In The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society, Mujan Zhou describes the 30-year evolution of the liberal intellectuals’ project of building a civil society by tracing five social movements, namely the environmental movement, the homeowners’ movement, the labour movement, the feminist movement and the New Rural Reconstruction movement. Zhou describes this project as an ideational movement to disseminate a specific conceptualization of civil society that dichotomized state–society relations and viewed participants of civil society as homogeneous. The book is organized chronologically into two parts with three chapters in each: the first three chapters explore the initial emergence of the project of building civil society from approximately 1992 to 2007, and the latter three chapters discuss the project’s institutionalization and demise from approximately 2008 to 2019.

Zhou argues that the “liberals and their project of building civil society had emerged from interstitial spaces formed during China’s transition from socialism to a market economy… [as this transition was institutionalized] the organizational structure of the public sphere was changed. This transformed the way people combined political ideals and specific issues in public discussion and caused the eventual decline of the civil society projects” (p. 5). Zhou defines “interstitial space” as the space in the public sphere (in a Habermasian sense) where the exercise of power has not yet been fully institutionalized and thus allows a process of ideational contestation. In this way, she explores the development and challenge of civil society as an ideational movement. This theoretical insight is quite interesting because it means that “people do not need to have an intact civil society with a clear boundary against the state and the market to initiate meaningful public discussions. Instead, these discussions could emerge interstitially – between the pores of state and market institutions or around their edges” (p. 12). Introducing this concept of interstitial space through which to examine the development and contestation of the idea of civil society represents a powerful theoretical development that helps move the literature away from state–society binaries and allows the author to explore the sources and process of ideational challenge such as from New Left scholars as well as civil society actors like feminists.

This interstitial space began to disappear after 2007 when, Zhou argues, the public sphere discussions of civil society changed due to the institutionalization of the “thought sphere” and when social science scholars began to work in a more regulated system for producing knowledge. She examines this process of institutionalization including elite contestation: “Deng Zhenglai … pointed to the lack of autonomy of China’s social science studies … advocated to reflect on upon the ‘machine for producing knowledge’” (p. 58). During this period, control over NGOs and critical news intensified after the Arab Spring protests at the same time as the idea of civil society was contested with the emergence of a new generation of participants. As Zhou explains, “The engagement between different types of participants aroused contestations and nurtured new forms of public expressions in which the combination of ideological frames and social issues became more exploratory and open-ended” (p. 5).

One of these important new participants was the feminist movement. To fight for women’s rights, these activists needed to confront both the state and advocates for the “patriarchal family”; however, many liberals felt that these were private issues, which created contestation around the idea of civil society that was later joined by labour activists. Zhou argues that as these new actors and forms of activism proliferated in the 2014 to 2019 period, liberals were marginalized and the “political project of building civil society eventually disintegrated” (p. 164). It is important to note that Zhou does not argue that activism and discourse about the public sphere disappeared; instead, she argues that these different groups fragmented into their own spaces.

Zhou contends that “state suppression over social movements activism and alternative public discussion played a major role in this process [of the disintegration of the project of civil society], while the pervasion of commercial power also helped” (p. 186). However, given the historical development of civil society in other countries, I wonder if instead of the “death of civil society,” we are observing the organic transition to a new stage of more professionalized organizations working alongside different social movements, some of which might eventually coalesce into new NGOs. In many other countries we see a similar process of the institutionalization of the public sphere interrupted by contestation from new participants and social movements, and this process is described as a maturing of advocacy organizations rather than the death of civil society. Zhou seems to agree that what is lost in this process of institutionalization is this interstitial space, or what early researchers of Chinese civil society called the “grey space,” where conceptions of civil society were able to evolve. Thus, it is not that NGOs and activists who consider themselves to constitute a “civil society” have disappeared but rather that the interstitial space has been lost with the institutionalization of civil society (p. 194).

Regarding the outcomes of institutionalization of civil society, Zhou argues that “As dominant power institutions like the state gradually learn the nature of interstitial space and the necessary techniques for governing the space, practices in this space could become so routinized that they no longer constitute any challenges to these institutions” (p. 195). However, this seems to be an overly strong conclusion in that many successful challenges to state institutions can come from within the system. For example, the creation of environmental public interest lawsuits (EPIL) has allowed NGOs like Friends of Nature to enact larger changes in the overall governing system than many of their earlier campaigns dependent on public opinion. Also, this institutionalization does not destroy the possibility of social movements that might reconstitute existing civil society organizations or create new ones, such as the social movement around domestic violence that recently prompted the strengthening of the 2016 law against domestic violence. So perhaps instead of the “death” of civil society, or at least the liberal conception of it, we are observing a period of professionalization and change that might catalyse another round of ideational contestation as new actors and varying state reactions to these actors continue to occur, including a new version of liberal civil society.

Zhou concludes that “From the China case, we can see that the ‘strength’ of civil society as an ideational movement lies in its abstractness… However, the ‘weakness’ of the project also lies in its abstractness” (pp. 197–198). She suggests that a possible remedy for this problem of abstraction is to “keep the agenda of an ideational movement open and let more people participate in the debate about the idea” (p. 200), and that this will “refresh the connection between the idea and the common people’s concrete, everyday concerns” (p. 202). This is a good recommendation and one that echoes the conclusion in Anthony Spires’s recent book about the potential future of Chinese civil society with increasing youth participation (Everyday Democracy, Columbia University Press, 2024).

Although this was a challenging book to review because the ambitious historical, theoretical and ideational scope, it is also one of the best books that I have read about civil society in China. I highly recommend it for those interested in the evolution of civil society in China as it makes a significant contribution to our theories of civil society.