Over the last decade, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to assimilate the third sector – non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – through its party-building campaign. This article examines NGOs’ strategies in response to this campaign, based on in-depth interviews with 64 NGOs and local cadres. We find that NGOs have developed three main strategies to respond to the CCP’s attempts to penetrate their organizations. First, NGOs embedded in the party-state system and those affiliated with private enterprises tend to acquiesce to party building out of habit and for compliance reasons, respectively. Second, those with multiple stakeholders generally compromise in the party-building process, acting as passive compliers if they depend more on non-state resources, or active players if they rely more on state resources. Third, civic NGOs that advocate causes inconsistent with the ruling regime might avoid party building as a resistant strategy, by either disguising their nonconformity or escaping from the control of the ruling regime entirely. NGOs’ strategic responses are contingent on their negotiating power, which results from their resource dependence and the party’s enforcement dilemmas. This article contributes to our understanding of the recent party-building campaign from an institutional perspective, and enriches our knowledge about relations between the party and the third sector.

Previous studies on affective governance (情感治理) emphasize how the state has regulated and manipulated citizens’ emotions and psychology. This article, however, shows a different political landscape in which citizens employ emotional strategies to persuade and bargain with the government. Drawing on intensive fieldwork conducted in China from 2019 to 2020, we find that citizens deploy targeted emotional strategies to advance specific interests such as building reciprocal relations with the government, arousing political elites’ empathy, or addressing their most urgent needs. We argue that the government’s deliberate use of affective governance has, on the one hand, unexpectedly revealed and reinforced the conflict between the positive emotions that the state has attempted to exhibit and citizens’ daily experiences and, on the other hand, increased positive feelings towards the government’s efficacy in addressing citizens’ grievances. Taking rare disease patient groups as an example, this article maps and compares three main emotional strategies adopted by civil society in China, namely gratefulness, sadfishing, and dissent. By deciphering these emotional strategies, this article helps us understand the emotional synergy between state and society and sheds new light on the governance of China.

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