Perspectives of Time and Change

Abstract

China's burgeoning civil society has often been characterized as state-led or corporatist. However, these concepts fail to capture the current dynamics of Chinese social activism, as they cannot account for two of its critical features. First, the fact that the nature of Chinese state—society relations is not a matter of the former dictating the latter, but rather a kind of “negotiated symbiosis.” Second, the semiauthoritarian context necessitates that China's social activists develop a diffuse, and informal rather than formal, network of relations. This informal web of relations has yielded undeniable political as well as societal legitimacy. It is against this background that we put forward the concept of “embedded social activism.” Since its initial emergence, environmental activism has resourcefully adapted to, rather than opposed, the political conditions of its era. The hallmark, and in fact, the success of China's reforms lie in their strategy of incremental change. Therefore, we might view embedded environmentalism as a transient phase which is itself changing through time, a transitional feature of a burgeoning civil society in a semiauthoritarian context.