Building Civil Society in Authoritarian China

Writings about civil society in general and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in particular have downplayed the value of state linkage for the development of non-state social actors in non-democratic settings. Those writings have generally emphasized the state’s constraints on the development of NGOs in authoritarian countries. However, an increasing number of scholars have discovered that NGOs in non-democratic countries can accrue real benefits by establishing strong linkages to the authoritarian state, which control critical organizational resources. Similarly, in existing studies about NGOs in non-democratic states, the importance of NGO leadership has been overshadowed by the attention to structural factors. Yet, NGO leaders are valuable resources for their respective organizations. Among the critical roles that NGO leaders play in advancing organizational effectiveness is their role as resource agents. The NGO’s dependence on external resources means that the leader’s social ties are among the most valuable leadership skills. Given the state’s control of critical organizational resources in contemporary China, state linkages constitute the most valuable form of leadership ties for China’s NGOs.

Notwithstanding media reports about how the authoritarian state in China has repressed its civil society, China’s NGO sector has grown significantly in number over the past two decades. In fact, the state has played a decisive role in the emergence of the NGO sector in China, which is also highly diverse. It includes both organizations that are officially registered as nonprofit organizations and those that do not possess this status; it also includes organizations that should be more properly viewed as state institutions and those organizations that meet the conventional criteria for NGOs. However, despite the state’s positive contributions to the development of China’s NGO sector, it continues to view NGOs with suspicion and has adopted legal, political, and practical measures to control China’s NGOs. A significant consequence of these control measures is that many Chinese NGOs are unable to attain official nonprofit registration status, thereby negatively impacting their social and political legitimacy. This fact, in combination with the state’s overwhelming legitimacy, makes it all the more important for individual Chinese NGOs to reach out to the state, thereby affirming the value of state linkages. In recent years, the rising demand for rural migrant workers to contribute to China’s modernization and urbanization has highlighted the institutionalized discrimination against this population group. Consequently, migrant NGOs have emerged to advocate on behalf of migrant workers and their dependents as well as to serve their needs. These NGOs are keenly aware of the value of state linkages. Some of these organizations have also been quite effective. Therefore, a close look at these organizations can help us understand how China’s NGOs have been able to achieve their goals while allowing us to gain an in-depth understanding of migrant NGOs in contemporary China.

State linkages have real benefits for NGOs in China. They can help NGOs build organizational capacity, achieve political legitimacy, and access the state’s policymaking apparatus and process. State linkages are also especially valuable for NGOs with aspirations to create national networks because those linkages allow NGOs to access state networks around the country. Organizational linkages to the state begin with the NGO leader’s state linkages. In contrast to writings about the significance of membership in the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), this study has found that the most significant form of personal state linkage is not CPC membership. Instead, the leaders of China’s most successful NGOs possess affiliations with well-endowed and authoritative state organizations. Moreover, membership in China’s ruling party is not necessary for NGO leaders to establish the proper state affiliations. Armed with state affiliations, China’s NGO leaders can establish formal relationships between their respective organizations and state agencies even in the absence of the nonprofit registration status.

The literature on media-state relations has generally emphasized the media’s function as a watchdog of the state. According to this line of reasoning, a strong democracy is characterized by the presence of independent media to check the state. By extension, the absence of independent media generally characterizes non-democracies, thereby implying that media in non-democracies do not hold any value for non-state actors. However, this simple distinction of state-media relations by regime type ignores the fact that media in transitioning states like China have retained their connections to the state even as they exercise greater independence. In fact, Chinese media’s ability to straddle the state-society divide makes them uniquely positioned to contribute to the work of the NGOs, which can employ media connections to establish state linkages as well as obtain other state resources. Although it is important not to overstate the value of media connections when compared with that of state linkages, the cases presented in this chapter nevertheless show that media connections are extremely valuable as means to acquire state linkages and can help NGOs strengthen those linkages.

International resources have played an invaluable role in the creation of NGOs in contemporary China, mainly through financial support and human resource training. However, contrary to some views, the cases presented in this book show that international resources may not necessarily contribute to the political legitimacy of China’s NGOs. In fact, optimal utilization of international resources by China’s NGOs may require the prior establishment of state linkages and media connections to ensure an NGO’s political legitimacy and its ability to access state resources that are necessary to realize the objectives of the NGO. In addition, the cases presented here show that state linkages and media connections may play a direct role in helping China’s NGOs acquire international resources. These observations suggest that aspiring Chinese NGO entrepreneurs should not view international ties as the ultimate solution to their needs, but instead should invest considerable resources to developing state linkages and media connections.

The impressive growth of China’s NGO sector belies the fact that China’s civil society is still a work in progress. Nonetheless, NGO leaders who are involved in that building process have established effective organizations that are making important contributions to social governance. In this respect, they defy the understanding that effective NGOs cannot be found in non-democracies and that effectiveness can only be defined in terms of effecting revolutionary political changes. As a work in progress, China’s NGO sector is under-institutionalized, which means that the NGO leader is especially important for organizational effectiveness. In this respect, contemporary China offers a unique opportunity to assess the importance of NGO leadership and its associated skills. This study’s focus on leadership ties in general and state linkages in particular reflects the empirical reality in China. However, it is important to continue monitoring the emergence of other types of leadership ties and a new generation of leaders because such changes may point to important developments in China’s civil society and, by extension, changes to China’s political landscape. Similarly, the continuing importance of the NGO leader must also be subjected to regular observation. In this vein, the greatest challenges to the development of China’s NGO sector in general and NGOs in particular may not be their dependence on linkages with the state. Instead, elitism and individualism may constitute a greater threat to their development. Both Chinese and foreign actors can play an important role in addressing these challenges.