SE DEJA CONSTANCIA QUE LA PAGINA DE INTERNET DEL GCABA DEBERÀ SER CONSULTADA PERIODICAMENTE A LOS EFECTOS DE CONSTATAR LA

As I argue in the first chapter, the language of gongyi should be the 'keyword' in understanding the changing landscape of the Chinese NGO sector. By the changing landscape here, I look at how Chinese NGOs have become more depoliticized and commercialized in many aspects in Chapters 4 and 5. In AF’s case, the foundation workers were asked to be more wolf-like, aggressive, and self-sacrificed, which partly constituted their daily anxieties living in the most prosperous areas in China (see Chapter 5). But the cases I present here could be different. Most of AF’s partner organizations were located in less developed cities or towns. During my visits, I could hardly hear the organization leaders talking about their pressures of being a wolf-like worker, or buying houses and cars as most of the white collars in Shenzhen have to face today. In our conversations, regardless of whether we were discussing their private life or NGO work, most of the organization leaders would direct our discussions to the questions of how to manage the various social relations in their local society, including how to deal with the local officials, how to be more integrated into the local media and business circle, and how to work with different donors from the outside world.

It is not to say that these people I talked to had no anxieties at all, but it is because they were living a quite different life and therefore what gongyi means to them in their daily life should be understood in different ways. In this context, this chapter of local NGOs pays attention to a slightly different word that AF’s partner organizations called themselves, “gongyi people". Identifying themselves as 'a person in the local society', rather than an 'urban professional', my study reveals how corporatism at the local level can be strengthened and reproduced through the various social relations and everyday practices of the local NGO workers. My study of these NGO leaders also turned out to be an exploration of their personal history and network of “how to become a success”

7.3.1 Building and managing social relations

In Osburg’s study of China’s new rich, he looks at how the personal relationships in the city of Chengdu can be cultivated among the local businessmen as well as between the local government officials and the business circle. These personal relationships, called as guanxi in the Chinese language, have been seen as a legacy of the planned economy, which are supposed to be swept away by the expanding market reform in the past decades (Guthrie 1998; King 1991). Also, there are scholars emphasizing the adaptability and continuing evolution of guanxi in the reformist era (for example, Bian, 1994; Wank, 1999; Ho, 2009). Osburg’s (2013) ethnographic study of guanxin in Chengdu finds that these personal networks should be understood as “evolving cultural practices” which have contributed to the local market economy in the reformist era. In his research on the local corruption in Chengdu, Osburg argues that the elite networks between the private entrepreneurs and local government officials are “at the very heart of capitalist development in urban China” (ibid: 32). Given that the networks provide opportunities for the personal wealth and status accumulation, these local elites are more “rallied” together to achieve the economic growth goals set up by Beijing. In particular, Osburg examines how guanxin has been produced in certain new, exclusive spaces of leisure in the city, for instance, the various salons, karaoke, private clubs, spas, and so forth (ibid.: 37-75). Based on the traditional native-place ties, these new spaces have become important platforms of building up more exclusive personal relationships between business associates and other local elites, which has also contributed to the growing social inequality in China. My study of some NGO leaders’ daily life echoes with Osburg’s findings in two ways. Firstly, as these NGO leaders were running their own businesses and enjoying governmental titles at the same time, the people they met, the places they work, and the leisure time they spent every day were much more complex than most of the ordinary NGO workers I knew in the field. The most important job in dealing with the various social relations for them was not to clarify the differences but to manage, maintain, and live with them (Yan: 2003). The daily social activities that these NGO leaders did in their clubs or salons were not just to strengthen their personal networks, but also these social spaces and relationships have constituted to a culture of defining them as the "big bosses"

in the local society. Therefore, we can find that although the major donors of these organizations have changed from international agencies to domestic entrepreneurs, these organizations can still keep an extraordinary status in the local society. The current highly commercialized gongyi language has given these ‘successful’ NGO leaders more power in disciplining the other organizations in China’s NGO community.

Secondly, as the corruption in Chengdu shows, NGO leaders with better guanxi in their local society may not contribute to a more open and accountable environment for China’s NGO sector, although their organizations did have “stronger organizational capacity” in getting projects done in their local communities (Hsu & Hasmath, 2014; Hildebrandt, 2013). In my fieldwork, I found it difficult to talk to many of the “big bosses” that I had heard in AF’s office. Perry and Sarah were two of the very few leaders that I can get access to, although both of them were also very cautious of talking about the details of their personal history and wealth, family backgrounds, and their social networks. At the same time, the other organization leaders from the bottom of the society such as Humphrey were more likely to be defined as “the lag behind” in China’s NGO community, since they were seen as “less capable of mobilizing the local resources” for their gongyi work. In this sense, gongyi and Chinese NGOs, being deeply embedded in the various forms of corporatism and an increasingly polarized NGO sector, is producing new forms of social inequality from the internal structure of the NGO industry, as a mirror of the mainstream Chinese society.

7.3.2 Performing Buddhism

Doing gongyi in local society means more than just managing guanxi, it also indicates that the NGO leaders need to legitimate what they do in the sense of morality (Yarrow, 2008). My fieldwork with different local NGO leaders finds that their common belief in Buddhism turned out to be an important strategy of claiming their morality in the local society, though performed in different ways. In fact, many AF workers may have their own religions in their private life, but most of them were reluctant to show their faith in the workplace. On the one hand, the party-state in China is still ruled by the Communist Party; religious groups, especially Christian home churches, have been under strict

surveillance (see more in chapter 6). Therefore AF, as an influential NGO in China, tried to keep a non-religious face in the public. On the other hand, as the AF office has been deliberately designed as a place to separate its workers from their other aspects of life under the name of doing modern gongyi, so talking about their religions was perceived as "unprofessional" in the workplace. But the situations in AF’s local partners were quite different. Given the vague boundary between their private and non-private life, performing and discussing Buddhism was also part of their NGO and business work. Just like my informant Perry said to me, “the mortal life can be also a pure land, we need to practice [Buddhism] no matter where”. Cao’s (2008) ethnographic research of “Boss Christians” in the city of Wenzhou finds that the underground Christians and churches had overlapped with the emerging private entrepreneurs in China. With more than 90% of the economy in Wenzhou was from the private sector, especially family-owned businesses, the church-based social networks become quite crucial for these small businesses in terms of informal financing and information exchange. More importantly, being a Christian in the local society has become a symbol of most well to do families, so that they can present themselves to the nonbelievers (mostly immigrant workers), as having the most authentic reason to embrace the Western-style life and a high-class culture taste. Boss Christians in Wenzhou maintained a higher social status by performing their faith in distinctive ways, for instance, large scale drinking and banqueting events for their "church branding" and owning pianos at home as a Western culture symbol.

Unlike Christianity that has been seen as an imported symbol, the development of Buddhism has been much more popular among ordinary Chinese with its history dating back to two thousand years ago. There have been several culture fevers of Buddhism in reformist China, from the revival of martial arts and supernatural powers in the 1980s to the numerous reconstruction projects of traditional temples and monasteries across the country (Birnbaum 2003; Palmer 2007; Lai 2003). But the way that different groups of people perform Buddhism in creating a social hierarchy is much like the Christians in Wenzhou. Although all the three NGO leaders I discuss in this chapter were Buddhists, they tended to emphasize the differences in their daily Buddhist practices rather than their common faith. Like the “Boss Christians” in Wenzhou, Perry

and Sarah were the “Boss Buddhists” in their cities: comparing with Humphrey, they did not need to talk about Buddhism in a very straightforward way in their daily work, but the expensive and delicate Buddha statues and decorations in their offices and private clubs have perfectly presented their devotedness and outstanding cultural tastes, which in return justifies their morality in doing the noble cause of gongyi. However, for Humphrey, his way of practicing Buddhism was just like the immigrant workers in Wuzhou who participated in the church activities for learning a new language of being a success. As a person living in the bottom of the society in his early life, connecting his work with Buddhism was the only "language" that Humphrey could “speak” when he tried to socialize with the local business circle in doing modern gongyi. In the eyes of Perry and some other AF workers however, Humphrey’s practice of talking about his personal belief was quite “unprofessional”.

Conclusion

In September 2016, AF just finished another round of recruitment, with four new project officers in different humanitarian projects. In an internal AF meeting I attended, the then vice general secretary Calvin made a speech to these new employees, in which he spent most of the time talking about the importance of relationship maintenance with their local partner organization leaders:

“These gongyi people are not simple. They are the key to keeping our project safe in different provinces. They are the big bosses in the local society…they are very sophisticated people in our circle, old and clever enough to take advantage of their donors. You can push their staff to work, but don’t push them too hard. If you find yourself can’t deal with them, come to me”.

At the beginning of this chapter, Calvin described these NGO leaders as “big bosses (dalao)”, my fieldwork finds that the secret of “becoming a dalao” is not in specific projects they were doing, but the way they live. Becoming a ‘gongyi people’ in China’s NGO sector, in the cases that I have discussed in this chapter, means to live within and to become part of the corporatism on a daily basis. The capacity of building and managing various social relations in the local society