China Governance Workshop
January 23, 9 AM ET: Yan Long, University of California-Berkeley
Affective Lockdown: Administrative Chaos and Informal Repairing in the Local Enactment of Immobility in Urban China
This study investigates the installment and management of targeted lockdowns in urban China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Departing from the scholarly focus on either top-down governance mechanisms or the spontaneously rising societal (in)compliance, it highlights the overlooked daily practices of government workers in soliciting consent and collaboration from residents. Through fifty in-depth interviews with frontline workers in a Southern Chinese city, this research reveals that targeted lockdowns were not executed orchestrations of high formal state capacity. Instead, they were fraught with procedural, material, and personnel deficiencies and digital breakdowns, leading to administrative chaos and intensified resident disobedience. this research argue that it was frontline workers’ informal affective labor—interpersonal emotional engagement and communal relationship building—that were repairing social order and holding together the neighborhood governance system on the verge of collapse. These findings provide a granular reevaluation of the enforcement and eventually recession of targeted lockdowns that may continuously shape post-pandemic urban neighborhood governance.
January 24, 10 AM ET: Mark Sidel, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The New Central Social Affairs Department of the Chinese Communist Party and its Impact on Social Policy in China
While social policy and social affairs have long been under Party control in China, new developments at and after the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2022 now promise to further strengthen that control and coordination. In this talk Professor Mark Sidel, a longtime specialist in civil society and nonprofit issues in China, will review what we know so far about the formation and developing roles of the Party’s Central Social Affairs Department, the new Party group tasked with policy formation over a wide range of social policy issues, and what this development may mean for Party-state policy coordination and boundaries on social policy issues and other possible implications.
March 26, 9 AM ET: Jessica Teets, Middlebury College
Creating a Culture of Philanthropy and Volunteerism in Contemporary China
In contrast to previous regimes, under Xi Jinping the Chinese Communist Party has pushed citizens to engage philanthropy and volunteerism. State messaging about “common prosperity” and “tertiary distribution” posits these prosocial behaviors as a way to alleviate inequality. Is this propaganda working in changing citizen behavior? This study uses national survey data from the 2018, 2020, and 2022 waves of the Civic Participation in China Survey (CPCS). It finds that Chinese citizens are donating and volunteering more than in the past, and that they view these activities more positively. We find some evidence that the state propaganda may be a motivating factor for cadres, who are exposed to these messages sooner and in higher doses than non-members. However, there is less evidence that behavior and views of non-cadres has been influenced by propaganda, as the uptick in philanthropy and volunteerism mostly precedes the new state discourse.
May 7, 9 AM ET: Shen Yongdong, Zhejiang University
Government Funding and Nonprofit Performance: Exploring the mediating roles of Private Donations, Volunteers and Network Quality
There is a general consensus in the existing literature that government funding plays an important role in improving the performance of human services nonprofit organizations. However, most of these studies focus on Western countries and we do not know the mechanisms through which such impacts take place in non-Western contexts. Taking advantage of a unique dataset of central government funding to nonprofits in China, we find that private donations (Treasure), volunteers (Time), and network quality (Tie) are important mediators in this government funding–nonprofit performance relationship. While private donations mediate the impact of government funding on both types of nonprofit performance, volunteers and network quality only have a mediating impact on service delivery and policy advocacy, respectively. These findings suggest that government funding leverages divergent resources to influence nonprofit performance adapting local contexts. Register here.
April 8, 9 AM ET: Reza Hasmath, University of Alberta
The Future of Philanthropy and Volunteerism in China
China is experiencing increased socio-economic inequalities and reported social discontent in the 2020s. At the same time, the Chinese state has reimagined the desired characteristics of a model citizen in the domain of philanthropy and volunteerism. Given the Chinese state’s signaling to suggest that a morally good citizen is one who engages in charity work and volunteerism, the question remains why do we witness relatively high levels of citizen inaction in this domain? Leveraging data from the 2023 Chinese Altruistic Behaviour Survey, a national survey conducted by the speaker that develops a socio-psychological profile of the altruistic citizen, this talk delineates behavioral attributes of the citizenry that accounts for their philanthropic and voluntary action or inaction. The talk further discusses the implications of these findings for the future of state and civil society relations, and more acutely, for the state’s strategies for increasing philanthropic and voluntary action amongst the citizenry. Register here.
August 6, 10 AM ET: Hui Yin, Zhejiang University
The Impact of Digital Management on Volunteer Outcomes
Digital technologies have been widely used for volunteer management, but their impact on volunteer outcomes has rarely been studied. Based on the motivation-hygiene theory, this study divides digital management into two categories – monitoring and empowering, and further applies the psychological contract theory to study the mechanism through which digital management affects volunteer outcomes. Through a questionnaire survey of 1,980 Chinese volunteers on digital platforms, the results show that: empowerment-oriented digital management positively affects volunteer outcomes by positively influencing volunteers’ relational psychological contracts; monitoring-oriented digital management negatively affects volunteer outcomes by positively influencing volunteers’ transaction psychological contracts. The complexity of volunteer service weakens the mediating role of psychological contracts in the impact of digital management on volunteer outcomes. The research reveals differentiated influence mechanisms of various digital management strategies on volunteer productivity, providing insights to advance the digital management for volunteers. Register here.