Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces

Jonathan Unger (ed.), Associations and the Chinese State: Contested Spaces, ArmonkLondon, ME Sharpe, 2008, ix +275 pp.he study of associational life in China has been squarely on the scholarly agenda since the early 1990s. The contributions to this new volume, edited by Jonathan Unger, reflect the increasing diversity in Chinese associational forms and in the conceptual lenses being utilised to analyse developments on the ground. The book perhaps best serves as an anthology for those scholars looking for an overview of the field. While some chapters are essentially reprints of previously published work, others are based on more substantial revision of prior articles, and still a few others offer original data or perspectives (most notably a chapter by Samantha Keech-Marx). Andrew Watson opens the book in Chapter One by highlighting the variety of associational life in China and positing the existence of a diverse civil society. He identifies nine categories of associations that comprise the field, including mass organisations, government-organised NGOs and foundations, service-based groups, independent foundations, research or study associations, business associations, issuebased groups, rural associations, and grassroots groups. He locates these along a spectrum of autonomy, with mass organisations and GONGOs situated closest to the state and grassroots groups just outside of or on the fringe of state control.Chapter Two, by Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, offers a contrasting theoretical and empirical perspective to Watson's. As in prior works by the pair and individually, here they argue that the civil society perspective is not appropriate for a general analysis of Chinese associational life. While they concede that some relatively autonomous (and innocuous) groups have sprung up at the margins, they hold that associations in China are still best understood through the lens of state corporatism. In their view, corporatist structures and practices dominate, and the Chinese government, rather than ceding ground to autonomous civil society organisations, has been quite successful at and insistent on incorporating, controlling, or overseeing any extra-Party, extra-government organisations that could pose a threat to the political status quo.Chapters Three to Six stay mostly within the corporatist framework. Focusing on China's trade unions in Chapter Three, Chan offers an insightful comparative analysis that draws on communist theory and actual experiences during the communist period in Eastern Europe. She goes on to discuss the development of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) under Mao, through the economic reform era and up to the present. Although she identifies the "seed-germ" of societal corporatism in recent legal reforms, she ultimately finds that worker control of Chinese unions is still heavily constrained by the demands of capital and management.The authors of Chapters Four (Kenneth W. Foster), Five (Jonathan Unger), and Six (Scott Kennedy) take business and trade associations as their key area of interest. Drawing on extended fieldwork in the city of Yantai, Foster argues that China's business associations are essentially "appendages of government or Party organizations" that are used by the party or state to carry out mandates from above. Unlike the membership-based Chamber of Commerce familiar to readers in North America and other democratic societies, business associations in Yantai - and by extension other parts of China - are not organisations designed to represent the interests of businesses to the public or government.Unger, in Chapter Five, draws on two periods of fieldwork with business associations in Beijing. After fieldwork in the early 1990s, although he viewed these groups as essentially corporatist creations designed to further the goals of their state overseers, he also saw signs that civil society-type associations could emerge as members became more assertive. …