The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society

Mujun Zhou, Zhejiang University

People used to enthusiastically talk about a "rising civil society" in China and discuss its implication for China's democratization. At the turn of millennium, protests emerged among peasants, industrial workers, and middle-class homeowners. NGOs engaging in social problems mushroomed. Muckraking reports were prevalent on commercialized newspapers. However, the rising trend of these activisms has not continued in the second decade of the 21st century. We are living in a time when the prospect of democratization in China becomes ever more unclear. To understand the perplexities today and the hope of change in the future, it is necessary to go back to history, analyzing the constraints inherent to the activisms in the past and uncovering their unrealized potentials. My book, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society, provides such a historical documentation. It focuses on a particular group of actors in China's public sphere -- a group of intellectual elites who are often referred to in China as the liberals. Since the 1990s, the liberals launched a political project that advocated to build a civil society to constrain the state power and provide citizens with an independent space for participation. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my book examines how the liberals had incorporated social movements that raised specific social and economic demands into their political project in the 2000s and how the project had later disintegrated in the 2010s. From my illustrations, readers will command a comprehensive knowledge of the history of several significant social movements happening in China in the past three decades, including the environmental movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, the homeowners' movement, and the new rural reconstruction movement, as well as the transformation of critical institutions in the public sphere, such as NGOs, commercialized newspapers, and digital space for public discussion.

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 Presented in Session 109. Author Meets Critic: The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society by Mujun Zhou