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This study hypothesizes that the Chinese state uses NGOs as objects of consultation for improving its policymaking in the same way it consults mass organizations, democratic parties, and official professional associations to obtain specialist information. This model of consultation is based on the mass-line model and on its application within democratic centralist administrative hierarchies. The investigation shows that, apart from their main social or environmental tasks, Chinese NGOs indeed inform the state, many of them with policy formulation in mind. It also shows that the Chinese state uses democratic centralist vocabulary to describe the tasks that it assumes NGOs should undertake. However, apart from the mass-line type of consultation, both NGOs and the state have other conceptions about the proper roles for NGOs. The state now promotes the idea of civil society as an independent service provider, while NGOs seek an even larger sphere of social autonomy and self-organization.

This paper critiques current academic usage of the analytic category of 'civil society' in recent studies of contemporary China. The problem is not the lack of good empirical work (which abounds), but rather the way in which understandings of '

Refugees become asylum-seekers not only because the receiving country gives them the bureaucratic-legal status but also because they start to identify with the status. This article examines how refugees learn to be asylum-seekers even when they question asylum decisions. It uses Foucault's idea of governmentality to assess how governmental policies become translated into asylum-seekers’ collective and personal conducts as asylum-seekers, sometimes in ways that undermine the official policy. This article introduces the idea of papered governmentality, in which the production of papers is a governmental technology to manage not only populations but also personal identities and conducts. It investigates how asylum-seekers’ own role in papered governmentality as receivers, producers, and users of various papers in the asylum process transforms their conducts and identities in ways that reshape how they are governed. The empirical research site was an asylum-seekers’ protest in Finland where the first author conducted participant observation about how papers included in the asylum process were collected, read, discussed, circulated, and co-produced. The article finds that when migration control utilizes laws, bureaucratic documents, and other liberal governmental technologies designed to modify autonomous individuals’ own decisions to migrate, it produces not only control but also identification with the host country and some freedom to choose how to act with governmental decisions.

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