Anxiety and Ambivalence: NGO–Activist Partnership in China’s Environmental Protests, 2007–2016

Abstract

This article examines how partnership between social organizations and popular protests is affected by the state in the field of environmental activism. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, we study non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement with 22 grassroots environmental protests in China, 2007–2016. We find that NGOs and grassroots protesters were mostly distant from each other to avoid state repression and retribution, but NGOs occasionally collaborated with protesters in an ambivalent manner because state control was contradictory, fragmented, and varying. NGOs either used institutional means to support the protesters or were informally and invisibly involved in those protests. Our research contributes to studies of the triangular relationship between the state, NGOs, and social movements. Specifically, we find that when NGOs lack the institutional access to policy making but are not fully controlled by the state, they have both incentives and spaces to make joint actions with grassroots activists.

Introduction

Do social organizations collaborate with popular protests in an authoritarian context? Given that the state controls social organizations and suppresses contentious movements, we wonder whether social organizations like non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots activists are able to form synergies in protests. If so, how is the NGO–activist partnership affected by the state?

Despite the lack of political opportunity for collective resistance, researchers have found that civil and grassroots activists are able to make contentious claims and even build movement alliance under the so-called liberalized authoritarianism (Heurlin 2010; Moss 2014; Schock 2005). In China, until recently, the economic reform created ambiguous political spaces and sent mixed signals to various kinds of activists—including critical journalists (Lei 2017), lawyers (Stern 2013), NGO leaders (Hildebrandt 2013; Spires 2011), and reformist state officials (Mertha 2008; Zhang 2018)—who navigated political possibilities by simultaneously working with and criticizing the state (Stern and O’Brien 2012). Furthermore, the Chinese state left limited spaces for interest-driven social protests (Lee and Zhang 2013; O’Brien 2008). The relationship between such institutional actors (e.g., NGOs) and grassroots activists, however, remains less studied.

In this article, we examine the relationship between the state, environmental NGOs (ENGOs), and grassroots environmental protests in China,¹ the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter since 2009. There, ENGOs and grassroots environmental activism were previously disconnected, but recent studies find that there is a partnership between the two (Bondes and Johnson 2017; Steinhardt and Wu 2016; Sun et al. 2017). Little is understood about how the state regulates the collaboration between these two otherwise separate actors. To explore the nature of such partnership, we analyze NGO participation in 22 environmental protests between 2007 and 2016. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, our paper offers a comprehensive survey of the partnership between social organizations and grassroots activists in the recent grassroots environmental protests in China.

We find that NGO partnership with environmental protesters is anxious and ambivalent. First, NGOs and grassroots protesters forge anxious alliances in China, as both parties are eager but nervous to ally with one another. Social-psychologically, anxiety “occurs when individuals appraise a situation as being unpleasant, highly threatening and uncertain” (Albertson and Gadarian 2015: 37), and often leads to risk-averse behavior (Eysenck 1992). Under China’s authoritarian regime, NGOs worry about state regulation, repression, and retribution, despite the desire to establish their reputations in contentious public events. Similarly, while grassroots activists hope to gain support from NGOs, they are cautious to do so for fear of being identified as organized confrontation with the state. Second, the NGO–protester alliance is ambivalent, because the boundary of such partnership is shifting, contingent upon how NGO actors navigate the political boundary in their interactions with state actors. Sociologically, ambivalence occurs when people experience mixed feelings, opposing preferences, self-contradictory attitudes, and in-between forms of actions, and when they simultaneously embrace and reject certain objects (Merton 1976; Smelser 1998). Operating in a restrictive yet ambiguous political space, NGOs in China either use legal, institutional methods to support citizen activists or become informally and invisibly involved in grassroots protests, so as to keep both autonomy and flexibility.

We further contend that such NGO–activist relations hinge on how the state controls civil society. Notably, the state is not a unitary, monolithic entity, but is composed of multiplex and often conflicting parts and actors (Migdal 2001). It often maintains incoherent control of civil society and creates a mosaic relationship between social organizations and popular protests (Moss 2014). As such, our research shows that the fragmented and contradictory state control results in both detachment and engagement between NGOs and grassroots activists in China.

Our research contributes to emerging studies of the triangular relationship between the state, social organizations, and social protests in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America (Brass 2016; Glasius and Ishkanian 2015; Karriem and Benjamin 2016). Beyond examining their dyadic relationships, we find that authoritarian yet ambiguous state control of social organizations may cause anxiety and ambivalence within NGO–protester partnerships. Specifically, our preliminary exploration finds that the in-between level of state control may produce incentives and spaces for NGOs to participate in grassroots protests.

The rest of the article proceeds as follows. The next section offers a theoretical discussion about how fluid state control may affect NGO–protester partnership. We then introduce research design and data and provide a historical background of Chinese environmental activism. Subsequently, we discuss the contradiction, fragmentation, and variation of state control over NGOs in China. Using in-depth interviews, we then analyze how such control affected NGO participation in environmental protests from 2007 to 2016. We conclude by summarizing our findings and contributions and discussing new trends of environmental activism in China.

The State and the NGO–Protester Partnership

The state, NGOs, and popular protesters constitute a subtle triangular relationship. Above all, the relationship between NGOs and grassroots protesters is ambivalent almost everywhere. On the one hand, NGOs are potential allies for grassroots activists, such as by helping activists frame their course of actions (Karriem and Benjamin 2016), and providing activists with greater access to change policies (Swidler and Watkins 2017). Furthermore, because NGOs are embedded in established networks, they are also platforms for individual activists to form ties to facilitate larger-scale mobilization and cross-movement coalition (Van Dyke and Amos 2017). Finally, grassroots protesters can form their own NGOs to sustain their activism, further blurring the boundary between NGOs and activists (Glasius and Ishkanian 2015). On the other hand, however, the NGO–activist relationship has varying degrees of visibility and significance. Well-connected NGOs often reflect the values and interests of domestic and international establishments rather than represent grassroots groups, and may distance themselves from grassroots radicalism (Hauf 2017). With its inherent hierarchy and professionalization, NGOs sometimes draw disdain from grassroots activists, who see NGOs as becoming too compromising, or allegedly losing their core values (Alvarez 2009).

This already nuanced NGO–activist relationship is further complicated under certain authoritarian contexts where the state employs flexible strategies to control NGOs and protesters. It is widely found that the state is “Janus-faced,” comprising cognitively heterogeneous actors and multiple competing subgroups (Migdal 2001: 22). Furthermore, the boundary between the state and society is blurred and contested: “the edges of the state are uncertain; social elements seem to penetrate it on all sides, and the resulting boundary between state and society is difficult to determine” (Mitchell 1991: 88). Across multiple civil sectors in China, for example, the fissures in state policy create an uncertainty among activists to define their political boundaries; therefore, “the presence of mixed signals is an important reminder that the Chinese state, even at its most repressive, is not as single-minded as it is sometimes portrayed” (Stern and O’Brien 2012: 190). Such fragmented authoritarian control has consequential implications for both NGOs and grassroots protesters and their relationships (Fu 2017; Mertha 2008).

On the one hand, authoritarian states’ strategies toward regulating NGOs can be categorized into two approaches: 1) exclusionary policies that may limit the scope of NGOs’ operations, financial resources, and autonomy, or 2) corporatist policies that incorporate NGOs into the government to provide public service (Brass 2012; Heurlin 2010). In practice, however, a state can employ both strategies while implementing them differently across place and policy fields. This uncertainty of rules creates mixed signals for NGOs: in China, for example, state–NGO relationships are found to be blurred (Stern and O’Brien 2012), ambiguous (O’Brien 2003), bargained (Lee and Zhang 2013), conditional but cooperative (Zhang 2015), and co-existent, yet location-dependent (Spires 2011). In such an ambiguous space, NGOs operate “at the boundary of the acceptable” and continually navigate “the limits of state toleration” (Gasemyr 2017: 103).

On the other hand, while authoritarian states may firmly contain protests, their strategies of control become flexible and pragmatic in certain “liberalized authoritarian” regimes (Moss 2014). Rather than indistinguishable repression, the state tends to permit non-political, interest-driven protests so as to collect information about social grievances (Lorentzen 2013). In China, for instance, it may even be a deliberate strategy of the central state to use such protests to monitor local governments’ malfeasance (Hildebrandt 2013: 10; Lee and Zhang 2013). Therefore, “there is not one unitary, national opportunity structure, but multiple, cross-cutting openings and obstacles to mobilization” (O’Brien 2008: 13–14).² The multifaceted state produces boundary-spanning contentions and various “in-between forms of resistance” (Chen 2012; O’Brien 2003).

Such kind of authoritarian control, we argue, also makes NGO partnership with grassroots movements precious and precarious. Under political pressure, their partnership is often “surreptitious symbiosis”: NGOs offer activists “behind-the-scenes” support for fear of state retribution (Glasius and Ishkanian 2015). NGOs’ ties to the government may further limit their open support for activists or constrain their effectiveness in advancing their cause (Teets 2014). However, the fragmented state control leaves ambiguous spaces for NGOs to participate in protests, albeit often in a limited, invisible way.

Our exploratory research reaches a preliminary finding about the curvilinear relationship between state control and NGO–protester partnership. When the state distances itself from civil organizations but does not entirely tighten its grip on civil society, it presents both incentives and opportunities for NGOs to collaborate with grassroots activists. In the absence of institutional access, NGOs work directly with citizen activists to voice their opposition to certain policies, especially when the state is not repressive enough to stifle this NGO–protester partnership. By comparison, a more inclusive and responsive regime may incorporate NGOs into the policy process and institutionalize them, and a more exclusive and repressive regime may suppress the contentious nature of NGOs and fully obstruct their collaborations with protesters.³

Methods and Data

Our article examines two environmental movement sectors—anti-PX⁴ and anti-incinerator protests⁵—the two most influential types of environmental protests in China recently. Our period of study begins with two inaugural protests in 2007 against a PX chemical plant in Xiamen and a waste incinerator site in Beijing, respectively, which inspired a series of anti-PX and anti-incinerator protests around the country. Our study period ends in 2016 because 2017 is often regarded as the beginning of a new era of China’s regulation of civil society with a new NGO law, effective on January 1, 2017. We choose these two movement sectors also because NGO–protester partnership has been reported in previous case studies about anti-PX protests (Steinhardt and Wu 2016; Sun et al. 2017; Zhang 2018) and anti-incinerator protests (Bondes and Johnson 2017; Johnson 2010; Lang and Xu 2013; Wong 2016). In a notable study, Steinhardt and Wu (2016) exemplify such partnership with two anti-PX protests and one anti-incinerator protest out of four environmental protests. Our main purpose is to further identify common patterns of NGO participation in these two types of popular protests over a decade.

Using LexisNexis to search English media reports of protests in 2017, we identified nine anti-PX protests and 13 anti-incinerator protests in several cities between 2007 and 2016. The world’s largest electronic database for legal and journalistic documents, LexisNexis encompasses the most comprehensive English media information about China by including multiple sources, such as BBC, The New York Times, and South China Morning Post. We used the search terms “PX,” “incinerator,” “environmental protest,” “environmental unrest,” or “environmental movement,” in combination with “China” or “Chinese,” and identified the 22 protests. We did not use Chinese sources in our search mainly because of the lack of accurate information due to media censorship; further, there is no Chinese counterpart to LexisNexis to be used as the base for content analysis. However, we have cross-checked the information of the 22 cases within available reports in Chinese media.⁶ Figure 1 maps the 22 cases in our dataset.⁷

Fig. 1

Sources: LexisNexis Database

Major cases of anti-PX and Anti-incinerator protests in urban China, 2007–2016.

Here, we briefly sum up the 22 protests. Beginning with the 2007 movement in Xiamen, these nine anti-PX protests ranged in numbers of participants from a few hundred to as many as 70,000. Half of these protests saw both violence and police crackdown. Notably, in six of these nine cases, the protests proved successful, with a substantial concession made from the government to protesting constituencies in the form of PX project cancellation or relocation (Appendix Table 2). The 13 urban anti-incinerator plant protests began with the 2007 protest against the Liulitun incinerator in Beijing. Like the anti-PX protests, the size of these protests ranged from just a few hundred to roughly 20,000. Half of these protests were successful, while only one failed outright (Appendix Table 3). Because of the limit inherent to content analysis and the constraints of our data sources (Earl et al. 2004), our cases do not constitute a full sample of all anti-PX and anti-incinerator protests during this period, but we did identify those protests that captured wider public interest.

Our in-depth analysis is built upon 50 interviews with individuals directly involved in these protests or otherwise familiar with them. In 2008 and 2012, the first author conducted pilot fieldwork in Xiamen and Beijing and interviewed individuals related to the first anti-PX and anti-incinerator protests. Using content analysis in 2017, we further identified those cases in which NGOs were reported to participate in the protests between 2007 and 2016. Subsequently, we employed the “sequencing interview” method to conduct interviews in July and August 2018 with individuals involved in protests in Guangzhou, Kunming, and Ningbo and NGO leaders in Beijing (Small 2009: 24–25). Taken together, we have interviewed one Vice Minister, three department chiefs (“sizhang”), and three division heads (“chuzhang”) of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, six local environmental officials, ten ENGO leaders, eight protest leaders, as well as journalists, scientists, NGO staff members, and ordinary citizen protesters.⁸

The 50 interviews were all semi-structured, open-ended interviews, each lasting from 1 to 4 h. In particular, we asked ENGO members and protest leaders about whether and how they collaborated with each other, what constrained them from further partnership, and how the state warned and punished them for their collaboration. Overall, these interviews enabled us to obtain inside information about the relationship between ENGOs and protesters, providing the main evidence to support our theoretical claims.

Background: Periodization of Environmental Activism in China

This section provides a brief background of environmental activism in China with a focus on the change of ENGO–activist partnership over time. Chinese environmentalism is constituted by a complex network of actors, including environmental officials, journalists, lawyers, scientists, and citizen activists (Zhang 2018). Among them, three can be ranked as the most important: grassroots activists, local and national/international ENGOs, and activists within environmental agencies, especially the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, 1998–2008) and later the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP, 2008–2018).⁹

Based on the leading actor and key features, we organize China’s environmental activism (1994–2016) into three periods (Table 1): (1) ENGO-led environmentalism in 1994–2003; (2) SEPA-led “embedded activism” in 2003–2007 (Ho and Edmonds 2007); (3) and grassroots environmental activism in 2007–2016. While these three stages overlapped and saw common activities, our periodization captures the most essential characteristics of each stage and is consistent with the current literature (Bondes and Johnson 2017; Steinhardt and Wu 2016).

Table 1 Periods and patterns of environmental activism in China, 1994–2016

China’s environmental activism began in 1994 with the founding of the first ENGO, Friends of Nature. Soon after, ENGOs sprang up nationwide, becoming the most vibrant actors in environmental activism (Yang 2005). Capitalizing on growing environmental awareness in China, these ENGOs succeeded in leading a few environmental campaigns, such as the Golden Snubnosed Monkey Protection Campaign (1995–1996). By allying with reporters and other social elites, they successfully pushed these movements forward without protests against the state. However, little evidence shows that NGOs collaborated with grassroots protesters during this period. At this stage, Chinese ENGOs professed “a greening without conflict, an environmentalism with a safe distance from direct political action” (Ho 2001: 916).

In Stage II (2003–2007), SEPA began to play a vital role in coordinating environmental activism, although ENGOs continued to function as an indispensable ally for SEPA. A ministerial agency, SEPA was in charge of environmental policy making, regulation, and investigation. With the arrival of the reformist Deputy Director Pan Yue in 2003, SEPA began expanding its authority in environmental regulation and enforcing stricter implementation of environmental impact assessments. Furthermore, Pan Yue and his aides coordinated a network of environmental activists, including ENGO leaders, reporters, scientists, and celebrities, and tactically made joint actions in environmental campaigns. In a landmark case, this network successfully halted the Nu River Dam (Mertha 2008). While collaborating with these reformist SEPA officials, ENGOs continued distancing themselves from grassroots protesters in these years. The dualism of environmental activism—the separation between grassroots protesters and professional ENGOs—was regarded as a defining feature for this stage (Johnson 2010).

In Stage III (2007–2016), grassroots environmental protests gained momentum while the leadership of MEP went silent. Despite being upgraded into a full ministry in 2008, MEP officials became less active, mainly due to a power reshuffle within MEP in which Pan Yue and his aides were sidelined or demoted by Minister Zhou Shengxian (Watts 2009).¹⁰ ENGOs were then considered by Zhou as potential enemies rather than “natural allies,” and had less institutional channels to affect policy making.¹¹ Partly due to the inaction of MEP, environmental activism began to take on a new shape, with a populace increasingly aware of health hazards and a wave of grassroots protests across several cities, exemplified by the anti-PX and anti-incinerator protests (Steinhardt and Wu 2016).¹² As grassroots activists now chose to protest on the street rather than petition with the state, ENGOs are also found to support protesters to pressure the state (Sun et al. 2017; Wong 2016).

State Control of NGOS: Contradiction, Fragmentation, and Variations

To gain a full picture about whether and how ENGOs partnered with protesters, we first describe how the Chinese state controls NGOs. The complexity of state–NGO relations stems from the state’s contradictory strategies of NGO regulation, the policy incoherence between the central and local states, and regional variations and temporal volatility of the policy. This style of state control leads to mixed signals for NGOs, who are unsure of their boundary within the state (Stern and O’Brien 2012).

Above all, the Chinese state regulates NGOs with a combination of strategies ranging from collaboration, cooptation, containment, and control. First, the state, especially local governments, collaborates with NGOs in order to deliver social services and reduce administrative costs (Teets 2014; Yuen 2018). In so doing, the state also co-opts NGOs for institutional participation, though their relationship is asymmetrical and unequal: the state can exist with or without the NGO, but the NGO depends on the government for survival (Spires 2011; Hsu et al. 2017). Meanwhile, the state firmly contains political activities of NGOs through strategies such as the compulsory dual-registration system (Heurlin 2010). NGOs that are deemed as subversive can be forced to forfeit their registration, making them seem invalid (Fu 2017). Lastly, the state controls confrontational activities of NGOs: it does not hesitate to prevent or suppress NGO participation in contentious events by using surveillance, language control, and direct crackdown (Fu 2017; Gao and Tyson 2017).

In addition, the state–NGO relationship in China is well-known for its central–local inconsistency due to its decentralized administration (Mertha 2008). For example, SEPA was more reformist than most provincial or local environmental agencies in 2003–2007 (Wu 2013), but when it became conservative after 2008, some municipal environmental administrations, such as in Beijing, were still open to civic engagement.¹³ This incoherence also presents NGOs with different kinds of opportunities for political activism: local NGOs may work with national NGOs in Beijing to leverage the central government to pressure the local government (Hildebrandt 2013; Spires 2011); alternatively, local NGOs and local governments may collude to circumvent the central government when they have common interests (Gasemyr 2017: 98; Li 2019b: 84–85).

Furthermore, there are regional variations regarding state regulation, leaving NGOs with different political opportunities. For example, Yunnan and Guangdong are often considered to have the most robust NGO engagement; NGOs in Beijing are resourceful and politically connected, but they cannot be too controversial or radical because they are more heavily scrutinized and surveilled (Hildebrandt 2013; Hsu et al. 2017; Spires 2011; Wu 2013). As such, NGOs in different areas adopt varying partnership strategies with grassroots protesters.

Finally, there is temporal policy volatility. For SEPA/MEP, the years of 2003 and 2008 marked two turning points, respectively, opening a reformist period and a reactionary period regarding state–NGO partnership. On the provincial level, in Guangdong, a change of registration policy in 2012 allowed NGOs to register without a government agency as their sponsor, thus opening opportunity windows for many new grassroots NGOs (Dai and Spires 2018: 69); in Yunnan, by comparison, NGOs’ registration policy was tightened by the state at nearly the same time (Teets 2014). Overall, the temporal policy volatility creates different kinds of opportunities and obstacles for NGO activism in grassroots protests.

Taken together, China’s policies surrounding NGOs are flexible, emerging, and “not yet fully institutionalized” (Gasemyr 2017: 89). This environment perpetuates uncertainty for NGOs that do not know their boundaries. Therefore, NGOs are simultaneously embedded within the state, so that they may explore possibilities within the political limit, and detached from the state, allowing them autonomy to participate in confrontational events (Yuen 2018).

Anxiety and Absence of NGOS in Environmental Protests

For NGOs, interest-driven environmental protest is a grey zone that allows for the contest between contention and control (Stern and O’Brien 2012). China’s central state even tacitly allows such protests to collect information about society and monitor the delinquency of local states (Lee and Zhang 2013; O’Brien and Li 2006). That being said, the state still considers NGOs’ public participation in such protests to be confrontational and dangerous.

Overall, we find that NGO participation in grassroots environmental protests was limited. In the majority of the 22 cases, ENGOs strategically opted against involvement in such protests or were unable to participate. Instead, private citizens disseminated information on social media and shared protest details with those in their social circles, hinging success on the amount of pressure they placed on the local government and the amount of national or international scrutiny drawn from media reports. Given the wide publication of these protests, it can be assumed that NGOs were aware of the protests but were unwilling or unable to participate in them.

The overall absence of NGO–protester partnership demonstrates the anxiety of both NGOs and grassroots activists for fear of government penalty. On one hand, NGOs were self-limiting in grassroots environmental protests. In the protests in Xiamen and Beijing, for example, ENGO leaders said they were deliberately distant from collective contention.¹⁴ When contacted by citizens for organizing a March, the NGO Green Cross in Xiamen refused outright with the “Three No” principle: “no support, no opposition, no organizing.”¹⁵ In Beijing, when residents requested support for their protest against the proposed Liulitun waste incinerator from 2007 to 2011, Beijing ENGOs stayed away from the protest (Johnson 2010; Lang and Xu 2013).¹⁶

On the other hand, citizen activists were as anxious as ENGOs regarding their partnership. Activists saw the benefit in protesting as citizens rather than in association with an NGO to avoid becoming “professional activists.” Actual protesters also deliberately distanced themselves from NGOs to protect themselves from being identified as organized contention (Li 2019b: 85). For example, Beijing residents did not request NGOs to back their protests, as recalled by an NGO leader: “I feel that citizens almost never discussed with us about their protests. I am not sure whether they have certain consciousness of self-protection as well as avoid trapping NGOs in a dilemma.”¹⁷ In the anti-incinerator protest in Guangzhou, one grassroots leader recalled:

Indeed, we avoided the concept of “organizing” from the very beginning. We continually highlighted that we didn’t have an organization and no external organization intervened; we participated in this incident as individuals, as individual activists.¹⁸

Interestingly, when this grassroots leader later created his own professional NGO, Eco-Canton, in 2012, he experienced the same distance from citizen activists protesting incinerators: “In 2012–2013, we did consider offering more partnership [to anti-incinerator incidents] in some locations, but the residents were not interested. So, we didn’t get very involved.”¹⁹ Indeed, the contentious identities of activists and ENGOs were situational.

The anxiety of NGOs and grassroots protesters and the overall absence of their partnership are related to the aforementioned state cooptation, surveillance, and suppression of NGOs. NGOs limited themselves for fear of arrest, being shut down, or losing organizational credential; grassroots activists understood that working with an institution for policy change opened them up to greater government scrutiny. In Xiamen, Green Cross was unwilling to participate precisely because the local authorities had made it clear that even sharing information about the anti-PX March would be deemed unacceptable, threatening to shut down the organization.²⁰ NGO activists were monitored during the mobilization period, and some of them were arrested before the March.²¹ Our content analysis shows that in more than half of anti-PX protests, such as Xiamen, Dalian, Ningbo, and Kunming, dozens of protesters were detained after the March.²² Likewise, all anti-incinerator protests between 2013 and 2016 experienced police crackdown. In Kunming, according to a leader of the NGO Green Watershed: “We were closely monitored at the time and were unable to go to the street. Prior to the protest, director and associate directors of our supervisory agency, the Science and Technology Agency [of Yunnan Province], continually visited us, warning us not to do something, and so on.”²³

In short, because Chinese civil society organizations depend on flying under the state’s radar, most ENGOs were unable or unwilling to involve themselves in environmental protests. Their anxiety to form alliances stemmed from avoiding state scrutiny and penalty: NGOs and citizen activists practiced self-limiting and distancing actions for the sake of their own safety.

Ambivalence of the ENGO–Activist Alliance

As mentioned above, although the Chinese state deploys a number of strategies to control NGO involvement in protests, the everyday implementation is decentralized, fragmented, and often self-contradictory, leaving social organizations limited spaces to partner with grassroots protesters (Fu 2017). Rather than remaining entirely silent in contentious events, they were involved with varying degrees in several cases, including anti-PX protests in Xiamen (2007), Ningbo (2012), and Kunming (2013) and anti-incinerator protests in Beijing (2007, 2009) and Guangzhou (2009–2011). Furthermore, some temporal policy shifts of the state (unintentionally) provoked NGO involvement in grassroots protests. In particular, ENGOs, alienated by the MEP after 2008, had increasing incentives to collaborate with the protesters to voice their opposition against polluting projects, especially wherever the contentious space was not closed by the state.

In these cases, explicit movement strategies were rarely adopted by social organizations; instead, NGOs used legal and institutional ways to object the controversial projects, or moderately mobilize and/or participate in the protest. Specifically, we find that NGOs engaged in contentious movements with the following tactics: (1) NGOs openly voiced their objection to support protesters by using various institutional means; (2) NGOs leveraged their coalition work to assist grassroots activism, but not yet on the level of movement coalition; (3) NGOs offered moderate mobilizing frameworks for protesters, albeit framing their support as neutral rather than confrontational; (4) some NGO members directly participated in protests and even served a leadership role, as long as their participation was not associated with their organization. All of these strategies demonstrate political ambivalence of the NGO–activist alliance.

Open Institutional Objection

Above all, NGOs can openly voice their objection to the controversial projects to support grassroots activists, yet they do so through available institutional channels, such as oppositional policy advocacy, critical media reports, and (quasi)-public interest litigations. These strategies can largely fall into the category of “rightful resistance” (O’Brien and Li 2006), although they are used here by professional NGO members rather than by grassroots activists.

With its political connections, Beijing ENGOs played a key role in oppositional policy advocacy and critical media reports for controversial projects, because China’s fragmented, contradictory state left spaces for these NGOs to step in. Although the MEP turned away from NGOs, Beijing ENGO leaders could still access some technical bureaucrats of MEP to demonstrate their policy disagreement. Certain remaining reformist officials, though sidelined, continued tacitly working with ENGOs to block controversial projects.²⁴ Beijing ENGO leaders also maintained relationships with the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, the Environment Protection and Resources Conservation Committee of the National People’s Congress, or other related agencies.²⁵ Although they were not the executive branches for environmental administration, officials still exerted influence on certain projects and intervened in the policy process. For example, ENGO leaders in Kunming and Beijing lodged complaints with the State Seismological Bureau after finding the risk of earthquake near the PX site.²⁶

One understudied tactic is public interest litigation: social organizations issue lawsuits against the government, corporations, or other interest groups on behalf of citizens whose interests are impaired. Public interest litigation is often regarded as confrontational and subversive in non-democratic contexts (Stern 2013). In China, although environmental litigation had been extensively practiced, public interest environmental litigation (“huanjing gongyi susong”) was not possible until January 2015, when the new Environmental Protection Law came into effect. Even under the new law, the defendants in the public interest lawsuits initiated by social organizations can only be corporations or other non-state actors, not government agencies. Regardless of these limitations, local and national NGOs probed the boundary of political possibility by issuing lawsuits to challenge the state even before 2015.²⁷

In the 2013 anti-PX incident in Kunming, for example, Green Watershed and Green Kunming encouraged residents nearby the PX plant to advocate for themselves by filing suit jointly for government malfeasance. Meanwhile, Green Watershed sued the municipal and provincial governments for malfeasance and the MEP for nonfeasance. None of these lawsuits were accepted by the court, but they caused trouble for the local governments and increased the visibility of the controversy.²⁸ By using this legal weapon, they challenged the state authority.

In Beijing, Friends of Nature played a central role in facilitating public interest environmental litigation, including the legislation in 2014. Its founding leader, Liang Congjie, started advocating the legislation as early as 2005 and assembled a group of environmental lawyers in 2006. In 2008, they formally included environmental litigation as part of its core business and practiced with experimental cases in 2010. According to its member, “we explored experimental cases before the law was established. If you wait to practice until the law is made, you lose the explorative and experimental value in the legal term.”²⁹ During this experimental period (2010–2014), they assisted many grassroots activists to lodge lawsuits against business groups and local governments. For example, in the Kunming case, one of its leaders, Li Bo helped Green Watershed find lawyers and prepare the litigations together, suing the government beyond the locality and publicizing the controversy broadly.

In short, open institutional objection demonstrates NGOs’ political ambivalence: while it was not entirely legal, it was rightful; while it was not yet authorized, it was fully engaging with authoritative institutions; it was contentious in its substance but compliant in its means.

Quasi-Movement Coalition Work

Another form of NGO partnership is coalition work: NGOs make alliances with each other to support grassroots movements. This coalition work differs from movement coalition in democratic societies, where social organizations directly organize and participate in social movements and make alliances with each other (Van Dyke and Amos 2017). However, this coalition work is not simply policy or advocacy coalition either, because ENGOs make specific moves to advance contentious environmental campaigns rather than for purely legal or policy purposes within the institutional channel. We refer to this in-between form of NGO participation as quasi-movement coalition work.

One notable coalition is the Zero Waste Alliance that was founded in December 2011. Funded by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, its founding members included 16 NGOs, such as Friends of Nature and Green Beagle in Beijing, and dozens of grassroots activists, such as the leaders of the Guangzhou anti-incinerator protest. Since its founding, it has recruited increasing numbers of organizational and individual members, become a vigorous national policy coalition, and supported grassroots anti-incinerator activism.

Above all, such national alliance increased solidarity because activists in each city were “not fighting alone.”³⁰ Furthermore, this alliance helped the delivery of resources, knowledge, and know-how from established, experienced NGOs to grassroots activists and nascent anti-incinerator NGOs. For example, this alliance inspired grassroots activists in Guangzhou to create their own NGO, Eco-Canton, in 2012 and mentored its operation in its incipient period (Wong 2016).³¹ Finally, members of this alliance reduced political pressure for each other by using the strategy of “supervising local government from outside” (yidi jiandu), precisely because of China’s fragmented control of civil society and lack of coordinated state actions across jurisdictions (Chen 2012; Fu 2017). According to an NGO activist and researcher, “when local NGOs cannot conduct certain sensitive jobs in their home areas, other members of the alliance can do so. … Requesting the government for information disclosure, for instance, can be taken over by external organizations.”³² In particular, national ENGOs exercised their abilities to pressure the government indirectly and to advocate for transparent and environmentally sound policies in conjunction with the unfolding of those protests.³³

Admittedly, this coalition was not primarily contentious: it was neither a full-fledged movement coalition nor an alliance between environmental movements and other movement sectors such as labor activism. Like other cross-region civic associations, the Zero Waste Alliance was closely monitored by the state, and some radical members were actually warned and surveilled by the state.³⁴ Most remaining members carefully restrained themselves from participating in anti-incinerator protests: “the [Zero Waste] Alliance won’t join contentious [activities]. Even if they join, they are just circulating information at arm’s length. It is too risky to participate in protests in the name of the alliance.”³⁵After all, its involvement in grassroots protests was invisible and indirect, a clear feature of political ambivalence.

Moderate Movement Mobilization

In China, NGOs are forbidden from mobilizing a protest (Fu 2017). In particular, ENGOs were monitored, prevented, and controlled by several local administrative branches: The Environmental Protection Bureau might cut off its institutional and financial support to ENGOs; ENGOs’ supervising institutions might revoke their registration support for the ENGO involved in mobilization; and the Public Security Bureau, which surveilled NGO involvement in such “confrontational activities,” might dispel the ENGO mobilization. However, some ENGOs still managed to facilitate movement mobilization in a moderate, “neutral” way. As moderateness and neutrality were evaluated by the state, the political boundary of ENGO involvement was unclear and redefined amid the interactions among those actors.

One such form of NGO movement mobilization is information provision: ENGOs offer objective information about environmental conditions known to the public, with no direct suggestion of what the public should do with such information. The information is often used by citizen activists in their movement mobilization, although NGOs are careful to avoid association with the protests in order to keep themselves safe. In anti-PX protests in Xiamen and anti-incinerator campaigns in Beijing and Guangzhou, NGOs provided scientific information about the PX chemical and the incinerator to the public at large, while they made a show of being politically neutral throughout each contentious campaign. Here, NGOs walked along a redline between “neutral” information and contentious information. For example, when one employee from Green Cross circulated information on their website related to the upcoming March, they soon received instructions from an official of Xiamen Environmental Protection Bureau, requiring immediate deletion of this message to avoid serious sanctions.³⁶

In unusual cases, some NGOs took an even further step. In Kunming, Green Watershed organized two workshops to train citizens to protect their rights “rationally” before the protest, but these workshops were monitored and eventually prohibited by policemen. The recollection from its organizer vividly shows both the effects and constraints of these workshops:

We received warnings [from the government]. We promised not to go in the street, but we [were permitted to] do some trainings for citizens. … Before the second protest, we intended to do something. … We hoped them [the citizens] to be more reasonable, not making a big fuss, but [we also hoped that] they had better successfully object this project.³⁷

Almost 200 citizens joined the workshop. For those citizen activists, not surprisingly, it became a de facto platform for movement mobilization. While Green Watershed insisted that they did not encourage such activities, their workshop was eventually regarded by the local government as a facilitator of protest. As such, when they tried to organize another workshop 10 days later,

We were noticed by the police the second time. … We rented a classroom at Yunnan University, but Public Security officers didn’t allow us to hold the meeting. We moved to a nearby coffee shop, … but we were again disrupted by the officers. We then transferred to a faraway coffee shop. … Soon we received notices and were not allowed to do such trainings. … [the government] maintained that these workshops mobilized citizens to protest, although we told them not to do so but to use other means.³⁸

Ironically, one driver for ENGO mobilization behind the scenes of those protests was the irresponsiveness and inaction of the MEP. Since it was less likely for ENGOs to affect the project decision making via institutional channels, they backed grassroots protesters to show their disagreement. Mr. Jia, Director of the Center for Communication and Education in MEP, once commented: “According to (our) investigations, those so-called opponents, who seemed self-organizing and spontaneous, received instructions and funding from professional organizations in a significant number of cases. In other words, there were black hands behind them” (Jia 2014). Although this comment is prejudiced, it nevertheless reflects the vital role ENGOs played in the mobilization of such grassroots protests; this hostility from an MEP official also reveals why ENGOs had to use extra-institutional means to voice their opposition.

Unorganized Protest Participation

ENGO members had divided opinions toward protest participation. NGO leaders are often cautious and unwilling to be involved because of the existential threat protest participation poses to an organization,³⁹ and some retired government officials within ENGOs were even critical of such approach.⁴⁰ However, radical NGO members were active in these protests. In a few cases, they joined the protest and even provided spontaneous leadership during the protest, albeit as individual members rather than on behalf of their organizations. In other words, they engaged in unorganized protest participation. This shows another form of political ambivalence: while NGO members may have greater motivations, opportunities, and capacity for protest participation, they still avoid organizational confrontation with the state (Li 2019b: 85).

In the anti-PX protests in Xiamen (2007), Ningbo (2012), and Kunming (2013), while no NGO openly organized residents into protest groups, many NGO members were actively involved as individual protesters. Partially because the concerns of NGO members had not been properly addressed by the MEP after its conservative turn in 2008, some of them voiced their grievance together with citizen protesters on the street. Although they did not protest in the name of their organizations, they could stealthily mobilize their professional and personal networks. According to one NGO activist in Kunming, “about ten of my NGO friends attended the protest…none of them used their institutional identities but all participated as individuals… they were just loosely connected…because well-organized [protest] would incur many problems.”⁴¹

Furthermore, even though NGO members protested like other citizen activists, they were able to apply their organizational expertise and movement skills in the otherwise unorganized protests, and often became “spontaneous” leaders during the protest. An NGO activist Mr. Li, who became the protest leader in the Xiamen protests in 2007, reflected on this process: “I had participated in other social movements; I knew how to deal with policemen. The past experience unconsciously inspired me to stand out… People trusted me and let me lead; even the policemen trusted me and asked me to keep the March in order.”⁴²

Similarly, according to Mr. Fei of Green Kunming, who participated in the two protests in Kunming and became a leader during the second protest:

I rushed to the front. I saw nobody dared to hold a banner. One protester was immediately taken away [by police officers], so everyone was silent. I then found a high point, took out the prepared paper slogan, and raised it up. Then I was taken away to a police car, but others blocked the car and did not let it leave. At that time, everyone took out slogans or banners. It became a tipping point.⁴³

Notably, these spontaneous leaders, Mr. Li and Mr. Fei, were noticed by the local police officers. Mr. Li was arrested immediately after the protest and was detained for 55 days, although he was well treated by the detention officers who, as Xiamen natives, were sympathetic with the anti-PX protest.⁴⁴ In Kunming, Mr. Fei was arrested after the second protest, but was set free a few hours later. He was later monitored by the street officers and was visited by local police officers and taken to the police station, but he was not detained.⁴⁵

Overall, while the Chinese state stifled ENGOs’ organizational involvement in protests, it was unable to control NGO members to participate as individuals protesters, especially when they lacked institutional access to affect decision making. Though protesting as individuals, their professional connections and organizational skills nevertheless often made them stand out from the crowd.

Conclusion

In sum, this research contributes to the study of NGO–activist partnership on both descriptive and explanatory levels. First, we find an anxious and ambivalent alliance between almost all ENGOs and citizen activists in China’s environmental protests within the scope of this study. In most of the examined 22 protests between 2007 and 2016, NGOs were nervous to collaborate for fear of state surveillance, repression, or punishment. However, some NGOs tacitly and tactically engaged with protest events without drawing retribution from the government. Such anxiety and ambiguity are also seen in other kinds of environmental activism and other types of activism in China (Chen 2012; Spires 2011). Remaining ambivalent may be a deliberate strategy for Chinese NGOs to allow autonomy and flexibility in contentious events.

Additionally, our exploratory research probes the explanatory claim that the contradictory and fragmented state control of social organizations causes ambivalent NGO–protester partnerships. In particular, we find that the in-between level of state control presents NGOs with both incentives and spaces to partner with grassroots protesters, as NGOs do not have sufficient institutional access to the state, yet they are also not fully controlled by the state. While our Middle-N research design with in-depth interviews presents preliminary supportive evidence to this claim, whether our findings can be generalized to a curvilinear relationship between the degree of state control and the level of NGO–protester collaboration needs further test by quantitative and cross-national studies.

Theoretically, our article contributes to the emerging literature on the triadic relationship between NGOs, grassroots activists, and the state (Brass 2016; Glasius and Ishkanian 2015; Karriem and Benjamin 2016). Neither friends nor foes of the state, NGOs may behave either role for different purposes or change their identities situationally in those contentious events. Our article hence reveals how contradictory and fragmented state regulation causes the anxious and ambivalent partnership between NGOs and grassroots protesters in an authoritarian context. In so doing, our article continues to enrich the tradition that features the complexity of state–society relations of China (Lee and Zhang 2013; Stern and O'Brien 2012; Spires 2011).

What has been changed regarding environmental activism in China since 2016? This kind of alliance-building was clearly experiencing a downward trend, given that the state further tightened their grip over NGO activism. Notably, in April 2016, the National People’s Congress passed a new law restricting foreign organizations and their local partners.⁴⁶ The law introduced a stricter registration method by mandating foreign NGOs to register with the Ministry of Public Security instead of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and made it harder for them to transfer funds to domestic NGOs. Coming into effect on January 1, 2017, this new NGO law is seen as part of China’s attempts to curtain civil society and represents “a dramatic shift in the regulation” of overseas NGOs from regulatory ambiguity to comprehensive control (Shieh 2018: 1). Despite this negative trend, we still find mixed signals at least in the environmental field (Dai and Spires 2018; Kostka and Zhang 2018; Li 2019a). Most notably, the new Environmental Protection Law—often regarded as the strictest in Chinese history—facilitated environmental public interest litigations since 2015 (Shapiro 2016: 69–70, 137–138).⁴⁷ To accurately address the change after 2016, however, we need other studies based upon firsthand data collection.

The Chinese reform has created an ambiguous space where domestic civil and foreign organizations can legally operate while being able to navigate political boundaries. The recent narrowing of such space and the hardening of the boundaries means that civil society in China will experience increasing anxiety and anger. As anxious politics is becoming a global phenomenon today (Albertson and Gadarian 2015), partnership between citizen activists and social organizations is fragile but much needed. Our article, nevertheless, reveals strategic actors’ skills in negotiating even negatively changing environments (Fligstein and McAdam 2011). It is because of their persistence and pragmatism that we remain hopeful for progressive social change in this dark time.

Appendix

See Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 Anti-PX protests in urban China, 2007–2016.

Table 3 Anti-incinerator protests in urban China, 2007–2016.