Hailing Zhao; Cheng Lu; Carlie Hibbert
Hailing Zhao
University of East Anglia, Year 3 PhD candidate in International Development
Rethinking NGOs and market in China: a case study of a Chinese foundation
The past a few years have witnessed the rapidly decline of funding from international organizations in China’s NGO sector. Meanwhile, the funding from the domestic private sector (e.g. impact investments from Chinese companies, funding from corporate social responsibility departments, or donations from super rich Chinese) has kept increasing greatly. The changing landscape of China’s NGO sector has led to hot debates on marketization among Chinese NGO practitioners as well as researchers. My research examines the relations between NGOs and market under this background. By ethnographic study of an entrepreneur-founded foundation in China, my research will reveal and understand how NGOs could be influenced by the marketization currencies in terms of organizational governance and their everyday work. Specifically, the paper would focus on three issues: recruitment, daily human resource management, and organizational culture. I argue that markets should not be understood only as a source of funding or an external element when researchers evaluate the relations with NGOs. Rather, market has been affecting, and greatly changing, what NGOs and NGO workers look like in China through the rising of domestic foundations and private entrepreneurs. By establishing various organizations themselves, Chinese private entrepreneurs have become major driver of the marketization process in China’s NGO sector. They have been no longer passive, external donors; but also decision-makers and active game players. At the same time, Chinese NGOs may have not only been impacted in terms of funding, but also in their working patterns, organizational structures, values and knowledge. Such impacts brought by marketization process may be a double-edged sword: they may hence the ‘working efficiency’ of China’s NGOs; also they could make NGOs and other civil society groups to be more ‘de-politicalized’ in China’s context.
Cheng Lu
Durham University, Year 2 PhD Candidate in Sociology
Reexamining the Impact of Contention in Harmonious Society:
Protest Signals, Intellectual Responses and Knowledge Production
It is known to all that there is a new wave of social insurgency in authoritarian China, but, only a few studies try to explore the impacts and consequences of these popular protests. Most scholars focusing on this issue paid much attention to the role of state and stressed the heterogeneity of governmental responses, both vertically and horizontally, to protest events. So, here questions arise. Do Chinese popular protests make change to other Chinese social institutions? Do these institutions also respond to protest events heterogeneously? How can we explain the variations of responses of the same institution? To answer these questions, this study will take established intellectuals’ research activities for a case and examine the effect of popular protest on knowledge production within established intellectual institutions. Following signaling theory, this study will view each protest event as a carrier of mix messages, namely action, issue and threat, and further argue that established intellectuals will receive all kinds of signals and respond to them respectively and selectively. Thus, a complex pattern of relations between activists/protests and intellectuals/knowledge will be delineated and three types of protest-relevant knowledge produced by established intellectuals, as institutional responses to protest events, will be explicitly distinguished, namely action-mobilization, issue-professional and threat-governance knowledge. Then, by collecting data from newspapers and academic journals to constitute Truth Table, multiple causal pathways to different combinations of institutional outcomes will be identified via QCA on basis of a combined theoretical framework revised from political mediation model, which consists of dimension of protest signals, namely strength, clarity and level, and dimension of opportunity structure, including political and academic opportunity. In summary, this study is expected to make contribution to the evaluation of intellectual impact of Chinese protests and to the interactions between established intellectuals and non-institutional actors, rather than intellectual-state relations.
Carlie Hibbert
SOAS, MSc Politics of China
The Role of Social Media in Cross-Strait Relations
This dissertation hopes to explore the question: what role did new media play in Tsai Ing-wen’s election and how did it affect cross-strait relations. New or social media has only really gained momentum in politics within the past 10 years. It is a new element that is rapidly gaining influence; however, its true impact has yet to be fully discovered. This is an area that may have tremendous impact in modern understanding of politics, and it deserves attention to study its potential and actual impact in politics. This paper will examine the role new media played in politics leading up to the election of Tsai Ing-wen as president from Taiwan’s perspective and from China’s perspective. Additionally, in recent years, each new president of Taiwan had their own effect on cross-strait relations. China’s perspective may shed light on Tsai Ing-wen’s anticipated effect on cross-strait relations. This paper will also examine whether new media had a continued effect on politics following Tsai Ing-wen’s presidency and whether that effect presents in current cross-strait relations.