The study centers on the ACWF’s Featured Projects List, an annual recognition program that highlights exemplary initiatives by women’s social organizations serving women, children, and families. Unlike government purchase-of-service contracting, which involves formal agreements and competitive bidding, these lists function primarily as honorific mechanisms. They identify model projects, publicize preferred organizational models, and confer institutional legitimacy on selected organizations. By choosing which projects to celebrate, the ACWF effectively defines what counts as valuable women’s work and determines which forms of civic participation receive political endorsement. The researchers argue that this recognition-based mechanism operates through what scholars call control and empowerment, shaping nonprofit development through legitimacy-sharing rather than direct funding or regulation.

The analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which this co-production unfolds. The first is institutional incorporation, through which the Party-state selectively integrates social organizations into Party-led governance. The researchers found a clear trajectory across the three years of project lists: in 2023, the focus centered on moral education and patriotic socialization for children; by 2024, the framework expanded to encompass women, children, and families; and in 2025, a new emphasis emerged on establishing Women’s Federation branches within social organizations themselves. This shift reflects a broader policy push, articulated by President Xi Jinping in October 2023, to achieve full coverage of Women’s Federation organizations across new economic and social organizations.

The institutional logic of this incorporation becomes strikingly concrete in the study’s archival findings. In Guangdong Province, establishing a Women’s Federation branch was explicitly included as a scoring item worth two points in the official evaluation criteria for charity organizations, alongside other Party-building indicators. During fieldwork in northern China, an interviewee from a county-level children’s welfare organization confirmed that creating such a branch had become a practical requirement for achieving higher scores in annual nonprofit assessments. Political alignment, in other words, has been transformed into a measurable dimension of organizational performance, embedding Party-state priorities directly into the administrative metrics of the nonprofit sector.

The second mechanism, discursive role alignment, concerns how women are portrayed in officially recognized projects. Here the researchers uncovered a striking pattern: among the 180 projects analyzed, nearly half contained unclear gender representations, referring broadly to the work of organizations or volunteers without specifying who performed the activities. When women were explicitly visible, they were almost always depicted as providers of care and moral guidance, comforting children, mediating family relations, and fostering social harmony. Even in projects focused on women’s political mobilization, which nearly doubled by 2025, women’s participation was framed less as empowerment and more as service, translating domestic virtues into public moral work under titles such as matchmaker and family mediator.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this gendered framing is the widespread use of maternal identities in volunteer programs. At least 16 of the 180 projects adopted labels such as Loving Mother or Neighbor Mother, assigning volunteers a symbolic maternal role upon participation. According to the Yunnan Women’s Federation, the term is broadly defined and technically open to men, yet all volunteers were still referred to as mothers regardless of gender. The researchers interpret this as a feminized governance template in which motherhood functions simultaneously as metaphor and managerial device, standardizing how care should be practiced in public life and tying women’s civic participation to the state’s moral order.

The third mechanism, gendered co-production for affective governance, emerges most clearly from the fieldwork. In a county in northern China, the researchers observed a close partnership between a children’s welfare organization featured on the 2023 list and the local Women’s Federation. A Federation official explained that the organization could take children on a three-day summer hike without the层层 approvals that would stall a government-led initiative, admiring their passion and dedication while acknowledging that her own office would never dare organize such an activity. The organization, in turn, valued the Federation’s name as a protective shield, with one staff member noting that having the Women’s Federation alongside them made everything feel much safer. This mutual exchange of flexibility for legitimacy illustrates how co-production operates as a pragmatic strategy for navigating resource scarcity and bureaucratic risk.

The researchers also documented how this partnership extends into legally ambiguous territory. During fieldwork, they observed a case in which a child urgently needed shelter but did not meet the legal criteria for direct state intervention. Through informal coordination among the local Women’s Federation, a juvenile protection center, and other agencies, the social organization helped devise a flexible rescue plan that all parties tacitly endorsed. Operating in this grey zone, the organization acted as liaison and mediator, bridging institutional gaps while preserving bureaucratic legitimacy. Such cases reveal that co-production in China is sustained not only through administrative coordination but through emotional credibility, trust, and moral reputation, qualities the researchers describe as the affective infrastructure of governance.

The study situates these findings within broader fiscal and political constraints. Local Women’s Federations often lack the budgets and staffing to serve women, children, and families adequately, making collaboration with social organizations a necessity rather than a choice. Policy documents institutionalize this affective logic, with the 14th Five-Year Plan for Women’s Federation Work promoting initiatives such as the Mother’s Health Action so that women and children fully feel the warmth of the Party. In this model, private care is recast as a public obligation, and women’s emotional labor is transformed into an administrative resource. The researchers note that this arrangement resembles soft budgeting, in which state actors transfer service responsibilities to social organizations without formal fiscal commitments, offering symbolic recognition in return.

The study’s conclusions carry a central paradox. Women’s care and emotional labor are publicly celebrated as moral virtues while simultaneously instrumentalized as technologies of political control. Women’s social organizations emerge neither as autonomous civic actors nor as passive state instruments, but as hybrid entities embedded in a governance system where bureaucratic, moral, and affective forces converge. Yet the researchers also identify ambivalence within these arrangements: within the moral idiom of service, women and their organizations sometimes reinterpret official expectations through acts of solidarity, creativity, and affective commitment that subtly reshape governance from below. The authors call for future policy reforms that would recognize emotional labor as skilled, professional, and politically consequential work, and that would decouple care from gendered prescriptions, supporting more equitable and sustainable forms of governance that genuinely empower the organizations and women involved.

Subject of Research: Gendered co-production and emotional labor in women's philanthropic governance in China

Article Title: The co-production of women’s organizations: party-building, emotional labor, and gendered philanthropic governance in China

Article References: Han, L., & Hong, Y. (2026). The co-production of women’s organizations: party-building, emotional labor, and gendered philanthropic governance in China. Global Public Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00154-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00154-y

Keywords: co-production, women's organizations, All-China Women's Federation, emotional labor, Party-building, philanthropic governance, China, gender norms, nonprofit sector, affective governance, civil society, care work

The significance of this comparison lies in its methodology. While many scholars have observed anecdotally that conditions for civil society organizations in China have tightened or loosened over time, few studies have undertaken a systematic, field-by-field comparison of the actual policy texts issued at the national level across these two eras. By treating policy documents as primary evidence, the researchers were able to trace precisely where the state’s posture changed dramatically and where it remained remarkably stable. This document-based approach allows the evolution of government-nonprofit relations to be mapped with a granularity that impressionistic accounts cannot match, and it grounds the analysis in the concrete legal and administrative instruments through which the Chinese state actually exercises authority over organized social life.

The study identified major policy changes across several crucial domains. The first is organizational establishment, the process by which nonprofit groups gain legal recognition. Registration requirements, sponsor oversight arrangements, and the criteria for what may legally exist as a social organization all shifted between the two periods, altering which kinds of groups can form and under whose supervision. A second domain is disciplining and monitoring, where policies governing annual inspections, audits, and enforcement actions became more elaborate and more demanding in the New Era. Related fields include government funding of nonprofits, the rules governing charitable fundraising, and the increasingly consequential regulation of overseas funding, through which foreign grants to Chinese organizations have come under intense scrutiny. Party building, the extension of Communist Party committees and members into nonprofit organizations, emerged as another field transformed almost beyond recognition between the two eras, alongside policy advocacy, the arena in which organizations seek to influence government decisions.

The contrast with earlier decades is striking. During the New Century, the state’s relationship with the nonprofit sector reflected what scholars of Chinese politics have described as consultative or graduated forms of authoritarian governance. Organizations were subject to controls, but the state also experimented with purchasing services from nonprofits, encouraging social organizations to deliver welfare functions, and soliciting their expertise in policy formation. Some analysts characterized this as a period in which many civil societies could bloom, at least within carefully bounded spheres. The policy environment allowed a measure of negotiated autonomy, in which grassroots groups survived through what researchers have called contingent symbiosis with local authorities. The new comparative analysis confirms that this era’s policies embodied a deliberative logic: the state consulted, absorbed, and steered, but it did not yet demand organizational integration into its own political structures.

The New Era policies tell a different story. Since 2013, the party-state has asserted far more direct and directive authority over the sector. Party building requirements, which the study identifies as one of the most transformed policy fields, now extend Communist Party organization deep into social organizations, embedding political supervision within the internal governance of nonprofits themselves. The regulation of overseas funding, formalized through legislation targeting foreign nongovernmental organizations and their domestic partners, has securitized what was once a routine channel of philanthropic and technical support. Charitable fundraising, while legally clarified through the 2016 Charity Law and the subsequent recognition of tens of thousands of certified charitable organizations, has been coupled with heightened disclosure and monitoring obligations. The cumulative effect, according to the researchers, is a strategy of incorporation: organizations are welcomed into the state’s agenda only to the extent that they accept directive oversight and align with party leadership.

Yet the study’s most analytically interesting finding may be what has not changed. In certain policy fields, notably business activities and tax deduction, the researchers found fewer significant shifts between the New Century and the New Era. The rules permitting nonprofits to engage in revenue-generating activities, and the tax incentives that encourage charitable giving, have remained comparatively stable. This continuity matters because it complicates any simple narrative of wholesale repression or liberalization. The state has, in effect, retained and even cultivated the economic and fiscal infrastructure of a functioning philanthropic sector, with more than sixteen thousand certified charitable organizations now operating under the Charity Law framework, while simultaneously transforming the political infrastructure through which those organizations are supervised and integrated. The result is a sector that is institutionally more developed and politically more constrained at the same time.

This dual trajectory sheds light on long-running theoretical debates about state-society relations in authoritarian contexts. Earlier frameworks described China’s approach as administrative absorption of society, in which the state co-opted social organizations to prevent autonomous mobilization, or as fragmented authoritarianism, in which policy authority was dispersed among competing bureaucratic actors. The new evidence suggests that such framings capture the New Century better than the present. The shift toward directive state incorporation implies a recentralization of authority and a clearer command hierarchy, in which the party’s organizational presence substitutes for the looser bargaining that once characterized government-nonprofit encounters. Participation by nonprofits is still possible, and even encouraged in service delivery areas, but it increasingly takes the form of participation without contestation, a formula that recent scholarship on NGO autonomy in China has used to describe advocacy that operates strictly within state-defined limits.

The practical implications for the nonprofit sector itself are substantial. Organizations seeking legal status, government contracts, or fundraising permissions in the New Era must navigate a policy environment in which political conformity is a baseline expectation rather than an occasional demand. Annual inspections have become instruments through which party leadership and standardization are enforced, with authorities explicitly framing inspection regimes as mechanisms to keep social associations on a steady course. Overseas partnerships, once a lifeline for environmental, legal aid, and public health groups, now require registration and reporting under security-oriented regulations. At the same time, organizations aligned with state priorities, particularly in poverty alleviation, elder care, and community services, have found expanded opportunities for government funding and public recognition. The policy landscape thus rewards integration and penalizes autonomy, reshaping the composition of the sector in favor of groups willing to operate inside the incorporation framework.

The researchers conclude by situating their findings within the global comparative literature on government-nonprofit relations, noting that China’s trajectory offers a distinctive model in which a strong state deliberately cultivates a nonprofit sector as an instrument of governance rather than as a counterweight to state power. They argue that future research should track how these policy changes filter down to the local level, where implementation has historically varied widely, and how organizations themselves adapt their strategies, governance structures, and issue portfolios to survive under directive incorporation. For scholars of civil society, authoritarian governance, and comparative public policy, the study provides something the field has lacked: a systematic, evidence-based map of exactly where Chinese nonprofit policy changed, where it endured, and what that pattern reveals about the state’s evolving theory of how organized society should be governed. As China’s social organizations continue to multiply in number while narrowing in permitted purpose, the comparison between the New Century and the New Era offers an essential baseline for understanding one of the world’s most consequential experiments in managing the boundary between state and society.

The findings also resonate with scholarship on the social origins of nonprofit sectors, which holds that the shape and autonomy of civil society depend heavily on the prevailing pattern of state welfare provision. China’s trajectory illustrates a variant in which the nonprofit sector expands not through retreat of the state but through its active orchestration, with government funding and service contracting serving as levers of alignment rather than signs of disengagement.

Historically, the study’s framing benefits from a longer view of Chinese associational life. Charitable halls and benevolent societies flourished in imperial China, often operating in negotiated proximity to officialdom, suggesting that the tension between state authority and organized benevolence is not a modern invention but a recurring feature of Chinese governance that each era resolves differently.

Methodologically, the reliance on document analysis underscores both the strength and the limits of policy-text research. Texts reveal official intent with precision, yet implementation has historically diverged across regions, meaning local enforcement may soften or sharpen the national posture described here. The authors’ call for research tracing these policies to the local level therefore addresses a genuine evidentiary gap.

For comparative scholars, the case suggests that authoritarian states can simultaneously professionalize a philanthropic sector, through legal clarification and fiscal incentives, while narrowing its political space, a combination that standard typologies of government-nonprofit relations, developed largely from liberal democratic contexts, may need to accommodate more explicitly.

Subject of Research: Policy changes in China's national-level governance of nonprofit organizations from the New Century (2002-2012) to the New Era (2013-present)

Article Title: China’s policy changes in managing nonprofit organizations: The comparison between the New Century and the New Era

Article References: Hu, M., & Dong, H. (2026). China’s policy changes in managing nonprofit organizations: The comparison between the New Century and the New Era. Global Public Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00157-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00157-9

Keywords: China, nonprofit organizations, civil society, government-nonprofit relations, policy change, state control, party building, charitable fundraising, overseas funding, authoritarian governance, comparative public policy, social organizations