ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how uncertainty unfolds ethnographically in the day-to-day work of the labor NGOs and their relationships with their partners in Hong Kong as well as with the Chinese state. Specifically, it draws on and discusses two examples: a large-scale crackdown on labor NGOs in 2012 and the revised policy concerning the registration of social organizations in the same year. Zooming in on these two incidents, this chapter illustrates the specific workings of the notion of uncertainty. The chapter shows and discusses how uncertainty can be conceptualized as productive and reproductive in making and sustaining certain relationships and practices possible. These relationships and practices occupy both an analytical and ethnographic space, which is constitutive of the ways in which governance works in China and can be understood and analyzed through such concepts as intimacy, complicity, secrecy, and mingan (sensitivity), which will be closely examined in the ensuing chapters.