ABSTRACT
The conclusion chapter starts with discussing the recent developments in Chinese civil society. Since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, there have been crackdowns on civil society movements, especially in the area of labor rights. With the implementation of the Law on Oversea NGOs in 2017, many other civil society groups, such as environmental NGOs, have also been losing their capacity-building and foreign funding sources. Recently, the Uygur issue and Hong Kong protest led to another wave of tightening social control, leaving little space for activists to intervene in social injustice. Thus, on the one hand, the years since 2012 can be regarded as a “frozen” period for Chinese civil society. On the other hand, the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 has shown that Chinese civil society can participate in disaster rescue and social governance even in the “new totalitarian” environment, which might indicate hope for societal pluralization under certain conditions. In an increasingly complex political environment, the mechanism of cultural resonance suggests that adjusting strategies to gain legitimacy in the eyes of both policymakers and the mainstream public are becoming more and more important. This kind of compromise should not be regarded as a betrayal to civil society principles; rather, it should be understood as a more effective way to fight for progress in a particular political context. In other words, in this non-receptive political environment, symbolic identification and cultural resonance might be the only vehicles which can carry the civil society agenda to the political core, leading to pluralization and good governance at a slow but steady pace.
