Jessica C. Teets

• PhD
• Professor at Middlebury College

In response to increasing socio-economic inequalities, the Chinese state has promoted preferred qualities of a model citizen in the domain of philanthropy and volunteerism. This study examines why some individuals in China choose to be ‘bad citizens’ and not donate or volunteer. Leveraging data from three waves of the Civic Participation in China S...

The Civic Participation in China Survey (CPCS) is a nation-wide, randomized online survey of urban residents that looks at philanthropic and volunteering activities, and perceptions of citizenship and civic engagement. The survey ran between 2018 and 2024 in four waves. This article describes the general methodological approach and the broad trends...

This study examines the significant changes in philanthropic and volunteering behaviours among CCP and non-CCP members across three waves of the Civic Participation in China Survey in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Although the increase in these behaviours cannot be solely attributed to the new political messaging encouraging philanthropy and volunteerism, e...

Chinese citizens are relatively happy with the state’s management of national disasters and emergencies. However, they are increasingly concluding that the state alone cannot manage them. Leveraging the 2018 and 2020 Civic Participation in China Surveys, we find that more educated citizens conclude that the government have a leading role crisis man...

中国公民对国家管理应对灾害和突发事件的做法比较满意。然而，他们越来越发现仅靠国家无法应对危机。2018年和2020年的中国公民参与调查显示，更多受过良好教育的公民认为政府在危机管理中起主导作用，但民间社会组织（CSO）有较大的空间补充协助应对危机。另外一个稍有分歧的观点是，与非志愿者相比，曾与民间社会组织深度合作的志愿者更怀疑民间社会组织履行危机管理职能的组织能力。这意味着中国共产党的政治合法性不会因为允许民间社会组织在危机管理中发挥更大的作用而受到挑战。

Citizenship education has been an explicit part of the universal education system in contemporary China. Using data from an original nationwide survey conducted in 2018, we test the hypothesis that the longer the intensity of exposure to citizenship education, the more citizens are influenced by a state-led conception of citizenship characterized b...

This article argues that policymakers' individual attributes influence their willingness to engage in policy innovation, and that this influence is responsive to, but not determined by, changes in the institutional structure. We derive these findings by employing principal component analysis of original data from surveys of local policymakers in Ch...

Extant literature on civic participation in Western democracies demonstrates a linear relationship between increased civic participation and a stronger democracy. In general, the scholarly debate revolves around the precise causal mechanisms for this relationship: holding government accountable; citizens learning ‘democratic skills’, such as collec...

本文认为，政策制定者的人格特质会影响他们开展政策创新的意愿，并且这种影响是因制度结构变迁而产生的，而不是由其决定的。通过对中国地方性政策制定者调查的源数据进行主成分分析，我们得出这些发现，以便定位和归纳不同的人格。从统计学的观点看，人格的意义十分明显，它会影响开展创新的意愿，并且这种影响是因诸如风险升高等变化而产生的。除了分析外在激励和内在激励对政策创新的影响之外，我们进一步发现，传统的政策企业家人格愿意接受风险，但这种人格并不能很好地解释创新。

公民身份教育已成为当代中国全民教育体系中的一个明确组成部分。本文基于 2018年进行的一项全国性调查，检验了以下假设：接受公民身份教育的时间越长，公民受国家主导的公民身份概念影响越大，国家主导的公民身份的显著特点是被动地服从国家并对国家忠诚。研究发现，当公民受教育程度较低时，公民身份教育是有效的；但当公民受教育程度较高时，公民身份教育效果较差，而且可能会促进（或至少不会妨碍）更积极的公民身份观念。

现有关于西方民主国家公民参与的文献表明：公民参与的增加和民主的强大之间存在线性关系。学术辩论通常围绕这种关系的确切因果机制展开，包括向政府问责，公民学习“民主技能”，如集体动员和宣传，以及建立社会资本和信任以化解集体行动的困境。考虑到中国迅速增加的志愿服务，本研究利用2020年中国公民参与调查的证据，在一党专政的背景下检验这些理论。研究发现中国的志愿者的确学习“公民技能”，然而他们所学的技能和民主国家的志愿者所学的有所不同。最重要的是，当志愿服务允许权威主义国家的公民去学习和分辨最适合解决具体的社会问题的方法时，他们一般不会试图直接让政府为其糟糕的表现负责。另外，研究发现志愿者能寻求的支持以对其他公民产生信任是非常有限的，这与西方民主国家的证据相反。最后，结果表明志愿者的参与是为了向政府发送...

Scholars and policymakers debate whether centralized environmental governance improves protection. In China, in response to its environmental crisis, the government designed a centralized payment for ecosystems services (PES) policy to alter the costs and benefits for local stakeholders to protect the environment. This study analyses the impact of...

This article argues that policymakers’ individual attributes influence their willingness to engage in policy innovation, and that this influence is responsive to, but not determined by, changes in the institutional structure. We derive these findings by employing principal component analysis of original data from surveys of local policymakers in Ch...

The Fight for China's Future: Civil Society vs. the Chinese Communist Party Willy Wo-Lap Lam London and New York: Routledge, 2020 xii + 234 pp. £34.99 ISBN 978-0-367-18869-6 - Jessica C. Teets

This article examines how civil society organizations navigate local government to secure more inclusive environmental governance. Based on an in-depth case study of water governance in Zhejiang Province between 2012 and 2018, we find that Green Zhejiang, a civil society organization, exercised informal power to hold the local government accountabl...

Most scholars credit policy experimentation with China’s successful economic reforms and continued authoritarian resilience. This article contributes to this policy experimentation literature by providing a systematic overview of the motivations incentivizing Chinese policy entrepreneurs to experiment at local levels. This article traces the evolut...

Citizenship education has been an explicit part of the universal education system in contemporary China. Using data from an original nationwide survey conducted in 2018, we test the hypothesis that the longer the intensity of exposure to citizenship education, the more citizens are influenced by a state-led conception of citizenship characterized b...

Xi Jinping’s efforts to recentralize political power have triggered a debate over if these changes will destroy the “authoritarian responsiveness” in China credited with regime durability. This review essay assesses “responsiveness” based on empirical research on three types of mechanisms through which the Hu-Wen administration interacted with citi...

Why do local officials in an authoritarian bureaucracy experiment with policy, even when directed not to do so by central-level officials? This study suggests that policy experimentation in this institutional environment can best be understood as an interaction between the structure in which local officials are embedded, and individual-level person...

To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power. Edited by Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi, 321 pp. - Volume 78 Issue 2 - Jessica C. Teets

In this chapter, we explore the development of urban community governance in China, specifically the interaction of local government, social organizations, community, and citizens in urban community governance. To explore this interaction, we selected the case of collaborative governance in urban housing, because by the 2000s the cost of housing wa...

Will Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian rule stifle innovation by local officials, which has been instrumental in the Chinese communist regime's resilience and economic success?

The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China Bin Xu Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017 xiii + 237 pp. £20.99 ISBN 978-1-5036-0336-3 - Volume 234 - Jessica C. Teets

Under the Hu-Wen administration, scholars analyzed how political opportunity structures (POS) affect the policy influence of NPOs in China, and found that the opportunity structure was relatively more open, especially for NPOs using personal connections. In this article, we focus on changes in the opportunity structure since Xi Jinping came to powe...

Within the field of international relations, scholarship supports the notion that international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and foundations, as a part of transnational civil society, influence state policy and behaviors, while the causal effects of state influence on INGOs is less researched. By contrast, the co-constitutive roles of sta...

Despite playing a key contributing role in China’s economic reforms and the Party’s regime durability, there has been a noted reduction in local policy experimentation. Using semi-structured interviews with policymakers in Beijing, Zhejiang and Shenzhen, we find that although recentralization efforts at the central-level are impacting local officia...

In this article, I examine how civil society organizations (CSOs) in China created policy networks among government officials to change environmental policies. I contend that these networks work in similar ways to those in democracies, despite the focus in the literature on how policymaking in authoritarian regimes lacks societal participation. Chi...

Decentralised policymaking in China is often cited as a key success factor in economic reform and authoritarian resilience. Although the existing literature presents policy diffusion as a technocratic process where socially optimal policies diffuse, many examples exist where the reverse is true or where the central government sanctioned local innov...

In May 2015, a draft of China’s new Overseas NGO Management Law was leaked to the media. International journalists and NGOs declared that this law was evidence of the Xi Jinping regime’s political repression and a “crackdown” on civil society. In this paper, we argue that the goal of the Chinese government is not to destroy the NGO sector and civil...

In this article, I address the puzzle of what motivates local officials in China to do something new—create a new policy, launch a pilot, adopt an experimental policy—especially when such innovation has uncertain outcomes. Despite the uncertainty and risk, we observe a great deal of policy innovation, both the creation and adoption of experiments,...

This article examines the evolution of the Yunnan model of civil society management, and through a pretest–posttest research design, finds that new regulations in 2010 create a larger role for the local state in developing civil society. These changes bring the Yunnan model closer to the more supervised model of social management pioneered by Beiji...

在过去20年中国市民社会的发展过程中，基于地方实践出现了不同的公民社会管理模式。中国将在国家层面出台有关市民社会管理的新规，目前正处于意见征询期，主要的争论围绕云南和北京这两种模式展开。看起来，北京模式更受决策者青睐，其重点在于政府主导NGO的发展，通过非营利孵化器和政府购买公共服务来实现。作者认为，伴随北京模式的是协商式威权主义治理（consultative authoritarianism）在中国的兴起，这种模式在试图建立新的间接的社会控制机制的同时，寻求扩大公民社会的自主活动空间。这对威权体制之下不会有自治市民社会的观念以及市民社会显现民主化指标的观念形成挑战。

The Role of American NGOs in China's Modernization: Invited Influence. NortonWheeler. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. xix + 220 pp. £80.00; $135.00. ISBN 978-0-415-50657-1 - Volume 214 - Jessica C. Teets

In this article, I analyse civil society development in China using examples from Beijing to demonstrate the causal role of local officials' ideas about these groups during the last 20 years. I argue that the decentralization of public welfare and the linkage of promotion to the delivery of these goods supported the idea of local government–civil s...

上海市地方政府的公共产品提供领域存在着一种政治经济学，这种政治经济学带来了上海地方政府从现有公共服务提供模式向社会创新模式的转型。现有的公共服务提供模式是一种基于住所的模式。而在社会创新模式中，政府通过合同将公共服务的提供工作承包给非营利组织或私有企业，以求降低成本，并尝试提供不同层次的公共服务。合同是沟通旧治理模式与新治理模式之间的桥梁，并使新治理模式能够在避免社会动荡的前提下实现行政的现代化。在许多其他省份，利用合同来提供公共服务也成为主流。合同使非营利组织能够更加专业化地为弱势群体提供公共产品。当前，政府对非营利组织的使用是单向的，非营利组织在政策过程中的参与并没有得到扩大。不过，社会创新模式开辟的这一公私合作新渠道，可能会在未来提高非营利组织在相关政策领域中的参与度。通过地方公共政策...

Despite the dominant narrative of the repression of civil society in China, Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model argues that interactions between local officials and civil society facilitate a learning process, where by each actor learns about the intentions and work processes of the other. Over the past two decades, often facilita...

In this paper, I find that the political economy of public goods provision by the local government in Shanghai influenced the decision to transition from the existing public service delivery model based on residency, to a social innovation model where the government contracts with non-profits and private firms to provide services at lower costs and...

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the state-society models of state-led civil society or corporatism have dominated the academic discourse on Chinese state-society relations and determined a hierarchal relationship between the state and society (Unger and Chan 1995; Brook 1997; Saich 2000; Ding 1994; Chamberlain 1998). Recently,...

Bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time. We argue that along with economic and social conditions migrants consider the political environment when choosing among various destinations. Specifically we hypothesize that a country’s citizenship policy regime and the strength o...

Many analysts contend that participation in the Sichuan earthquake relief efforts strengthened Chinese civil society. I examine these claims based on interviews with civil society organizations, academics and local officials in Sichuan, and argue that participation in relief efforts has strengthened civil society through increased capacity, publici...

This paper examines the effect of registration regulations on civil society autonomy from the state, and argues that mother-in-laws (supervisory agencies) often advance civil society goals and protect these groups from both the local and central government. Although the registration system is designed to decrease autonomy and increase control over...

Abstract will be provided by author.

This article examines the broad question of how countries improve governance—the process whereby the government effectively meets citizen needs—through analysis of Chinese governance reforms and the role played by civil society. This definition of governance focuses first on the mechanism which allows the government to understand citizen needs, and...