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This guest author post is by Mujun Zhou, author of The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society. The book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.

Since the 1980s, with the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism in major capitalist economies, the discussion of the idea of civil society has experienced a revival in both academic and political circles. While advocates of civil society suggest that the growth of an independent space for participation could increase the accountability of government and enhance democracy, critics argue that the discourse of civil society simply represents the hegemony of the West. My book, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society, joins these debates. It invites a new perspective to the field by seeing the dissemination of the idea of civil society in China as an ideational movement.

In the book, I focus on a group of intellectual elites who are usually referred to in China as the liberals (ziyou pai). In the 1990s, when independent organizations in China were still scarce and weak, the liberals advocated to build a civil society to constrain the state power and provide citizens with an independent space for political participation. I examine the spread of this idea and discover that the influence of the liberals in social movement has changed over time. In the 2000s, activists in many movements that addressed concrete issues, such as environmental and AIDS movements, aligned themselves with the liberals and regarded their movements as part of the project of building civil society. But in the 2010s, activists in prominent movements, like labor and feminist movements, more often criticized the liberals and their interpretation of civil society.

To document and explain this transformation, my book provides a comprehensive framework that involves macro-, meso-, and micro-level analyses. I argue that the liberals and their project of building civil society had emerged from interstitial spaces formed during China’s reform. Before the late 2000s, the liberals occupied a dominant position in these interstitial spaces. This situation had enabled them to project their imagination of politics onto people in wider society. However, the increasing intervention of the state and the shifts in the social and technological environment led to partial institutionalization of public discussions in the interstitial spaces. On the one hand, this destabilized the power of the liberals and on the other hand brought in a new generation of participants. The engagement between different types of participants nurtured new forms of public expressions in which the combination of ideological frames and social issues became more open-ended.

To demonstrate the changing influence of the project of building civil society in the past three decades, my book traces the discourse and practice of five social movements: the environmental movement, the homeowners’ movement, the food and farming movement, the labor movement, and the feminist movement. To analyze the changing dynamics of the organizational structure of the public sphere, my book also examines three spheres in which major public discussions have occurred. These three spheres are the “thought sphere” (sixiang jie), the media sphere, and the NGO sphere. Readers with interest in any of these movements or domains will find the book valuable, as it provides detailed accounts not only of their historical development but also of how their interrelations have changed over time.

In recent years, as public discussions have become fragmented, the liberals’ project of building civil society has also gradually faded away. Why bother documenting a political project that has already declined? My suggestion is that, first, civil society as an ideational movement reveals critical moments in the history of China’s reform. It was with the liberals’ efforts that many social conflicts and problems, such as environmental pollution, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and corruption of local officials, were openly discussed in the public sphere. Without these discussions, the Chinese state might have lacked the impetus to address some of the most egregious human rights issues at the turn of the century. By proactively engaging with social problems and improving citizens’ welfare, the state has also bolstered its own legitimacy. This history raises a pressing question: as institutions once relied upon by the liberals to spotlight social problems, such as NGOs and commercialized newspapers, have been co-opted by the state, can earlier forms of state-society interactions endure?

Second, through demonstrating the ups and downs of various social movements, my book also highlights a simple but important fact about the effect of state intervention—the state’s arbitrary incorporation of social movement activities incurs unintended consequences. A common, unintended consequence is that people begin to skirt around the intervention of the powerful state and search for new space to express their discontent. To some extent, this observation counters a prominent pessimistic view about China’s civil society, which suggests that civil society actors in China today have already become too fragile to criticize under intensifying state suppression. The last two chapters of the book document some of the new forms of civil society activism emerging after the fragmentation of the liberals. I try to show that public expressions of these activisms are sometimes even more fluid and unpredictable. This actually connects to a new research project I am pursuing: an ethnographic study of the subcultural community of street dance in China and its relationship to the global spread of Africa diasporic aesthetics.

Lastly, this book can also be read as a reflection upon the role of intellectuals in social movements. The liberals I study are among those intellectuals who believe that producing totalizing knowledge about society could unify fragmented resistance and foster profound political change. My story of the civil society project in China shows that this expectation is not entirely illusory. Ideas can be powerful. Through talking about civil society, the liberals mobilized resources, built alliances, and galvanized action. Yet in doing so, they also reproduced power inequalities and their alliances often proved fragile. At the end of the book, I argue that sustaining the link between an abstract idea and the concrete concerns of ordinary people requires continual public deliberation on the idea’s intension, relevance, and applicability. Paradoxically, then, the vitality of an intellectual project depends on how we engage with its critics. I advocate that we take the risk of open debate. While such debate may superficially slow the organization of collective resistance, it is indispensable for forging substantive solidarity and building a truly emancipatory project.