The Party-State’s Hegemonic Project and Responses from Civil Society: The Case of Service-oriented NGOs in China

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Chinese party-state’s hegemonic project to construct social consent in NGOs and how they react to this. Using service-oriented NGOs as examples, it argues that the changing institutional dynamics of NGO governance in China demonstrates that Chinese civil society is a site of ideological struggle. The party-state has adapted some foreign concepts and practices of civil society, which have been popular in China since the reform era, to serve its political and socioeconomic agenda, while avoiding political challenges of liberal values and discourse. Civil society’s hegemonic transformation relies on two major mechanisms—professionalization and Maoist incorporation. This process, however, also leaves some space for NGOs to act differently. Some have been comfortably incorporated into the state-led welfare system and reproduce authoritarian norms and practices among their beneficiaries, whereas counter-hegemonic activism still exists among groups that link their stance and agenda closely with marginalized groups in society.