Mujun Zhou, "The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

About this episode

Mujun Zhou discusses the evolution and challenges of civil society in China over the past three decades.

In a society undergoing rapid transformation, how do people engage in debates around a foreign concept and in doing so, pursue contested political futures? The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society examines how a group of Chinese intellectual elites referred to as the liberals or ziyou pai edified the civil society project beginning in the 1990s to build an independent space to constrain state power, increase political participation, and promote China’s democratization. In the early 2000s, activists in movements such as the environmental and the AIDS movements identified with the liberals and regarded their activism as part of the project of building civil society. However, since the late 2000s the liberals’ influence has gradually declined. In prominent social movements in the 2010s such as the labor and feminist movements, activists have openly criticized the liberal interpretation of civil society and regarded liberals’ civil society agenda as irrelevant. In the book, Mujun Zhou employs the concept of interstitial space, or the space where the exercise of power has not been fully institutionalized, to examine the history of the civil society project over the past three…

People in this episode

Guest: Mujun Zhou

Topics covered

• Chinese civil society
• political participation
• democratization
• social movements
• power inequalities
• liberalism

Keywords

• civil society
• China
• liberals
• social movements
• political futures
• activism
• democratization
• power dynamics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U Michigan Press

Places: China

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