IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/gigawp/173.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Negotiating Political Spaces: Social and Environmental Activism in the Chinese Countryside

Author

Listed:
  • Bondes, Maria

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Bondes, Maria, 2011. "Negotiating Political Spaces: Social and Environmental Activism in the Chinese Countryside," GIGA Working Papers 173, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:173
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/52404/1/66478335X.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. White, Gordon & Howell, Jude A. & Shang Xiaoyuan,, 1996. "In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198289562.
    2. Peter Ho, 2001. "Greening Without Conflict? Environmentalism, NGOs and Civil Society in China," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 893-921, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bondes, Maria & Heep, Sandra, 2012. "Frames We Can Believe In: Official Framing and Ideology in the CCP's Quest for Legitimacy," GIGA Working Papers 187, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jennifer Y.J. Hsu, 2012. "Spaces of civil society: the role of migrant non-governmental organizations in Beijing and Shanghai," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 12(1), pages 63-76, January.
    2. Lei Liu & Yue Xu & Zhaotian Yang & Ying Li, 2023. "The interrelationship between environmental NGO development and environmental condition in China," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 25(8), pages 8487-8516, August.
    3. Yusen Dong & Senhua Chen & Yixue Wu, 2023. "Keeping up with the Joneses: The role of investee peers corporate environmental responsibility," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 30(4), pages 1841-1855, July.
    4. Carlos Wing-Hung Lo & Gerald Erick Fryxell, 2005. "Governmental and Societal Support for Environmental Enforcement in China: An Empirical Study in Guangzhou," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(4), pages 558-588.
    5. Xu Ying, 2013. "Volunteer Participation and the Development of Civil Society in China: A Case Study of Jinan," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 139-168, September.
    6. Yijuan Jiao & Mou Leong Tan & Fei Zhang, 2023. "Factors Influencing the Roles of Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs) on Environmental Bargaining in Yunnan, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(5), pages 1-21, February.
    7. Büsgen, M., 2006. "NGOs and the search for Chinese civil society environmental non-governmental organisations in the Nujiang campaign," ISS Working Papers - General Series 19180, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    8. Wang, Haiyan & Zivkovic, Sanja, 2018. "Household Food Demand Analysis in Rural China: Implications for Food Imports," 2018 Annual Meeting, February 2-6, 2018, Jacksonville, Florida 267163, Southern Agricultural Economics Association.
    9. Chen Li & Mark Yaolin Wang & Jennifer Day, 2021. "Reconfiguration of state–society relations: The making of uncompromising nail households in urban housing demolition and relocation in Dalian, China," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(8), pages 1581-1597, June.
    10. Justin Joseph, 2020. "Exploring the Agency-Structure Dynamics in State–Society Relations in Contemporary China: The Case of Securitisation of the Environmental Sector," China Report, , vol. 56(2), pages 182-203, May.
    11. Howell, Jude, 2015. "Shall we dance? Welfarist incorporation and the politics of state-labour NGO relations in China," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 60219, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    12. LIU, Mingxing & XU, Zhigang & SU, Fubing & TAO, Ran, 2012. "Rural tax reform and the extractive capacity of local state in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 190-203.
    13. Pesqué-Cela, Vanesa & Tao, Ran & Liu, Yongdong & Sun, Laixiang, 2009. "Challenging, complementing or assuming 'the Mandate of Heaven'? Political distrust and the rise of self-governing social organizations in rural China," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 151-168, March.
    14. Jin Xue & Finn Arler & Petter Næss, 2012. "Is the degrowth debate relevant to China?," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 14(1), pages 85-109, February.
    15. Jude Howell & Tim Pringle, 2019. "Shades of Authoritarianism and State–Labour Relations in China," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 57(2), pages 223-246, June.
    16. Da Zhang & Marco Springmann & Valerie J. Karplus, 2016. "Equity and emissions trading in China," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 134(1), pages 131-146, January.
    17. Hongze TAN & Jing LUO & Geir Inge ORDERUD & Yan ZHENG & Jiahua PAN, 2015. "The Pollution Caused by Protection: The Unintended Consequences of the Local Governance of the Urban Drinking Water Source Protection in Tianjin, China," Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies (CJUES), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 3(03), pages 1-20, September.
    18. Mujun Zhou, 2014. "Debating the State in Private Housing Neighborhoods: The Governance of Homeowners' Associations in Urban Shanghai," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(5), pages 1849-1866, September.
    19. Kostka Genia & Zhou Jianghua, 2013. "Government-business alliances in state capitalist economies: evidence from low-income markets in China," Business and Politics, De Gruyter, vol. 15(2), pages 245-274, August.
    20. Xu Ying & Wong-Kim Evaon C., 2015. "Moral Resources, Political Capital and the Development of Environmental Protection Organizations in China: A Case Study of City J," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 6(3), pages 395-423, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:173. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dueiide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.