NGOs, the State, and Legitimacy in Contemporary China
| Author | : Eunhou Song |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2020 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
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What explains the explosive growth of the NGO sector in China in recent decades? The extant literature on civil society and the state focuses on the organizations themselves, which falls short in explaining the phenomenon. By parting away from the agency and focusing on the state incentives, this dissertation explores why the state has facilitated the growth of the sector in recent decades. An important assumption that is clarified in this dissertation is that the NGO sector in China not only comprises civilian-established civil society organizations but also government-established groups and former public agencies that have been transitioned to NGOs. When examining state incentives, two incentives emerge - one is economic, which relates to the idea of using the legal term of "NGOs" to downsize parts of the bureaucracy, and second is political, which centers on using NGOs to outsource services with the ultimate goal of appeasing the masses. The former strategy emerged as early as the early 90s and was implemented in several provinces in the early 2000s as a response to fiscal shocks stemming from the tax-for-fee reforms. The comparison of China's case with NGO policy development in other authoritarian states -- Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus suggests that China is unique in that its incentive for NGO sector expansion was not only economic but political. The empirical evidence is drawn from county-level statistics, rural governance data (CHIP), fieldwork, web-scraped data on NGOs, a unique survey conducted in the field, and case studies.
