Anxiety and Ambivalence: NGO–Activist Partnership in China’s Environmental Protests, 2007–2016

Abstract

This article examines how partnership between social organizations and popular protests is affected by the state in the field of environmental activism. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, we study non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement with 22 grassroots environmental protests in China, 2007–2016. We find that NGOs and grassroots protesters were mostly distant from each other to avoid state repression and retribution, but NGOs occasionally collaborated with protesters in an ambivalent manner because state control was contradictory, fragmented, and varying. NGOs either used institutional means to support the protesters or were informally and invisibly involved in those protests. Our research contributes to studies of the triangular relationship between the state, NGOs, and social movements. Specifically, we find that when NGOs lack the institutional access to policy making but are not fully controlled by the state, they have both incentives and spaces to make joint actions with grassroots activists.