Beyond corporatism and civil society: Three modes of state–NGO interaction in China

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the subsequent “velvet revolutions” in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, touched off a lively debate among China scholars about the potential for civil society in China. Since then, much has happened to dampen the initial euphoria about China’s emerging civil society. Reaping the benefits of a rapidly growing economy, the Chinese state has grown stronger and moved to co-opt emerging social interests such as private entrepreneurs and business and professional associations. The state has also clamped down on what it views as more independent and threatening forms of association, such as the Democracy Party in 1998 and Falun Gong in 1999. At the same time, social organizations of all kinds – what we choose in this volume to call NGOs – continue to proliferate like ivy around the sprawling trellis of the state bureaucracy. Some of these NGOs have been co-opted by the state, some have been closed down or banned, but many continue to operate in that political space between cooptation and repression. This chapter explores the different ways in which the state and NGOs have interacted over the past few decades, and what these interactions tell us about the prospects for civil society in China. The aim of this chapter is to sketch out an alternative framework to the corporatist and civil society frameworks that have been dominant in the literature. This framework views the state-NGO relationship through three important modes of interaction: regulation, negotiation, and societalization. The chapter starts by discussing the uses and shortcomings of existing frameworks, and the advantages of focusing on modes of interaction as an alternative framework for understanding state-society relations in China. It then looks at how these modes capture important patterns of interaction taking place between the Chinese state and society, and how these patterns have changed over the reform period, drawing from case studies of NGOs both in this volume and elsewhere. The conclusion discusses what this analysis can tell us about the evolution of state-society relations in China.