The death and life of Chinese civil society

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society examines how an elite Chinese intellectuals, known as liberals or Xiu Bai, enriched the civil society project starting in the 1990s, with the aim of building an independent space to curb state power, increase political participation, and promote democracy in China. In the early 2000s, activists in movements such as the environmental movement and the AIDS movement sympathized with liberals and viewed their activism as part of a civil society-building project. However, since the late 2000s, the influence of liberals has gradually declined. In prominent social movements of the 2010s, such as the labor and feminist movements, activists publicly criticized the liberal interpretation of civil society and considered the liberals' agenda in this area irrelevant. Mujun Cho uses the concept of in-between space, or space in which the exercise of power is not fully established, to examine the history of the civil society project over the past three decades and its changing relationship to other social movements. Zhu points out that, through their advocacy of civil society, the liberals gained allies and highlighted many of the social problems that emerged during China's economic reform. But liberal activism has also given rise to new forms of power inequality.