Sociologist Carolyn Hsu rolls with the unexpected to humanize Chinese people working on the ground to confront social issues

Horizontal Rule with Colgate C

In Carolyn Hsu’s experience, a big part of being a China scholar is learning to embrace the unexpected. The professor of sociology researches civil society in China, and one of her early experiences with happy accidents came about thanks to an offhand comment at an expat church in Beijing.

It was 2004, and Hsu had just arrived for a year-long study of the China Youth Development Foundation, a group that sponsored poor rural children to finish school. When Hsu gave a brief explanation of her scholarship, she was shocked to find that multiple people in the congregation knew of other nongovernmental organizations doing work around the country.

“Everyone [in the academic community] knew that the NGO sector in China barely existed and, after Tiananmen Square, got squashed like a bug,” Hsu said. It was assumed that the government tacitly restricted the development of NGOs, instead hoping to provide all such services for citizens on its own. “Nothing I learned in grad school or anywhere else would make you think this was something you should be looking for.”

Because nobody was looking into the newly emerging phenomenon, Hsu ended up writing some of the first scholarly articles on the subject, as well as a seminal book — Social Entrepreneurship and Citizenship in China: The rise of NGOs in the PRC was published in 2017. “You have a whole new generation of people with a lot of mobility that they didn’t have before, feeling empowered in ways that they wouldn’t have 15 years earlier, and learning about NGOs because of more media and visiting the West,” Hsu says.

Hoping to build on the ideas of volunteerism and citizen engagement under the Chinese Communist Party, Hsu and several colleagues then decided to look at the much-discussed but little understood “social credit system.” For years, the foreign press had speculated about the Orwellian nature of the Chinese government monitoring all its citizens’ actions and publicly ranking that behavior. Hsu wanted to understand the practical realities of this type of surveillance and whether it would encourage or suppress volunteering.

Between 2018 and early 2020, the team of researchers collected thousands of responses to online surveys about civic participation. But instead of that data forming the base for a project on the social credit system, it turned into something radically different due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We asked a bunch of questions on this survey about civic behavior, citizenship, and views of the state. We were interested in their views of the state solving social problems, and we were doing all this for a project that never happened,” Hsu said. “Now what we have is data on the pandemic.”

Using the responses from before and after January 2020, Hsu and her collaborators wrote an article for the Washington Post about citizens’ perception of how the Chinese government handled the early days of the pandemic.

“Central to China’s governance strategy is the idea that, without the Communist Party’s leadership, China would descend into chaos — and that outside expertise and leadership could undermine the legitimacy of the government. Our survey results suggest that Chinese citizens believe their government cannot successfully respond to this kind of crisis without outside assistance from civil society,” they concluded.

In a more recent paper, “The Construction and Performance of Citizenship in Contemporary China,” Hsu’s team used the survey data to explore the role of citizenship education in China and how it shapes people’s sense of what it means to be a good citizen. Although citizenship education has been part of China’s universal education system since 1957 (eight years after the Communist Party took over the country), China is not unique in shaping a national identity through the classroom. France and Portugal both require more than nine years of citizenship education, and many other nations require at least some amount of class time in understanding what it means to be a good citizen.

While the main message of this education in China is that good citizenship requires loyalty and obedience to the party, the way people respond to this messaging changes depending on their level of education. Those with more education are actually less likely to say that “supporting the party” is the most important element of citizenship than those who don’t receive as much citizenship education. Instead, among those more highly educated individuals, there seems to be an increasing emphasis on citizens having an active role in solving social problems and contributing to the overall improvement of the nation.

While outside observers might expect the Chinese government to crack down on citizen-led projects, Chinese government officials have realized it can be beneficial to let people solve some of their own problems. “What I joke is that NGOs are like the government research and development branch,” Hsu says. “They try out all these solutions and if they work, the government will copy them. NGOs are fine with this because all of this means the social problem they want addressed is getting addressed.”

Whether this level of citizen involvement will continue to be accepted by the government in the wake of the pandemic is an open question. Hsu and her team have just collected more survey data from 2022 and are beginning to analyze it. They hope to continue sending out surveys every two years, and eventually to return to the topic of the social credit system.

These questions about the Chinese people’s relationship to their government is meant to emphasize the fact that citizens are not passive minions of the officials in power. While Hsu strongly condemns the way the Communist Party has carried out oppression in Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and in other populations, she thinks the American media often paints China with an overly broad brush. Just as some Americans might protest against being lumped into the same political beliefs as President Trump or President Biden, Chinese people don’t agree with everything their government does.

“The bigger picture for me is to shed light on the citizens of China who are doing creative, courageous, innovative things and are not oppressed, sad drones under the heal of the Communist Party,” Hsu says. “They’re not fools, you know. And it frustrates me a lot that that is how they’re portrayed.”