RESOLUCIÓN N.° 474/AGC/

What made gongyi to be more like its original meaning as ‘public interest’ was the appearance of the first-generation NGOs in the 1990s (Howell, 1995). In the early stages, these NGOs looked like many other government-organized voluntary groups, as their activities seemed to be very similar, like bird watching, tree planting, street cleaning, etc4_{. However, given their independent}

relations with the Chinese state, they were more often called as minjian zuzhi (organization among the people, 民间组织). Minjian (民间) is a very traditional Chinese word to categorize all the social forces outside the state from imperial China, including a large range of organizations like clans, folk religions, peasants’ rebellion groups, business associations, etc. Although the traditional minjian did not emphasize the independence from the state, it did indicate there could be something different (or sometimes even opposite) from the state. As we have discussed in Section 2.1, the Chinese state in the socialist era firstly eradicated most of those minjian organizations by defining them as the legacies of the feudalism and capitalism. Therefore, for a very long time there was no specific state regulations or institutions specifically for administrating any social organizations in China. This led to a relatively open space for many self- claimed minjian organizations showing up after Mao’s death between 1976 to 1988. As Veg (2019), in this period, as long as these organizations were not identified as a direct political threat to social stability, they were simply neglected or tolerated by Beijing.

However, the various political movements in the 1980s, especially the 1989 Beijing Student Movement in Tiananmen Square, made the Chinese state realize the importance of regulating social organizations in a more systematic way. By the end of 1989, a set of national regulations were announced on NGO issues, which turned out to be the foundations of China’s NGO policy reform in the past three decades (Howell, 2012). In these regulations, business associations which were beneficial for the economic development have been encouraged; organizations with government supports as their supervisory bodies were allowed to register; while the independent labor unions,

4 _{Interview with two NGO workers B1 (15/11/2016) and B13 (25/07/2017) in}

underground student organizations and religious groups were strictly prohibited (ibid.). Moreover, state apparatus began to set up across the country for close surveillance from organizational registration, financial resources, annual check, staff background review, to detailed instructions of establishing a ‘qualified’ board and so forth. In 1998, a government department called ‘minjian zuzhi guanli ju’ (民 间 组 织 管 理 局 , translated as ‘bureau of civil organizations administration’) was set up under the supervision of Ministry of Civil Affairs; since then from up to bottom, every local government in China has a relevant institution in charge of NGO regulation issues. That said, since Mao’s death, the ruling party in China has been through many changes in understanding and regulating various non-state actors. By establishing government institutions specifically for ‘minjian organizations’, for a very long time Chinese NGOs were officially identified as something politically suspicious, with different features from the state, and therefore subject to be ‘governed’ by the state. In this period, the language of gongyi did not enter the official documents and speeches regarding NGO issues yet, since most NGOs were depicted as suspicious or even negative. The positive meanings of gongyi, or public interest, would not be attached with them. It was the first-generation NGOs in the 1990s, trying to legitimatize themselves in the public, that began to use the word gongyi. As minjian was a confusing word with traditional meanings and political doubts, some of the NGOs began to identify themselves as minjian organizations working for ‘public interests’, so as to distinguish themselves in two ways: firstly, they were not part of the socialist gongyi, they were people-based organizations, not a government apparatus. Secondly, they were not ‘political threats’ to the country and its people; they were organized to promote gongyi, or public interest. The first- generation NGOs were mostly funded by various international agencies, establishing their own organizational missions (Ji, 2000). In the late 1990s, some of them turned into environmental advocacy groups, women’s organizations, etc. In many circumstances, these organizations were more tended to interpret gongyi with a new word (that is different from the socialist morality): gongmin shehui, or civil society, a language directly translated from the Western world. By connecting gongmin shehui with gongyi, the emerging Chinese NGOs in the 1990s redefined the Lei-Feng-like, socialist gongyi with different meanings.

According to Ma (1994), the notion of gongmin shehui did not appear in Chinese intellectual debates till 1986. Initially, the term was only used by a small group of Chinese theorists attempting to understand the differences between a socialist society and a capitalist society. After the failure of 1989 Student Movement, many intellectuals, whether in exile or at home, began to emphasize the autonomous nature of civil society (Zhao, 1998), taking independence from the state as an alternative to authoritarianism. However, their notion of civil society was more like an urgent solution in responding to the failure of the student movement. It was these ‘liberal intellectuals’ that greatly impacted the emerging Chinese NGOs. During my fieldwork, I find that some founders of the first-generation NGOs in China had close links with the 1989 Student Movement5_{. Some of them were activists in the movement themselves and}

therefore maintained close relations with the political dissidents. Others admitted that their ideas of civil society were greatly influenced by these activists6_{. In the 1990s to early 2000s that Chinese NGOs began to use the}

notion of gongmin shehui, or civil society, in terms of what it was against rather than what it stood for. By distancing themselves from the state-sponsored

gongyi, NGOs tried to re-define their activities as the ‘real gongyi’ since they were from ‘minjian’. For example, the volunteers and donations mobilized by the Communist Youth League were referred to as ‘forced volunteerism’ or ‘fake volunteerism’7_{, arguing that these participants were not joining such activities} out of their own thinking. Hence according to these NGOs, ‘real volunteers’ were only those who engaged in ‘good deeds’ from their own ‘independent thinking’ (Jia and Sun, 2013). Gongmin shehui is also used as an umbrella term for all individuals who engage

in anti-state politics, no matter how different their economic conditions and personal backgrounds are. One of my interviewees, Humphrey, often complained to me that he had severe conflicts with Perry, a leader of another organization. These two organizations were both sponsored by AF, but had very different ideas about how to redistribute the sponsor’s funding in their network. Humphrey was like a proletariat and his organization could only

5 _{Interview with an NGO worker B1 (15/11/2016) in Beijing.} 6 _{Interviews with an NGO worker H3 (17/07/ 2017) in H Province.} 7 _{Both B1 and H3 had the same comments on CYL’s activities.}

afford to hire himself and another full-time worker; this led him to portraying himself as a representative of those at the margin of the society. By contrast, Perry’s organization had more than 20 workers and was more like a middle or upper class in a Chinese metropolitan. He also had his own companies, properties and cars in the city. Perry’s proposals tended to be more ambitious than Humphrey’s and aimed at mobilizing more state funding and well-off citizens to participate in his charitable projects. When I asked him whether

gongyi consisted in doing good deeds, Humphrey vehemently rejected this

definition: “No, of course not. We are all liberalists, we believe in the gongmin shehui values, a smaller government and a big society. So we should do gongyi together!” Humphrey said. From the discussions above, we may find that intellectuals and NGO practioners has reinvented ‘gongyi’ with a new value system, a mere normative knowledge, and a political ideology to solidify activists, departing from a socialist language. As an ideology, we can hardly see any serious discussions of how different civil society theories could be applied in analyzing social change in China, or what kind of internal conflicts of Chinese gongmin shehui may have among Chinese NGOs. Moreover, gongmin shehui changes ‘gongyi’ to be an action-oriented knowledge. As one NGO worker told me, ‘gongmin shehui is not done by talking, but only by doing’. The issue seems to be not what kinds of gongmin shehui China is going to have, but how to construct this gongmin shehui and when can Chinese people achieve gongmin shehui. In 2011, activist and NGO leader Liang Xiaoyan in a public speech delivered in Hong Kong University, told her audience that she had dedicated herself to ‘constructing China’s gongmin shehui’. Asked by the host how he felt about the speech, a student responded: “Actually, I still do not know what exactly gongmin shehui is. But one thing I know is that, if everyone just participates in it, this gongmin shehui can be better”8_. In this sense, this consensus among Chinese activists around the meaning of gongmin shehui and how to achieve it has changed the political nature of gongyi. At least among China’s NGO sector, gongyi was no longer being used in socialist, state-centric discourses for the national economic development. In many news

reports and research, 2008 was being referred to as the ‘year of China’s

gongmin shehui’ (e.g. Deng, 2008; Teets, 2009; Yang, 2017). That is largely

because for the first time, people found NGOs in China did not have to work underground: a large number of volunteers and social organizations joined in the disaster relief work following the devastating Sichuan earthquake that year. Almost at the same time, many local governments at the provincial and municipal levels began to reform NGO regulations, making the NGO registration process much easier (Hildebrandt, 2011).

However, the popularity of this revived ‘gongmin shehui’ did not last long. The major sponsors behind many national organizations promoting ‘gongmin

shehui’ from the early 2000s were international agencies and have been seen

as a threat to the state. Since 2010, Oxfam China has been under strict political surveillance and their volunteer recruitment in all Chinese universities was abolished; many of their local partner organizations were subjected to surveillance and police checks9_{. In 2011, these sanctions were formalized in an}

article calling for more ‘innovative and scientific social management in China’, written by the then General-Secretary of the ruling party’s Central Commission of Justice and Law, Zhou Benshun. In this article, Zhou wrote that the country should ‘guard against mistaken beliefs and propaganda, lest we fall into the trap of so-called gongmin shehui that some Western countries have set for us’ 10_.

Subsequently, gongmin shehui was listed in an internal Communist Party propaganda document as one of the ‘seven don’t-says’.

To some degree, the Chinese government’s reaction confirms that the notion of

gongmin shehui has become a contentious force threatening mainstream

propaganda. Since the censorship, a very visible change is that people no longer use ‘gongmin shehui construction’ when explaining gongyi in public. As

gongmin shehui has been seen as a radical and dangerous language, it needs to give way to a more ‘depoliticized’ or ‘neutral’ understanding of gongyi. 9 _{Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/23/china-tells-} schools-ban-oxfam 10 _{Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-official-warns-against-} trap-of-civil-society_1497993.html