Apr 24, 2026

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society

Mujun Zhou

Hosted by Yadong Li

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Summary

In a society undergoing rapid transformation, how do people engage in debates around a foreign concept and in doing so, pursue contested political futures?

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society examines how a group of Chinese intellectual elites referred to as the liberals or ziyou pai edified the civil society project beginning in the 1990s to build an independent space to constrain state power, increase political participation, and promote China’s democratization. In the early 2000s, activists in movements such as the environmental and the AIDS movements identified with the liberals and regarded their activism as part of the project of building civil society. However, since the late 2000s the liberals’ influence has gradually declined. In prominent social movements in the 2010s such as the labor and feminist movements, activists have openly criticized the liberal interpretation of civil society and regarded liberals’ civil society agenda as irrelevant.

In the book, Mujun Zhou employs the concept of interstitial space, or the space where the exercise of power has not been fully institutionalized, to examine the history of the civil society project over the past three decades and its changing relationship with other social movements. Zhou suggests that by advocating for civil society the liberals gained allies and thematized many social problems rising during China’s economic reform; however, liberals’ activism also produced new forms of power inequalities.

Mujun Zhou is a cultural-political sociologist. She is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Her major research interests lie in issues in political culture and social change.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Yadong Li

I am an anthropologist-in-training, with a regional focus on East Asia, particularly China's northwestern regions. I am interested in anthropology of ethics, ecological anthropology, and critical infrastructure studies.

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