ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter returns to the idea of uncertainty and the concomitant knowledge, skills, practices, and relationships that have emerged when the labor NGOs try to estimate the permissible boundaries of their activism. This, as the book argues, has resulted in a mode of double complicity between labor NGOs and the Chinese state in which the labor activists laboriously censor themselves and thus uphold the political order of things. The ethnographic examples discussed in the preceding chapters vividly illustrate the intimate and complicit aspects and effects of uncertainty as a governing mechanism. As a conclusion, the chapter also reflects on my own process of knowledge production about the labor community in the midst of uncertainty; it argues that to lay bare my own epistemological uncertainty paradoxically forms the basis for a certain understanding of the Chinese state, which is achieved by describing what sustains the mystification and demystification of the state. The (re)productivity of the concept of uncertainty lies in its capacity to arrive at a contested degree of certainty in the midst of uncertainty and thus provides an entry point to a more nuanced understanding of the workings of the Chinese state.
