Power to the People?
(Con-)Tested Civil Society in Search of Democracy
Edited by Heidi Moksnes and Mia Melin
Power to the People?
(Con-)tested civil society in search of democracy
Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development Villavägen 16
752 36 Uppsala Sweden www.csduppsala.uu.se
Editors Heidi Moksnes and Mia Melin Graphic design Tegl design Printed by Hallvigs Cover photo Dreamstime Uppsala 2010
ISSN 1403-1264 ISBN 978-91-975741-7-4
182
Session: Contradictory interests within civil society
NGOs providing support to migrant workers in China
Chloé Froissart
Abstract
Market reforms in China have created a space for the rise of a third sector; they also triggered the largest rural–urban migration flow in world history. Rural–urban migration is one of the major challenges that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has to face. Today, around 200 million peasants have left their villages to seek employment and a better life in urban areas, but appear as second-class citizens in the cities of their own country.
Unlike peasants and state workers, migrants’ claims for rights protec- tion are supported by Chinese so-called NGOs that first appeared toward the end of the 1990s and in the beginning of the 2000s. These organisa- tions function as substitutes for official trade unions, from which these workers were long excluded. The unions are now increasingly deemed inefficient and sometimes seen as illegitimate means of representation.
NGOs also lobby authorities to improve migrant workers’ conditions, thus appearing as a social structure, capable of organising migrants’ resis- tance and of interacting with the state on a sustained basis.
To which extent do NGOs challenge established social and political values? Do they foster migrants’ emergence as an autonomous self- conscious group, capable of negotiating a new social contract in China?
How does NGO mobilisation and the way it tends to become institutio- nalised re-configure state–society relations? Do these changes strengthen or threaten the power of the CCP?
Based on six years of fieldwork in Beijing and in the Pearl River Delta, my paper analyses how political constraints and contradictory interests within civil society shape the way NGOs defend migrants’ rights, socialise them and interact with the state. While highlighting the contradictory
183 Session: Contradictory interests within civil society
dynamics that re-configure the Chinese political field in a very uncertain way, my paper also seeks to assess the political changes that have taken place over time.
Author affiliation
Univeristé de Rennes, and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
