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The proliferation of social organizations in China has engendered a lively debate about how to conceptualize these social forces. This paper argues that such a conceptualization should take into account the role that both the party-state and social actors attribute to social organizations. With an empirical case study from the western Chinese countryside, this paper explores how social organizations both adapt to the restrictive authoritarian framework and negotiate the spaces opening up to society in the realms of environmental and social politics. The study shows that while the party-state understands organizations as consultants and partners in service provision, they have a deviating self-image with the Western concepts of "NGO" and "civil society" becoming increasingly relevant as frames of reference. While their practices remain within the limits imposed by the authoritarian framework, they impact policy formulation, local political participation, and the formation of social networks according to their own self-image as members of a budding Chinese civil society. -- China ; civil society ; NGO ; social organizations

The proliferation of social organizations in China has engendered a lively debate about how to conceptualize these social forces. This paper argues that such a conceptualization should take into account the role that both the party-state and social actors attribute to social organizations. With an empirical case study from the western Chinese countryside, this paper explores how social organizations both adapt to the restrictive authoritarian framework and negotiate the spaces opening up to society in the realms of environmental and social politics. The study shows that while the party-state understands organizations as consultants and partners in service provision, they have a deviating self-image with the Western concepts of NGO and civil society becoming increasingly relevant as frames of reference. While their practices remain within the limits imposed by the authoritarian framework, they impact policy formulation, local political participation, and the formation of social networks according to their own self-image as members of a budding Chinese civil society.

In the debate on authoritarian resilience, the importance of persuasion to regime legitimacy has been widely acknowledged, yet a conceptual framework explaining the role of persuasion is still lacking. Against this backdrop, we argue that the framing perspective (Benford and Snow 2000) provides a useful basis for such a framework. Drawing on Beetham's (1991) model of legitimacy, we contend that the ruling elites in authoritarian regimes propagate official frames in a continuous effort to reproduce the belief of the populace in the elites' leadership qualities and their determination to serve the common interest. In the empirical part of our paper we look at the case of China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has in recent years reemphasized persuasion as a means of reproducing legitimacy. We then apply our theory in an analysis of the conceptual shifts in the CCP's frames and ideology, as propagated under its secretary general, Hu Jintao.

Environmental contention is mounting all across China. In particular, protests against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon, spreading well beyond China's major cities. While these protests are gaining academic attention, they have mostly been analysed as separate phenomena in isolation from each other. Moreover, such grievance-based environmental contention has largely been investigated separately from 'environmentalist' activism underpinned by environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Yet recent protests against the construction of facilities such as waste incinerators and industrial facilities reveal the emergence of linkages and diffusion processes between cases and actors that challenge depictions of Chinese environmental contention as a necessarily purely localized and parochial affair. This article examines this new development in Chinese environmental activism through a detailed case study of an anti-incinerator campaign centred on a village in Hebei Province. It shows how linkages emerged horizontally between local residents and community activists involved in anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, and vertically between villagers and members of China's nascent 'no burn' community, a group of actors highly critical of waste incineration in China. This article concludes that both types of linkages were crucial for the development and success of the villagers' campaign. Although the opportunity for upward scale-shift based on active intra-community collaboration remains highly constrained, vertical ties and non-relational horizontal linkages ensure that the impact of environmental campaigns reaches beyond the immediate localities in which they occur. (J Contemp China/GIGA)