Controlling Civil Society from the Bottomup: China’s Strategic Arrangement of the State-CSO-Individual Trialism in Managing State-society Relations

It is often the conception in the literature that civil society’s major challenge in an authoritarian country like China would be from the state directly. This study utilizes over 1200 surveys conducted in Sichuan Province, 67 in-depth interviews with local government officials and CSO leaders, and case studies from communities that CSOs operated to provide an often-overlooked challenge. Based on the research in rural Sichuan, this article finds that the Chinese state at the local level does not spend a significant amount of energy directly interfering with CSOs, but uses institutional constraints to create divisions between the citizenry and CSOs. This article proposes the trialism conception in understanding civil society in authoritarian countries. The state could create conditions that reduce the confidence of individual citizens in CSOs and thus control society from the bottom up without having to apply a significant amount of direct repressions to the CSOs.