The dominant role of the authoritarian state in Chinese volunteerism has been noted but little examined in the scholarly literature. This study illuminates the ways in which the Chinese state controls and administers volunteerism and volunteering through a detailed analysis of the governance of volunteering in Beijing. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and archival research, we analyse how Beijing administers volunteering and its structures through the work of its administrative authority for managing volunteering in regulation and public policy, management structure, resources, internal operations, monitoring and evaluation. We argue that Beijing has built a comprehensive apparatus to manage and control volunteering through a Party- and state-controlled, multi-layered and centralized management structure. However, this state corporatist structure carries within it the seeds for over-formal controls and conflicts between official, professional service providers and the increasing number of volunteers throughout Chinese society.

This article employs ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to examine two distinct processes of depoliticization by non-governmental organizations advocating rights for sex workers in China. Drawing upon Bourdieu and institutional theory, we argue that the consolidation of state repression of civil society under the Xi regime created an institutional field of power to which two NGOs responded differently. While one of them relied on government procurement as its major funding source, thus diluting the original mission, the other internalized state rhetoric as it sought political legitimacy through state certification, thus sanitizing its political mission. These distinct responses were then institutionalized into organizational practices, norms and culture. Rather than portraying NGOs in China as either capable political actors or pawns of an authoritarian state, this article illustrates how NGOs are subtly depoliticized by being inculcated in a state-produced, hierarchical social order in which compliance with state norms becomes synonymous with organizational competence.

Reviewing the extant literature on China's public sphere from the perspective of 20th-century history and social science, this introductory essay argues for the continued relevance of studying the publications and public practices associated with knowledge communities. By steering away from normative definitions and by envisaging publicness as a process, a connection can be explored between social discourses and political practices in China. Discursive communities, based on shared identity or sociability, may appear marginal, but at key moments they can play a unique role in modifying the dynamics of political events.

Although the Chinese state has an outsized influence on shaping civil society in China, extant literature has generally overlooked the increasing role of the market in its non-governmental organization (NGO) development. This paper examines the marketization of Chinese civil society through an ethnographic investigation of funding relationships between domestic Chinese philanthropic foundations and grassroots NGOs. Two case studies of foundation venture philanthropy projects show that businesspeople, through their intensive involvement in foundation-led funding programmes, are introducing strong market influences to the non-profit sector. Notwithstanding the attraction of foundation funding, many NGOs decry the negative side effects of non-profit marketization. We argue that NGOs in this context risk being transformed into social product providers and resource-chasing machines, detracting from the self-directed social missions that many NGO leaders see as their original calling. These observations on emergent NGO–foundation relationships also reflect participants’ increasing uncertainty about the direction of Chinese civil society development.

Do authoritarian governments’ responses towards different civil society organizations (CSOs) reflect policy differentiations? Building on the existing literature of graduated control, diversification of civil society, and consultative authoritarianism, this paper utilizes an online field experiment,1 and interviews with government officials and CSO leaders to demonstrate that local governments have the tendencies to intentionally treat different CSOs with different policy responses, referred to as “deliberate differentiation” in this paper. However, contrary to what the existing literature would suggest, this study reveals that at the local level, such differentiation is driven more by the state's interest in extracting productivity and outsourcing responsibility for the provision of public goods and less by the state's need to acquire information from CSOs, including politically sensitive advocacy groups.

This paper explores the emergence of a highly networked and capable non-governmental organization (NGO) community in disaster relief in China. It provides a review of the growth of non-governmental actors in the relief field since the 2000s and examines the most important platforms and networks in the field, focusing on their strategies of maintaining a broad-based partnership, developing their own capacity, and enhancing overall inter-organizational connectivity. With an in-depth look at a successful joint non-governmental relief operation in Lushan in 2013, the paper also explicates how NGOs can break the state monopoly over disaster information management, public donations and relief operations. This research finds that during crisis times, non-governmental actors carry out relief missions effectively in parallel with state agencies. The rise of non-governmental disaster relief sheds light on one of many trajectories of civil society development in China where social autonomy is earned by innovation, public support and improved capacity.

This article uses a case study to analyse the fissures between human rights advocates and NGO practitioners. Since 2009, the Open Constitution Initiative, an organization run by human rights advocates, has been campaigning for migrant children's right to attend local schools. While fragmented resistance on the same issue has long existed in activities organized by migrant community NGOs, there has been almost no cooperation between the two parties during the campaign. Based on ethnographic research, I elaborate on how these two groups of activists differ in their strategies and goals, and how their choices are related to their understanding of political struggle and political transformation. I contend that this case provides a new lens through which to view the recent decline in some human rights activism in China, and illustrates the importance of investigating the internal structure of civil society.

Early literature on China's civil society focused on organizations’ autonomy from the state. However, the precise ways in which these organizations are dependent on the state – and on individual officials – are less well understood. I argue that NGOs depend on different types of officials whose career incentives vary, with significant implications for relationships with non-state actors. One set of officials, innovators, seeks rapid promotion and uses civil society partnerships to gain higher-level attention. Innovators’ career goals lead them to provide support for NGOs; however, excessive reliance on innovators can force organizations to stray from their mission and can weaken their long-term position in a given locality. A second set of officials, implementers, seeks stability and security. Cognizant of the risks of partnering with non-state actors, these officials are sometimes forced by their superiors to engage with NGOs but see little personal benefit in doing so. These findings suggest the importance of China's multilevel political structure for state–society relations.

This paper examines the diffusion of activism in post-colonial Hong Kong through the lens of the political regime and eventful analysis. It first reveals the institutional foundations of the hybrid regime that allowed the creation of a nascent movement society. It then explains how the historic 1 July rally in 2003 and a series of critical events since 2006 have led to a shift in scale and the public staging of street politics. A time-series analysis and onsite survey further capture the dynamics that spawned the collective recognition of grievances and reduced participation costs, leading to the Umbrella Movement. While the spontaneous, voluntary and decentralized organizational structure sustained protest momentum, the regime has adopted hybrid strategies to counter-mobilize bottom-up activism. The result is widening contention between the state and civil society and within civil society, or the coexistence of regime instability and regime longevity, a trend that is increasingly common in hybrid regimes encountering mass protests.

From a regulatory perspective, philanthropy in China has been officially modernized. Since the government established a legal framework in 2004 based on models from overseas, the number of private foundations in China has grown more than six-fold. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of 214 private foundations conducted in 2012, we present a landscape view of these new philanthropic institutions, discussing both who begins foundations and how their monies are used. We find that despite the rise of new private wealth in China and the adoption of the private foundation form, government priorities are structuring the field of Chinese philanthropy in key and consequential ways. We conclude with some considerations of the implications of these findings for the development of broader civil society.

Relations between the state and labour NGOs in China have been particularly fraught. In 2012, they took an interesting turn when some local governments made overtures to labour NGOs to cooperate in providing services to migrant workers. This article argues that this shift is part of a broader strategy of “welfarist incorporation” to redraw the social contract between state and labour. There are two key elements to this strategy: first, a relaxation of the registration regulations for social organizations, and second, governmental purchasing of services from social organizations. These overtures have both a state and market logic to maintain social control and stabilize relations of production.

This article uses an institutional approach to examine Chinese NGOs as an emerging organizational field. In mature organizational fields, the organizations are powerfully constrained to follow the institutional practices of that field. However, in an emerging organizational field, the institutionalized constraints are not yet established, so actors can try out a wide range of practices. Some of these practices will become the new “rules of the game” of the organizational field when it is established. The content of these rules will shape the relationship between NGOs and the Chinese party-state for future generations. We find that a Chinese NGO's resource strategy is shaped by two interacting factors. First, NGOs operate in an evolving ecology of opportunity. Second, the social entrepreneurs who lead Chinese NGOs perceive that ecology of opportunity through the lens of their personal experiences, beliefs and expertise. As a result, the initial strategies of the organizations in our sample were strongly influenced by the institutional experience of their founders. Former state bureaucrats built NGOs around alliances with party-state agencies. In contrast, NGO founders that had no party-state experience usually avoided the state and sought areas away from government control/attention, such as the internet or private business.