Public Trust as a Driver of State-Grassroots NGO Collaboration in China
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Public Trust as a Driver of State-Grassroots NGO Collaboration in China May Farid 1 & Chengcheng Song 2 Accepted: 31 August 2020/ # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2020
Abstract While the moniker non-governmental organization (NGO) connotes distance from the state, it is widely recognized that civil society in a range of political contexts is in fact characterized by close ties across the public-private divide. Scholars of Chinese social organizations have noted that proximity between the state and NGOs is even more pronounced in the context of China. What is less clear is why this is so. Why do grassroots NGOs overwhelmingly pursue engagement with the state? This paper presents findings that enumerate a number of motivating forces that drive state-NGO collaboration, particularly with respect to small, grassroots NGOs that do not have preexisting ties to elites or to the state. Most notable among these is that NGOs seek engagement with state agencies primarily in order to secure public trust. Public trust is found to be key to the ability of such groups to run programs, mobilize citizens or raise funds. These findings therefore have implications for how we understand the critical role of public support and legitimation—in addition to state control—in the enabling of civil society under authoritarianism. Keywords State-NGO relations . Public trust . Cross-sector collaboration . China .
Grassroots NGO
Introduction The rise of the NGO sector in China’s rapidly shifting social landscape led to a burst of scholarly interest in the nature of social organizations and their relationship with the May Farid and Chengcheng Song contributed equally to this work.
* Chengcheng Song [email protected]
1
Department of Social Welfare and Social Administration, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
2
School of Public Administration and Research Center for NGO & Society Innovation, East China Normal University, 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062, China
M. Farid, C. Song
state. An initial question preoccupying researchers was whether China’s burgeoning NGOs were signs of an ‘independent civil society’ arrayed against the state or evidence of corporatist control. Subsequent studies advanced more complex views of state-NGO relations in China by identifying collaborative modes of engagement and mutually beneficial interactions, focusing on state interactions with well-established groups in urban centers or NGO-friendly regions [1]. Important insights have been advanced despite limitations in access to other types of organizations. For example, less is known about China’s small grassroots non-governmental organizations, many of which are unregistered, operate in rural areas, and do not benefit from preexisting ties to government or elites. Because of the lack of official data and access, there is a paucity of empirical work on these grassroots NGOs, even though they constitute the bulk of the third sector, both in terms of numbers and distribution, and, according to
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