Labor Precarity of Chinese Feminist and LGBT NGO Activism—a Social Reproduction Perspective

Abstract: This article examines an under-explored topic of labor precarity of Chinese feminist and LGBT NGO activism from the perspective of social reproduction. Contextualizing the intimate connection between the Chinese party-state outsourcing social service delivery to global civil society and the burgeoning of feminist and LGBT NGOs since the 1990s, it argues that the party-state relies on the social reproductive functions of these NGO while containing their political influence; at the same time, the transnational non-profit funding complex utilized these NGOs for political intervention in China. Arguing against a binary framework of civil society versus state and resistance versus oppression, this article centers the lived experiences of feminist and LGBT activist workers and highlights the contradiction and interplay of agency and conformity of these workers in the state- and market- orchestrated processes of moralization, illegalization, and professionalization, whereby they reshape, revise, or reinforce norms associated with gender, sexuality, and neoliberal standards of productivity and efficiency. Building on Marxist feminist theorization of labor, this article valorizes NGO labor as socially valued work and calls for attention to the issue of labor precarity of NGO activist workers under the backdrop of increasing state violence and market cooptation in many parts of the world, especially in the global South.