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Organizing Civil Society in Russia and China: A Comparative Approach

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Abstract

Despite their authoritarian tendencies, the current regimes in Russia and China have both actively promoted stronger civil societies. This article explores this apparent paradox for insights both into the meaning of civil society and into the nature of governance in these two regimes. It argues that the social organizations that make up civil society both inhabit and construct a public sphere where individuals assist in their own governance. Recognizing that administered societies cannot compete in a globalizing economy, these regimes look to social organizations to perform functions previously left to the state, but at the same time use similar repertoires of regulation, revenue control, and repression to ensure such organizations do not transgress acceptable boundaries. Still, different notions of state–society relations in the two countries have led to different patterns of social organizations in the two countries. In Russia, a sharp distinction between state and society has contributed to a government strategy that seeks to dominate the public sphere leaving little room for autonomous civic action. In China, by contrast, deeply embedded institutionalized accounts see state and society as overlapping spheres of activity, creating pyramid-like structures encompassing both state-based and more autonomous organizations, and allowing more room for negotiation between the two.

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Notes

  1. In this article, we distinguish between civil society, which refers to the complex of social organizations inhabiting the public sphere, and the public sphere. Following Habermas (1991).

  2. Of course, neither regime relied solely, or even primarily, on social organizations to hear complaints from the citizenry. In both countries, citizens more often communicated complaints and frustrations individually through appeals and complaints made directly to government officials and the media. Finally, in both countries one finds a significant amount of local protest activity outside the accepted institutional boundaries. For the most part, these protests target local officials for mostly local issues, including the confiscation of housing for purposes of development, environmental degradation, and local economic issues of various kinds (for China, Shi 1997; Chen 2012; for Russia, Robertson 2011).

  3. Estimating the number of unregistered, grassroots NGOs in China has become a terribly contentious exercise. Chen (2009: 69) speculates that there are as many as 11 million, but Spires et al. (2014) scoff at this estimate, saying it probably includes dancing clubs and other such groups. They believe the number could be as low as 2,000.

  4. Yurchak (2005) takes issue with the common claim that the public and private in Soviet society represented two distinct moral realms, noting that the people he studies, mostly elite members of the last generation who came of age before perestroika, accepted many of the values expressed in the ideology. Even Yurchak, however, distinguishes between the performative elements of public party rituals and the more substantive (“Constative”) content of speech outside the public realm.

  5. To the authors’ knowledge, the Russian government has not appreciably increased its subsidies to Orthodox charities in the last year, though it may have encouraged more donations from private donors. Also, it is noteworthy that, even thought the law on foreign agents explicitly excluded religious charities from its jurisdiction, many religious organizations were in fact inspect except those affiliated with the Orthodox Church, even though much of their funding comes from diaspora communities abroad(Achmatova 2013).

  6. A more elaborate version of this argument can be found in Li 1991.

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  1. Department of Politics, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, 04240, USA

    James Richter

  2. Department of Government, Colby College, Waterville, ME, USA

    Walter F. Hatch

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Richter, J., Hatch, W.F. Organizing Civil Society in Russia and China: A Comparative Approach. Int J Polit Cult Soc 26, 323–347 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9148-5

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