Abstract
This essay looks at Liren Rural Library, a grassroots educational project, in order to shed light on the current situation of civil society organizations in China. With a detailed description of how Liren Rural Library started, thrived, and struggled and a look into the variable relationship between Liren Rural Library and the state, this case study intends to add new empirical material to the discussion of how civil society evolves and develops under a dominant state. It also aims to show the persistent influence of traditional, offline civil society organizations, despite the penetration of the Internet, at least on people in rural areas of China.
The theory of civil society is important for understanding emerging democracy and the emergence of a better society, both in the contexts of China and the West. However, the fate of civil society organizations in China is never smooth. For instance, Liren Rural Library (LRL; sometimes called China Rural Library (CRL)), an ambitious educational project based in rural areas, was suddenly forced to close down in 2014. How can we understand this incident? With a detailed description of how LRL started, thrived, and struggled and a look into the variable relationship between LRL and the state, this article tries to propose an analytical explanation rooted in civil society.
The development and demise of LRL
Active from 2007 to 2014, LRL was an educational
LRL was not the only grassroots organization aimed at establishing rural libraries. More than 80 organizations attended a 2010 symposium on civic efforts to set up libraries in rural areas, including Li Yingqiang, one of the founders of LRL. According to an interview with Li in 2012, the number of such organizations by that year had exceeded 200 (China Development Brief, 2012). Wang, Yin, and Wu (2013) reported that the number had already been as large as 860 by the year 2010. Despite the disagreement on number, it was clear that grassroots organizations played an important role in setting up rural libraries.
LRL was founded collectively by Li Yingqiang, Yang Mindao, Yu Shicun, Zhang Dajun, and Xue Ye. The original idea, however, came from Li Yingqiang, whose hometown was Qingshi Town, a rural area in Qichun County, Hubei Province. Li was inspired by Yan Yangchu (Y. C. James Yen), a pioneer in promoting civic education in pre-Communist China, and envisaged a “down-to-ground” career rather than one with “empty talk.” In addition, he endorsed the notion articulated by Yan that “people’s mind” is the fundamental problem of China (Li & Xin, n.d.). These factors, joined by concerns with the bleak situation of Qingshi Town, his hometown, led Li to start a “Countryside Book Project,” later developed into LRL.
By and large, LRL worked with local initiators, who typically aspired to having a library network in their hometown and were willing to offer help. The initiator was also to provide start-up capital for the library. Each branch library was named after a local culture celebrity and operated by volunteers. They were also responsible for various educational events tailored to local teenagers. Those events included reading clubs, movie viewing, writing competitions, winter/summer camps, student volunteer groups, and so on.
Ideally, the typical network of LRL features 1 county-level central library (a “county” in China is roughly equivalent to a “rural district administered by a city”), 3–5 township-level branches, and 9–15 village-level book stations.
There are two points worth noting about LRL’s philosophy. First, it claims that LRL was not a “poverty-alleviating” project, but rather an educational action (LRL, 2009). LRL claimed that “The books are not randomly picked. We carefully selected the books with guaranteed quality.” And that what they were doing was to create chances for the mental development of rural area teenagers and explore a brand-new route to educate and establish a person. This ambitious statement implies a difference from many other civic organizations operating in rural areas and, more important, an underlying confrontation with “the current system,” a phrase closely related to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime or simply the government in the Chinese context.
Second, LRL saw itself as an “operating system of rural construction,” and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing their work on rural areas, like ones dealing with small-amount loans, poverty-alleviation, agricultural technology, left-behind children, and so on, were welcome to view it as a “work station” and cooperate with it (LRL, 2009). This statement was arguably no less ambitious than the first one because it aimed to become an all-in-one platform of rural construction, but the Chinese government has long been wary of any organization that is able to generate or gather different types of social power.
Despite that LRL did not make it clear whether it worked under an overarching ideology, a
The “core bibliography” was found slanted by some outside observers. For example, in the “Western classic academic readings” category, there were books written by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and so on, but Karl Marx and other so-called “leftist” authors were not among them. And the “Contemporary Chinese Thinkers” category included names like Qin Hui, Yu Yingshi, and Cui Weiping, all of them renowned liberal scholars, while Marxist experts were nowhere to be found (LRL, 2010). Li Yingqiang did not deny LRL’s ideological background. On the contrary, he thought it to be LRL’s characteristic: “(The bibliography) was blamed for bias, but this was exactly why LRL was an attractive organization” (Cao, 2014).
Since its commencement, LRL had developed at a good pace. By October 2012, 5 years into its operation, LRL had established 12 county-level libraries and 3 branches around China. Four writing competitions had been held, with about 20,000 students participating. By its closure in 2014, the number of LRL libraries was 22.
Unfortunately, LRL came to a halt on 18 September 2014. In an open letter to the public, LRL (2014) committee made a statement “hopefully to explain why we close it down, and to voice our protest against and condemnation of the authorities who for years had forced LRL to close down libraries, confiscated books illegally, and threatened our volunteers.”
The committee claimed that “if it was not for tremendous external pressure, these libraries were becoming local educational centers, culture homes, and public platforms.” The external pressure first came in 2011, and by its closure in 2014, 10 libraries had been forced to close down.
LRL and the state: the first phase
The general revival of liberal civil society ideas, which took place around 1989, the time of massive pro-democratic revolutions in East European countries, emphasized the ability of civil society to counteract the state ruled by authoritarian regimes (Edwards, 2014). However, Chinese civil society scholars did not adopt this approach. Deng Zhenglai and Jing Yuejin (1992) proposed their “Positive Interaction Theory” of the relationship between the state and civil society. They argued that through positive interactions, the two sides could better alleviate their internal dysfunctions, respectively, striking a balance between the general interests maintained by the state and the special interests guarded by civil society.
Early on, LRL and Li Yingqiang were credited for their contributions to Chinese society. Not only liberal newspapers such as
LRL’s contribution to solidarity and social capital
Some of the volunteers and donors resided in cities, and many participants in LRL’s summer camps and Liren College were students from cities who had no idea what rural life meant. They were shocked at the bad living conditions in the rural areas, as well as different levels of consumption (like fake Oreo cookies they bought in local groceries; Fang, 2011).
The involvement of urban residents in LRL might have helped mitigate the increasing antagonism between rural immigrants and urban people and let citizens realize what they owed to people in rural areas. According to Wang et al. (2013), LRL also “created a new library development model meant to improve the social capital of rural communities by offering resources, information, and access to the ‘snowball effect’ of weak links between friends or via social media.”
LRL’s action to nurture civic consciousness
In an interview, Li Yingqiang illuminated the ways in which LRL cultivated civic consciousness within rural teenagers, including the following:
book clubs and movie screenings to broaden teenagers’ horizons and educate them to be good citizens;
volunteer groups, leaders of which were elected democratically, and which used
visiting scholars, who gave speeches and exchanged ideas with teenagers. (Li & Xin, n.d.)
The “core bibliography” included a number of titles regarding citizens’ participation in public life and civil society, including
Most of the visiting scholars specialized in social sciences, and they often talked to students about the society. For example, in the first session of Liren College Summer School, Liu Yu, a political philosophy scholar from Tsinghua University, talked about the lack of enthusiasm for politics among students (Fang, 2011).
LRL’s contribution to the public sphere
Today, many talk about the prominent role played by online public sphere in China (Hu, 2008; Yang, 2011), but LRL functioned effectively as an example of an offline public sphere. Through culture events like lectures, book readings, and so on and educational projects like Liren College, LRL provided citizens with a public space to exchange ideas and viewpoints. Particularly, Liren College, which took the form of summer camps and short-term seminars, achieved a high reputation. The participants of this “college” were high school students and college freshmen and sophomores. Instructors were recruited from both domestic and foreign universities, many of them renowned scholars. Zhang Jian, a political scientist from Peking University, gave a lecture with the theme “The Nation: Its Origin & Organization.” He even lectured about
Associational life was colorful in this “college.” There were poetry reading groups, journalism discussion groups, debate competitions, and even TED (technology, entertainment, design)-like idea-sharing events. During a summer camp in 2009 in Henan Province, there was an event listed as “Seminar: Environmental Topics” (Jin, 2009).
LRL and the state: the second phase
It is rewarding to look at LRL’s success in its early phase from a historical viewpoint. Guobin Yang (2011) argued that since 2003, civil society in China was generally on the rise. In 2006, Xu Zongheng, then Mayor of Shenzhen, cited the civil society concept under various circumstances, and Yu Keping, then Deputy General of the Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, proposed to build a rigorous civil society (Lu, 2015). LRL was among the major beneficiaries of this intellectual boom. So was the Transition Institute (TI), a think-tank NGO led by intellectual and activist Guo Yushan.
However, in 2013, an internal memo of the CPC (since leaked) urged officials across the country to be “fully alert to the threat posed by the ideas advocated by the West,” among them civil society (Bandurski, 2013). After that, a crackdown was launched against a number of civic organizations including famous ones like LRL and the TI. Some of the activists advocating for civil society were arrested, among them being Guo Yushan and another well-known figure, Xu Zhiyong. The talks of civil society diminished sharply in China since then.
Two Chinese scholars, Kang Xiaoguang and Han Heng (2008), developed the theory of “Graduated Control,” saying that the Chinese government uses different strategies toward social organizations with different powers to challenge authority. For grassroots NGOs and informal organizations (with less potential for challenge), the government does not conduct intervention; for religious organizations (with greater potential for challenge), the tactic is to limit their growth; for political opposition organizations (challenging the government publicly), the government firmly prohibits their existence. But categorization of social organizations is flexible, as proved by the sharp turn in the authorities’ attitude toward civil society organizations.
What of LRL, then, could possibly have provided the evidence of its “challenge to the government,” which resulted in it being removed from the safe category of informal organizations?
The role of religion in this case was downplayed by Li Yingqiang, then a newly converted Christian who had decided to quit LRL and become an evangelist prior to the crackdown. He said in an interview with NYT that “If it was for me, no matter for religious reasons or other ones, this organization would become ‘normalized’ with my departure. So I don’t know why they came in such a hurry” (Cao, 2014).
The second possible reason was LRL’s ambition to build an offline public sphere, especially with its liberal background, and Li’s ties with dissident intellectuals. Li was once a colleague of Guo Yushan at the TI and a friend of Xu Zhiyong. Talking to NYT prior to LRL’s closing down (earlier than the interview above), Li Yingqiang admitted that “From its start, LRL was pushed forward by a group of intellectuals with a dose of dissent background. I myself wasn’t, but I always hung around with them” (Cao, 2014).
What was the authorities’ evaluation of the challenge from LRL? According to Li, it was a serious one. In June 2014, a new library was to open in Chongqing, a municipality in southwest China, but it was forced to stop even before its opening ceremony. Li recalled, “Though I don’t know who was doing this, it seemed they made full preparations and great determination to do. I was surprised, to be frank. I don’t think we deserve this level of attention” (Cao, 2014).
Conclusion
This case provides explanations of why LRL was tolerated at first and got destroyed later on. As long as civil society organizations can provide resources or capacities that are wanted or needed by the state, they have potential to survive and develop, forming a “positive interaction” with the state. However, if they stage challenges to the government in any way, they risk being crucified by the authorities. The rise and fall of LRL exemplifies this current tendency of how China governs civil society.