The Chinese state has had a tumultuous relationship with civil society organizations (CSO) since they first emerged in the post-Mao era. Thanks to their resilient advocacy, some CSOs legitimize their issue areas and participate in policy processes. Environmental and migrant CSOs have had successful advocacy outcomes while housing and labor CSOs are still at the margins of the policy realm. As the public sphere shrinks under the new leadership, many national-level CSOs continue their advocacy through direct lobbying with the relevant government offices.
At the local level, China has developed what is called ‘neighborhood governance system’ that incorporates local CSOs as volunteer organizations. There is growing social discontent as local governments are in enormous debt and cannot afford welfare services. Therefore, the Chinese government emulated the service-providing CSO system to both co-opt local non-profits and to outsource the resolution of emerging social issues, such as elderly care and healthcare. These are by definition sensitive issues because they are all social policy failures of the central and/or local governments. In other words, service-providing CSOs operate in contentious fields and while providing services, they also partake in the framing of issue areas.
This research analyzes the inadvertent advocacy of service-providing CSOs in two fields: childcare provision and food safety. The former reflects public resentment towards the central government’s push for the two-child policy to slow down aging of the population, because the government has so far only suggested women quit their jobs to take care of the second child instead of providing childcare facilities and financial subsidies to encourage couples to plan having the second child. The latter reflects public resentment towards local governments’ inadequate food safety regulations. Food safety concerns are exacerbated in China during the pandemic period. These two case studies compare advocacy capacity of service-providing CSOs’ when their issue area challenges either central or local governments. Fieldwork in authoritarian settings on politically sensitive issues requires a particular set of data collection tools. The research design for this work will be based on vignette survey experiments to increase the validity of the data.
