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