Carolyn L. Hsu

‘Rehabilitating Charity’ in China: The Case of Project Hope and the Rise of Non-Profit Organizations

Beginning in the 1990s, the Peoples Republic of China has experienced explosive growth in the number of non-governmental organizations. This article examines one of the earliest and most influential Chinese NGOs, Project Hope, a charitable organization which solicits donations to help poor rural children stay in school. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector are surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form like the Western donative-style charity. As such, this case offers a rare opportunity to examine the rise of a new organizational form. New institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches will be used to analyse the social mechanisms underlying practice of donative-style charity. Chinese cultural practices of giving to the needy in the premodern era and under Mao Zedongs socialist state (1949–1978) will be explicated to reveal the resources and constraints emerging Chinese charities faced in the post-socialist era. This article focuses on one problem that Chinas first Western-style charities had to address: how to establish the practice of voluntary giving to non-governmental organizations. It examines two of Project Hopes strategies and their consequences: (1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state and (2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients.

Political Narratives and the Production of Legitimacy: The Case of Corruption in Post-Mao China

China watchers have predicted that corruption would lead to a crisis for the ruling regime. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has somehow managed to retain and even strengthen its political legitimacy. This article analyzes corruption not as a crime or a political problem but as a topic of political narratives, thereby revealing the political processes which led to this result. This study, based on interviews and archival data, examines narratives on the topic of corruption produced in the post-Mao era by the ruling regime and political dissidents in their struggle to influence the populaces views on political legitimacy. In the 1980s, disgruntled intellectuals drew upon the traditionalist collective narrative of corruption to teach citizens to blame the leadership and the structure of the government for social problems, essentially rewriting the narratives used to assess and judge the regime. In doing so, they successfully threatened the political authority of the Party-state. However, in the 1990s, Chinas leaders and the official media revised the story of corruption so that the Party-state battled corruption on behalf of its citizens in order to bring them economic opportunities, rising living standards, and social stability. In these new narratives, the role of the state was no longer that of ideological or moral leadership, but of economic management. Through these narratives of economic management, the regime managed to control the corruption crisis and recapture its political legitimacy, but was also forced to deal with the consequences of this new vision of state-society relations.

An Institutional Approach to Chinese Ngos: State Alliance Versus State Avoidance Resource Strategies

This article uses an institutional approach to examine Chinese NGOs as an emerging organizational field. In mature organizational fields, the organizations are powerfully constrained to follow the institutional practices of that field. However, in an emerging organizational field, the institutionalized constraints are not yet established, so actors can try out a wide range of practices. Some of these practices will become the new “rules of the game” of the organizational field when it is established. The content of these rules will shape the relationship between NGOs and the Chinese party-state for future generations. We find that a Chinese NGOs resource strategy is shaped by two interacting factors. First, NGOs operate in an evolving ecology of opportunity. Second, the social entrepreneurs who lead Chinese NGOs perceive that ecology of opportunity through the lens of their personal experiences, beliefs and expertise. As a result, the initial strategies of the organizations in our sample were strongly influenced by the institutional experience of their founders. Former state bureaucrats built NGOs around alliances with party-state agencies. In contrast, NGO founders that had no party-state experience usually avoided the state and sought areas away from government control/attention, such as the internet or private business.

MARKET VENTURES, MORAL LOGICS, AND AMBIGUITY: Crafting a New Organizational Form in Post-Socialist China

How do institutional entrepreneurs craft new organizational forms under unstable conditions, especially when all of the relevant organizational models have serious liabilities in terms of legitimacy? Previous literature argues that emergent organizational models must adopt existing organizational elements in order to solve three problems: (1) gaining access to resources, (2) exploiting previous competencies, and (3) demonstrating legitimacy to salient audiences. Yet, these three distinct needs often require very different organizational elements associated with diverse, contradictory moral logics. This article, which examines the case of for-profit ventures started by Chinese state organizations in the 1990s, reveals one strategy that entrepreneurs can use to solve this problem—to deliberately increase ambiguity about the organizations central characteristics and its underlying moral logic. This strategy makes it possible for new organizations to solve the problems of resources, competency, and legitimacy by simultaneously adopting (and adapting) contradictory organizational elements.

Even Further Beyond Civil Society: The Rise of Internet-Oriented Chinese NGOs (Response to Kin-Man Chan and Li Zhang)

The relatively recent emergence of Chinese NGOs has drawn the attention of many scholars for good reason. For those interested in state–society relations, Chinese NGOs are at the nexus of a far-reaching transformation in political life. For those interested in organizations and social movements, they provide an opportunity to study social change in the process of unfolding. For those China scholars interested in the environment, education, poverty, and inequality and a host of other topics, they lie at or near the centre of action. From the point of view of research, Chinese NGOs seem to be a potential gold mine. Yet the current obstacle we scholars face in cashing in on this potential is the lack of good, comparative data on these organizations. Because so many Chinese NGOs choose to ‘fly under the radar’ of the state (to quote one of my interviewees), either registering as businesses rather than NGOs or not registering all, there is no reliable database of these organizations. As a result, those of us who study Chinese NGOs have to depend on our own samples, often cobbled together from personal introductions and by word-of-mouth. ‘Beyond civil society’ (Hsu, 2010) was based on data analysis from five NGOs. With help from my research assistant, Yuzhou Jiang, my sample has increased to about 22, although several organizations have failed since we began studying them. Like everyone else who studies Chinese NGOs, I run the risk of being like one of the five blind men with the elephant, making vast pronouncements about the whole when I only have access to a small part. The only way we will get an accurate picture of the beast is to pool our knowledge. I thank Kin-Man Chan and Li Zhang for sharing their information, along with their constructive critiques, in their response essays to my article. And I must confess to Journal of Civil Society Vol. 7, No. 1, 123–127, April 2011

A taste of ‘modernity’: Working in a western restaurant in market socialist China

What does working in a western restaurant mean to people in urban China? This article, based on ethnographic research at three western food places in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, argues that for Harbiners at the turn of the century, working in western restaurants was meaningful for two reasons. First, these workplaces were seen as connected to the global capitalist economy and the world of cosmopolitan consumerism, in contrast to the local, provincial, and backward. Second, these workplaces were seen as distinct, and indeed oppositional, to state socialist workplaces and to the socialist understanding of work where individual contribution was rewarded by state paternalism. People who worked in western food restaurants understood work through the concept of development – people should develop themselves by acquiring skills and experiences through work. In other words, for those who worked in western food places, jobs were something to be ‘consumed’ like courses in a self-designed training program for entrepreneurship.