However, NGOs are also capable of at least partially compensating for the absence of academic and public discourse in their area of activity through intrasectoral networking.

Networking

In this section we show how the networking behaviour of civic organizations impacts on their general standing in society as well as their embeddedness within the government. Another component of NGOs’ relations with their institutional environment is their con-nections to other Chinese NGOs and international NGOs (INGOs), since these two types of groups function in a similar way: both provide other organizations with financial, material, or human resources.52 Likewise, they may offer organizational skills training such as capacity building, fundraising, and so on, or professional training specific to an




NGO’s area of concern. Thus, good connections to other NGOs may enable organiza-tions to compensate for the absence of public discourse and the resulting absence of issue salience. Moreover, exchanges with INGOs can help reconfigure prevailing discourses, thereby enabling organizations to become more deeply embedded. An organization’s networking behaviour may also influence its relations with the party-state in even more direct ways.

Almost all of the NGOs we investigated actively engaged in some sort of networking. Within Chinese civil society, their common focus is on connecting with NGOs from vari-ous domains which are based in their home location, as well as with NGOs across the country which operate in the same field. For example, the schools for autistic children in Xi’an and Jiangxi followed very similar strategies to achieve formal registration. Their participation in a network that the school in Beijing initiated in 2005 enabled them to share its professional knowledge with other similar NGOs throughout China. Each year, the school in Beijing conducts training courses free of charge for the staff of other NGOs in this network. In this way, organizational skills and strategies for dealing with public authorities, as well as knowledge about autism therapy, are disseminated within the sec-tor, thereby enabling NGOs to overcome the professional challenges resulting from shortcomings in public educational programmes.53 The schools in our case studies are also members of domestic NGO networks that offer capacity-building workshops or information on local policies.

The centres for mentally disabled juveniles are also linked by a network, in which it is even common practice to dispatch personnel from established organizations to tempo-rarily assist newly founded NGOs. One organization within this network is located in Guangzhou and thus has much better access to public funding than many of its upcountry counterparts; it therefore established a foundation in 2013 to aid similar newly formed organizations.

In contrast, organizations without access to similar networks may have to procure funding on their own and may be hampered in their professional development. This is clearly demonstrated by a school for autistic children located in eastern China. Established and run by the local government after parents of autistic children repeat-edly appealed for appropriate care facilities, it had been in operation for one year at the time of our interview. However, the school’s headmaster frankly admitted that his school had not yet learned how to effectively treat and manage the autistic children entrusted to its care. Thus, for the time being, the school simply looked after the chil-dren without applying any therapeutic techniques in their caregiving. In order to rec-tify this situation, the organization has spent a substantial amount of money carrying out research on appropriate therapies. This shows how a lack of access to NGO net-works is a disadvantage.

More often than not, NGO networks are funded by INGOs.54 Beyond financial aid, INGOs may also provide workshops on capacity building, fundraising, techniques in raising public awareness, or subject-specific professional knowledge. In addition, some INGOs may provide technical experts, whose salaries Chinese NGOs cannot otherwise afford.55 All the NGOs within our sample aspired to link up with INGOs. However, the capacity of INGOs is limited, and competition for their support heavy; thus, far from all NGOs succeed in gaining their support.




Knowledge transfer from INGOs to Chinese NGOs or via domestic networks may also enhance or even reconfigure Chinese discourses on certain issues. This has happened in other fields of social activism in China, for instance with respect to domestic violence – a concept and term that used to be alien to the discourse then prevailing in China but became established over the 1990s. When one of the initia-tors of a women’s hotline attended an international conference on domestic violence in India in 1998, she suddenly realized the importance of training counsellors in gender awareness. Previously counsellors used to advise victims of domestic vio-lence to placate their husbands with obedience to avoid further abuse. Subsequently the principle that there are no circumstances that make it right for a husband to hit his wife was implemented. The new approach included use of the term domestic violence, which helped to trigger a gradual shift in the public’s understanding.56 This illustrates how important close bonds with INGOs can be to the shaping of local discourses.57

Such ties may also affect an NGO’s relations with the party-state. This was demon-strated by the government’s actions to tighten control over NGOs in 2005. Back then, NGOs were obliged to make their bank accounts available for government inspection ‘in order to expose potential links with “foreign hostile and destabilizing forces” …. This action culminated in a vicious attack on Global Village of Beijing, a renowned green NGO.’58 In a nutshell, close relations with INGOs may arouse the government’s suspi-cion about an NGO’s loyalty to the regime as well as endanger the survival of civic groups which were previously well embedded.

Yet, ironically, close bonds with INGOs may occasionally have the opposite effect. As mentioned earlier, the centre for disabled juveniles in Beijing takes quite a confronta-tional approach to the party-state. To its director’s surprise, one of the centre’s main sponsoring bodies, the German Caritas Association, had urged the organization to adopt a more cooperative attitude towards the government. Caritas was concerned about the centre’s stance because the former runs several other projects in China and depends on a good relationship with the Chinese party-state. The case of Oxfam indicates that these fears are not unfounded: after successfully operating on the mainland for many years, this Hong Kong-based charity was unexpectedly and without explanation criticized by officials as an organization ‘with ulterior motives’, and students were warned not to seek employment there.59 Wu’s recent research on transnational activism regarding HIV/AIDS confirms that our observation is indicative of a general trend.60 For better or for worse, relations with INGOs have an impact on an NGO’s ties with government actors. The same may not be true of ties between domestic NGOs. The centres for disabled juveniles in both Xi’an and Xining have close ties with the local CDPF branches, despite their close networking relationship with the centre in Beijing which adopts a more con-frontational approach. On balance, the advantages of networking with other NGOs easily outweigh the disadvantages, and all the NGOs we investigated network actively. These observations are backed up by research in other areas: Chen draws a very positive con-clusion regarding the effects of China’s transnational civil society linkages in the envi-ronmental realm.61 And as Gallagher notes with respect to legal aid, a network among individually weak civil society actors adds up in strength and resilience to ‘more than the sum of its parts’.62




In summary, Chinese NGOs tend to engage in domestic and international networking. This helps NGOs to professionalize, and thus to overcome the problems that result from low issue salience. Knowledge sharing through networking may deepen or even recon-figure domestic discourses. Close ties with INGOs may also have an impact on an organ-ization’s relations with the government.

Leadership

The term ‘leadership’ refers to the behaviour of leaders in civic organizations, including the cooperativeness of the leaders with the government and issue framing. Both of these aspects affect civic organizations’ operational capability in general and their degree of embeddedness in particular.

NGOs’ decisions about their approach to the government are influenced by several factors, not least the personality of an organization’s founder. Especially in smaller NGOs, the director’s attitude towards the party-state may have a decisive effect on the whole organization. The institutional background of a civic organization’s founder also plays a major role, as the prisoners’ children’s village in Jiujiang shows. This organization is headed by a former director of the local department of civil affairs, which was certainly helpful in ensuring the NGO’s formal registration as well as a certain degree of financial aid and donations in kind. As is to be expected, NGO heads with a background as govern-ment officials naturally tend to have better access to governmental departments.63

There are other aspects that carry even more weight. The relationship between an NGO and a particular governmental department crucially depends on the type of NGO. An organization’s target group determines the NGO’s degree of dependence on the gov-ernment in order to function. We argue that some fields of activity necessitate coopera-tion with certain party-state actors while others do not. Accordingly, NGOs operating in these fields display very cooperative attitudes towards the government. The prisoners’ children’s villages are a case in point. As already mentioned, they rely on public authori-ties to identify children in need of their help.64 Most notably, such villages are closely connected with prison bureaus all over the country, which introduce their services to detainees. Without the support of these authorities, it would be virtually impossible for the prisoners’ children’s villages to reach their target group.

This is where issue framing comes into play – that is, the way in which NGO activities are presented.65 For instance, the Shaanxi Reintegration Association’s main task is to run a prisoners’ children’s village. Nevertheless, the name suggests that the reintegration of prisoners into society is its principal responsibility. Actually, all the prisoners’ children’s villages we investigated legitimated themselves in a similar way. According to all the directors and staff interviewed, two major tasks were to prevent needy children from descending into a life of crime while also showing their parents that the government cares for their children. This is supposed to instil in parents a sense of gratefulness to society and the government, thus preventing them from relapsing into criminality after their release from prison. In many cases imprisoned parents may not even know that their children are being cared for by an NGO, as they believe that prisoners’ children’s villages are state-run. The willingness of such organizations to proffer their laurels to the govern-ment ensures them the continued support of public authorities.66




Maintaining good relations with the party-state is the sine qua non for prisoners’ chil-dren’s villages’ ability to function; thus it is no surprise that these organizations adopt cooperative attitudes towards the government. This is how they have managed to embed themselves successfully within the party-state. In contrast, the centres for mentally disa-bled juveniles in Beijing and South China do not depend on close informal ties with public authorities, particularly because they have firm institutional standings and, thus, full legal status. Both of them can even afford a somewhat confrontational stance in their dealings with the party-state. In contrast to Ho and others, this shows that not every NGO strives for total embeddedness in the political system.

To summarize, depending on the personality and institutional origin of a given civil organization’s founder and/or director and, above all, its degree of dependence on the party-state to function well, an NGO might strive to a greater or lesser extent to nurture good relations with particular public authorities and the government in general. It may also frame issues which it deals with accordingly. As Gleiss shows in her article in this issue of China Information, the latter is also true for Chinese labour NGOs. Since these NGOs operate in a sensitive area where they face the risk of being labelled illegal and hence repressed, they develop discursive strategies that present their issues of interest as social rather than political problems.67 Thus, issue framing is of particular importance in fields of activity that the government tends to regard as sensitive.

Conclusion

Building on previous research and our own case studies of NGOs working with children and youth, this article has proposed a comprehensive conceptualization of Chinese civic groups’ political embeddedness versus marginalization. In contrast to earlier work on the subject we distinguish between different dimensions of embeddedness, treating embed-dedness as a continuous instead of a dichotomous variable. In particular, we identified three indicators of embeddedness: (1) formal registration; (2) informal bonds with public authorities; and (3) financial aid from the government. We found no clear-cut connection between these aspects and therefore regard them as separate dimensions of embedded-ness or marginalization.

Our in-depth study has revealed three factors that have a major influence on these indicators of embeddedness versus marginalization: issue salience, networking and lead-ership behaviour. Gaining the approval of a professional management unit is usually quite difficult for organizations whose activities constitute an emerging field and do not clearly fall within the remit of a particular governmental department. Therefore, the gov-ernment’s recognition of the needs of an NGO’s target group and the shaping of related public and academic discourses play an essential role. By highlighting the role of these discourses we go beyond previous models of Chinese state–society relations that tend to stress perceived threats to the authority of the party-state as the primary reason why civic groups face registration difficulties.68 We argue that such discourses are of great impor-tance for launching and for the continued operation of an NGO. When discourses related to an NGO’s area of activity are in the nascent stage of formation, that is, not yet well established, the organization will face registration problems, societal rejection, and pro-fessional challenges. Furthermore, an informed public and, in particular, academic




awareness of a social issue may increase the government’s willingness to act and to provide public funding.

This willingness can be enhanced via informal ties, which are more likely to develop when groups engage in networking. They are then able to benefit from the operational knowledge of more developed NGOs by learning how to present their own area of activ-ity to the public and how to reshape public discourses. Furthermore, networking helps NGOs to professionalize, which can also enhance a civic organization’s trustworthiness in the eyes of the government.69

Relations with INGOs are a double-edged sword for Chinese civic groups: the gov-ernment’s attitude towards an NGO might be negatively affected if the organization is closely linked to INGOs that the party-state views with suspicion. Conversely, INGOs may want to restrain more confrontational Chinese partners precisely in order to avoid arousing suspicion. On the positive side, NGOs benefit from networking with other NGOs, both domestic and international, as the other groups provide financial, material, or human resources. This can even help NGOs to overcome difficulties resulting from the low salience of the causes they champion.

Nonetheless, government recognition of a certain area of activity as legitimate rests not only on the prevalence of public discourses but also on how issues are framed. This is heavily dependent on the leader of a civic organization. The leadership also determines an organization’s approach to the party-state and, accordingly, to particular government departments. This approach may be influenced by a number of factors – namely, the personality and institutional background of the organization’s founder, the NGO’s field of action, and, last but not least, financial considerations.

While all the NGOs investigated in this study strive for at least a certain degree of embeddedness with regard to their institutional set-up, not every organization is ready to go to great lengths to achieve close informal relations with the government. Rather, NGOs studied here very skilfully embed themselves within the party-state to varying degrees and in accordance with their needs.70 They may attempt to relate with important officials, make their work transparent to public authorities, frame their activities care-fully, and engage in raising public awareness and in networking in order to cope with the circumstances as well as they can. Thus, what we see in state–society relations in con-temporary China is the mutual accommodation of state and society.71 This is an ongoing process: newly formed NGOs profit from established organizations’ experience; public discourses may shift and reconfigure over time; and even public authorities may gradu-ally change their attitudes – as evidenced by recent shifts in the official attitude towards NGO registration. At the same time, campaigns to clamp down on civic activism deemed threatening by the party-state are set to continue.

In sum, civic organizations’ relations with their environment, including the party-state, are multifaceted and highly complex. The notion of embeddedness versus margin-alization helps to address these complexities and clarify ambiguities. Therefore, our article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the dimensions and properties of embeddedness and marginalization. While some of the dynamics discussed above may be unique to our children and youth NGOs, comparisons with the findings on NGOs working in different fields suggest that the notion of embeddedness versus marginaliza-tion may also apply to other sectors of social activism.




Notes

Our fieldwork was partially funded by BayChina (Bavarian University Centre for China). The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Among the many persons who shared their views on previous versions of this article, special thanks are due to Andreas Fulda and Lianjiang Li.

1. Huang Xiaoyong and Cai Liqiang, Zhongguo minjian zuzhi de xianzhuang, zuoyong yiji zhengce jianyi (Present situation, function and policy advice of China’s civil organizations), in Huang Xiaoyong (ed.) Zhongguo minjian zuzhi baogao (2008) (Annual report on Chinese civil organizations (2008)), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2008, 5.

2. Minzhengbu fabu 2012 nian shehui fuwu fazhan tongji baogao (Ministry of Civil Affairs pub-lishes the 2012 statistical report on social services development), 20 June 2013, http://www.chinanpo.gov.cn/2201/66026/yjzlkindex.html, accessed 24 April 2014.

3. Paul Thiers, Stretching away from the state: NGO emergence and dual identity in a Chinese government institution, in Reza Hasmath and Jennifer Hsu (eds) China in an Era of Transition: Understanding Contemporary State and Society Actors, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 145–63.

4. Xie Haiding, Zhongguo minjian zuzhi de hefaxing kunjing (China’s civil organizations’ dilemma of legitimacy), in Huang (ed.) Zhongguo minjian zuzhi baogao (2008), 130–62.

5. Guosheng Deng, The hidden rules governing China’s unregistered NGOs: Management and consequences, China Review 10(1), 2011: 183–206; Timothy Hildebrandt, The political econ-omy of social organization registration in China, The China Quarterly 208, 2011: 970–89.

6. The term NGO has been variously defined and is contested in the Chinese context. For the purpose of this article, we use it in a wide sense encompassing all civic associations without direct government involvement inside the organization without regard to their registration status (see below), that is, these organizations enjoy ‘relative autonomy from the state’; cf. Julia Kwong, Educating migrant children: Negotiations between the state and civil society, The China Quarterly, no. 180, 2004: 1074; Fengshi Wu, Collective identity and civil-society development: The left, right, and neutral among social activists in China, Taiwan Journal of Democracy 8(2), 2012: 26.

7. Examples include Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan, In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; Qiusha Ma, Non-Governmental Organizations in Contemporary China: Paving the Way to Civil Society?, London: Routledge, 2005. For overviews see Carolyn Hsu, Beyond civil society: An organizational perspective on state-NGO relations in the People’s Republic of China, Journal of Civil Society 6(3), 2010: 259–77; Taru Salmenkari, Theoretical poverty in the research on Chinese civil society, Modern Asian Studies 47(2), 2013: 682–711.

8. Nara Dillon, Governing civil society: Adapting revolutionary methods to serve post- Communist goals, in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds) Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 138–64.

9. Caroline M. Cooper, ‘This is our way in’: The civil society of environmental NGOs in south-west China, Government and Opposition 41(1), 2006: 109–36.

10. Cecilia Milwertz, Activism against domestic violence in the People’s Republic of China, Violence Against Women 9(6), 2003: 630–54.

11. Jennifer Hsu, A state creation? Civil society and migrant organizations, in Hasmath and Hsu (eds) China in an Era of Transition, 2009: 127–43.

12. Exceptions include Timothy Hildebrandt, Social Organizations and the Authoritarian State in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.


http://www.chinanpo.gov.cn/2201/66026/yjzlkindex.html




13. Tony Saich, Negotiating the state: The development of social organizations in China, The China Quarterly, no. 161, 2000: 124–41; Anthony J. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state: Understanding the survival of China’s grassroots NGOs, American Journal of Sociology 117(1), 2011: 1–45; Fengshi Wu and Kin-man Chan, Graduated con-trol and beyond: The evolving government-NGO relations, China Perspectives, no. 3, 2012: 9–17; and Jessica C. Teets, Let many civil societies bloom: Rise of consultative authoritarian-ism, The China Quarterly 213, 2013: 19–38.

14. Peter Ho, Embedded activism and political change in a semiauthoritarian context, China Information 21(2), 2007: 187–209; Peter Ho and Richard Louis Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change: Rethinking embedded environmental activism in China, China Information 21(2), 2007: 331–44.

15. Yiyi Lu, Non-Governmental Organizations in China: The Rise of Dependent Autonomy, New York: Routledge, 2009.

16. Björn Alpermann, State and society in China’s environmental politics, in Joel Jay Kassiola and Sujian Guo (eds) China’s Environmental Crisis: Domestic and Global Political Impacts and Responses, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 167–209.

17. Rachel E. Stern and Kevin J. O’Brien, Politics at the boundary: Mixed signals and the Chinese state, Modern China 38(2), 2011: 174–98.

18. Kang Xiaoguang and Han Heng, Fenlei kongzhi: Dangqian Zhongguo dalu guojia yu she-hui guanxi yanjiu (Graduated controls: Research on state–society relations in contemporary mainland China), Kaifang shidai (Open times), no. 2, 2008: 30–41; Wu and Chan, Graduated control and beyond.

19. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state.20. Reza Hasmath and Jennifer Y. J. Hsu, Isomorphic pressures, epistemic communities and

state-NGO collaboration in China, The China Quarterly 220, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2319035, accessed 12 September 2014.

21. Teets, Let many civil societies bloom.22. Jennifer Y. J. Hsu and Reza Hasmath, The local corporatist state and NGO relations in China,

Journal of Contemporary China 23(87), 2014: 516–34. Given the increasing agreement among these authors on empirical findings – if not on terminology – we deliberately set aside the much-debated question of whether China’s state–society relations are best understood as a variant of civil society or corporatism.

23. Carolyn Hsu, Beyond civil society.24. Wu and Chan, Graduated control and beyond.25. Ho, Embedded activism and political change in a semiauthoritarian context, 197. For details,

see Ma, Non-Governmental Organizations in China; and Hildebrandt, Social Organizations and the Authoritarian State in China.

26. Hsu and Hasmath, The local corporatist state and NGO relations in China, 8.27. Zhonggong Zhongyang guanyu quanmian shenhua gaige ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding

(Decisions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on several important ques-tions concerning the comprehensive deepening of reforms), § 48, 15 November 2013, http:// cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/1115/c64094-23559163-13.html, accessed 12 September 2014.

28. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state; Hildebrandt, The political economy of social organization registration in China.

29. Cf. Deng, Hidden rules governing China’s unregistered NGOs.30. All interviews regarding prisoners’ children’s villages, schools for autistic children, and the

centres for mentally disabled juveniles in Beijing and Xi’an were conducted in the summer of 2009. The interviews related to the centre for mentally disabled juveniles in Xining were conducted in March 2014.


http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2319035


http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/1115/c64094-23559163-13.html




31. Following Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 3rd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.

32. Xiaoyuan Shang, Xiaoming Wu, and Yue Wu, Welfare provision for vulnerable children: The missing role of the state, The China Quarterly, no. 181, 2005: 122–36.

33. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state; Hildebrandt, The political economy of social organization registration in China.

34. Xie, Zhongguo minjian zuzhi de hefaxing kunjing, 139–40; Hsu and Hasmath, The local corporatist state and NGO relations in China, 8.

35. However, this is not to say that good informal ties are a guarantee for obtaining official regis-tration; see Shang, Wu, and Wu, Welfare provision for vulnerable children.

36. Cf. Hasmath and Hsu, Isomorphic pressures, epistemic communities and state-NGO collabo-ration in China.

37. Cf. Fengshi Wu, Environmental activism in provincial China, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 15(1), 2013: 89–108.

38. See Jijinhui guanli tiaoli (Regulations on the management of foundations), § 23, 15 April 2008, http://cszh.mca.gov.cn/article/zcfg/200804/20080400013547.shtml, accessed 14 September 2014; Shehui tuanti dengji guanli tiaoli (Regulations on the registration and management of social organizations), § 14, 25 October 1998, http://cszh.mca.gov.cn/article/zcfg/200804/20080400013543.shtml, accessed 14 September 2014.

39. Lu, Non-Governmental Organizations in China, 104.40. Jennifer Hsu, Layers of the urban state: Migrant organisations and the Chinese state, Urban

Studies 49(16), 2012: 3513–30.41. Yanfei Sun and Dingxin Zhao, Environmental campaigns, in Kevin J. O’Brien (ed.) Popular

Protest in China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 144–62.42. Andreas Fulda, Yanyan Li, and Qinghua Song, New strategies for civil society in China: A

case study of the network governance approach, Journal of Contemporary China 21(76), 2012: 689.

43. See Peter Ho, Greening without conflict? Environmentalism, NGOs and civil society in China, Development and Change 32(5), 2001: 893–921.

44. Kang and Han, Fenlei kongzhi; Wu and Chan, Graduated control and beyond.45. See Milwertz, Activism against domestic violence in the People’s Republic of

China.46. Cf. Helen McCabe, Parent advocacy in the face of adversity: Autism and families in the

People’s Republic of China, Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities 22(1), 2007: 39–50.

47. Cf. Cooper, ‘This is our way in’.48. McCabe, Parent advocacy in the face of adversity, 48–9.49. Jing Gu and Neil Renwick, China’s fight against HIV/AIDS, Journal of Contemporary China

17(54), 2008: 101.50. Fengshi Wu, Strategic state engagement in transnational activism: AIDS prevention in China,

Journal of Contemporary China 20(71), 2011: 622.51. See Fulda, Li, and Song, New strategies of civil society in China, 690–2, on similar NGO

strategies.52. Wu, Strategic state engagement in transnational activism.53. Compare the situation of civil society-run schools for migrant children in Kwong, Educating

migrant children, 1083–7.54. Wu, Strategic state engagement in transnational activism; Alpermann, State and society in

China’s environmental politics.


http://cszh.mca.gov.cn/article/zcfg/200804/20080400013547.shtml





55. This is, of course, not to say that such transnational cooperation was without friction; see below and Leslie Wang, Importing western childhoods into a Chinese state-run orphanage, Qualitative Sociology 33(2), 2010: 137–59.

56. See Milwertz, Activism against domestic violence in the People’s Republic of China.57. As Wu, Strategic state engagement in transnational activism, 631, demonstrates with an

example dealing with HIV/AIDS in China, how some INGOs deliberately attempt to reshape official discourses.

58. Ho and Edmonds, Perspectives of time and change, 335.59. Ng Tze-Wei and Gary Cheung, Oxfam calls halt after ‘warning’, South China Morning Post,

24 February 2010, http://www.scmp.com/article/706808/oxfam-calls-halt-after-warning, accessed 12 September 2014.

60. Wu, Strategic state engagement in transnational activism, 635.61. Jie Chen, Transnational environmental movement: Impacts on the green civil society in

China, Journal of Contemporary China 19(65), 2010: 503–23.62. Mary E. Gallagher, ‘Hope for protection and hopeless choices’: Labor legal aid in the PRC,

in Elizabeth J. Perry and Merle Goldman (eds) Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, 217.

63. Compare the environmental sector, Peter Ho, Self-imposed censorship and de-politicized pol-itics in China: Green activism or a color revolution?, in Peter Ho and Richard Louis Edmonds (eds) China’s Embedded Activism: Opportunities and Constraints of a Social Movement, New York: Routledge, 2008, 33.

64. Cf. Jennifer Hsu, Layers of the urban state, 3521.65. Cf. Ho, Embedded activism and political change in a semiauthoritarian context, 195–6.66. Cf. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state, 20–2.67. Marielle S. Gleiss, How Chinese labour NGOs legitimize their identity and voice, China

Information 28(3), 2014: 362–81.68. Cf. Kang and Han, Fenlei kongzhi.69. Cf. Hasmath and Hsu, Isomorphic pressures, epistemic communities and state-NGO collabo-

ration in China.70. Spires, Contingent symbiosis and civil society in an authoritarian state.71. Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute

One Another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Children and youth NGOs in China: Social activism between embeddedness and marginalization

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