The rapid growth and expansion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China's reform era has driven both Western and Chinese scholars to seek a more appropriate analytical framework to understand this phenomenon. Based on the analyses of some 40 cases of NGOs and their interactions with the state, the author aims to reach a “deeper understanding of the nature and functions of Chinese NGOs” by developing the concept of dependent autonomy.
The concept captures both the elements of continuities and those of transition in China's state–society relations. On one hand, NGOs are still required to go through a rigid dual registration system and largely depend on the state for their legitimate existence and survival. On the other hand, they have grown increasingly autonomous vis-à-vis the state. The author asserts that this is particularly the case with officially organized NGOs, which is contrary to some of the scholars' contentions that grassroots organizations tend to be more autonomous than their top-down counterparts. The officially organized NGOs have expanded their leverage and strengthened their organizational stability, demonstrating highly skilful behaviour in their relationships with the government. The author, however, also points out that the strategies and tactics used by these NGOs to assure a greater degree of autonomy have also led to dysfunctional outcomes such as corruption, patron–client relations and bad management.
Based on the detailed case studies of how NGOs operate (some based on her participant observation), the author illustrates how different Chinese NGOs with different organizational histories have formed varied relationships with the state – not a single state, but a state as an entity composed of various agencies and officials at different levels. She shows that NGO–state relations are marked by penetration and negotiation on both sides. And doing so, she substantiates her argument that neither civil society literature nor various corporatism approaches adequately illustrate and explain the evolution of state–society relationships. These frameworks, with their origins in Western societies' experiences and based on the assumption of the clear division between the state and society, fail to capture the dynamic behaviour of China's NGOs in their actual operation.
The most important contribution of this book to the literature on Chinese NGOs is that the author attempts to advance the alternative analytical concept of dependent autonomy to better describe and explain the continually evolving relationships between the state and NGOs. She shows how even highly dependent NGOs can still negotiate a certain level of their autonomy depending on their prowess. Such analytical separation is illuminating given previous studies' almost single-minded attention to Chinese NGOs' lack of autonomy to indicate that these organizations do not even meet the minimum qualifications as NGOs; instead, the separation of autonomy and independence allows one to see these NGOs in their own right rather than defining them by the state's terms. Therefore, free from the conceptual straitjacket informed by the Western literature on NGOs and civil society, one can understand better how these organizations have been operating and what they have achieved, and failed to achieve, in the Chinese context.
However, the skills and tactics employed by these “successful” NGOs in their relations with the state should not necessarily be conflated with their capacity, nor should they be considered as unequivocal signs of the growth of NGOs' power vis-à-vis the state. The stark political reality in which NGOs are embedded requires them to develop such skills to maintain autonomy; this requirement reflects the state's predominance. Without the state's concession and tolerance, the attempts of NGOs to gain more autonomy would not be fully effective in the first place. In addition, the author does not discuss much how these NGO–state relations have affected the NGO–constituent relations and their accountability to people. That is, the author does not address how NGOs' capacity to carry out their organizational missions and to maintain legitimacy in broader society is affected when their urgent priority is to secure more autonomy, by maintaining closer relations with the state and diverting a great deal of resources and energies to maintain such relations.
Finally, despite the importance of the concepts of “autonomy” and “independence” in this research, the author simply refers to the Oxford English Dictionary for the definitions and fails to provide any operational definitions. Had the author operationalized these terms and measured them consistently throughout her cases or developed a clearer typology of the conditions under which NGOs obtain greater levels of autonomy, her findings would have been much stronger. In addition, while recognizing that there are varying degrees of NGO autonomy from the state, she fails to address the different types of relationships that NGOs might have with the state. To be more specific, if one could posit autonomy and independence as two different features in the Chinese NGO–state relationships and different degrees of each could be found in NGO–state relations, one could hypothesize at least three more patterns of NGO–state interactions: dependence without autonomy, independence with autonomy, and independence without autonomy. Unless the author investigates the possibilities (or impossibilities) of these other types of NGO–state relationship patterns in China, her concept of dependent autonomy obscures many potentially different ways in which NGOs might relate to the state.
