China’s Offshore Civil Society

Bin Xu, Emory University

In the past decade, China’s new “offshore civil society” has been mushrooming in the form of small publics, which are based outside of China and evade the country’s repressive regulations and laws. In contrast to the feeble domestic civil society and the fallen offshore civil society in Hong Kong, the new publics demonstrate their grassroots strength in their diverse forms, pervasive existence, and cosmopolitan culture. Yet, the new offshore civil society is also entangled in the increasingly perplexing global political landscape, in which the boundaries between democracy and autocracy are no longer clear-cut, and caught in the crossfire of geopolitics.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 68. Presidential Session. Civil Society in the Global South