Anpassung, Einhegung, Aneignung: Chinesische Strategien im Umgang mit internationalen Normen und Akteuren der ZivilgesellschaftBertram Lang

ASIEN – Nr. 152/153 (2019) pp. 24–48

Taking China as an example, this article demonstrates the increasingly active role of nondemocratic governments in negotiating the international status of civil society actors. Thus, China’s evolving civil society policy is re-examined in light of theories of international norm diffusion and localization drawn from the field of International Relations. Based on an analysis of the Chinese academic civil society discourse as well as official policy documents and secondary sources, the article shows how Chinese elites — starting from an ambivalent, largely passive approach to “Western” civil society actors and norms — have become increasingly eager to counter “Western discourse hegemony” more proactively. Beyond the domestication of civil society within mainland China through combined repression and co-optation, developments that have received widespread international attention in recent years, the article also identifies growing Chinese efforts to appropriate norms and practices of “civil society participation” in international politics, as intensified by Xi Jinping’s announcement of the “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2013. These efforts to mobilize NGOs to support China’s own foreign policy goals are rooted in selective policy learning from “soft power diplomacy,” which is perceived and portrayed as a successful United States foreign policy model.

Manuscript received June 2018, accepted Jan 2020
Keywords: Civil society, international norms, Belt and Road Initiative, diffusion, Chinese foreign policy, civil society policy