 Back to NGO 2.0, because we wanted to introduce 2.0 thinking and practice to NGOs, therefore we started off with social media literacy training. We teach grassroots NGOs in western and central provinces of China to learn how to use social media to engage in participatory thinking, launch interactive advocacy campaigns, increase the transparency of NGO operation, design online crowdfunding projects, and learn human-centered design to create solutions to the problems that NGOs are tackling. To date we have trained approximately 2,200 NGOs, and this is part of our curriculum. We also created other programs, for example we developed a web 2.0 toolbox for NGOs. We also built a crowdsourced philanthropy map over which more than 27,000 NGOs have registered their project data and organization data. We also run civic hackathons in collaboration with transactional IT companies, domestic Chinese IT companies, software developer and maker communities, and universities, especially departments of computer science and design in universities. We have worked with Tsinghua University, and the University of Science and Technology of China, and the Senyue Science University, etc. As NGO 2.0 evolved, we have grown into an organization with expertise in designing social media for social good and tech for good projects. In short, we practice ICT-powered activism. In the process we have grown into a nationwide, for lack of a better word, super NGO working with grassroots NGOs in 34 provinces and municipalities. So all those activities form part of my regular practice as a non-confrontational activist. So now let's take a look at the concept of non-confrontationalism. Non-confrontational activism is a thematic threat running through my new book, The Other Digital China. Now, during my ten-year-long experience of running NGO 2.0, I encountered a variety of puzzled responses from my colleagues and friends in the US. They ask, how could a foreign NGO specializing in ICT activism survive at all in such an adverse environment like China? This question, however, is a false question because, first of all, NGO 2.0 is not an international NGO. From day one, I made sure that we set it up as a local Chinese NGO operated by a largely indigenous Chinese team. We now have seven full-time employees in China. So the challenges at the core of our operation are not much different from those faced by the other grassroots NGOs in China. So the question we should ask instead is, how have the Chinese NGOs failed through the successive rains of an authoritarian regime? Well, to fail well in China requires a different mindset and a different strategy, which is learning the art of restraint and following the centuries-old culture logic of finding the middle ground whereby missions are difficult or get accomplished. Because for the Chinese activists, this means producing social good without throwing a street revolution or confronting the state openly and aggressively. During the past 10 years, I was exposed bit by bit to a gradually unfolding, captivating picture of social media activism in China in which multiple players from diverse sectors are leveraging the network effect of 2.0 to create incremental change in China. And this book is devoted to the ICD practices emerging from China's social sector caught at a specific, particularly historical moment, thanks partly to the arrival of 2.0 technology and cyber-utopianism and partly to the Communist Party's alleged commitment to policies aimed at energizing the weak social sector. Now with this book, I was trying to answer to ask the question, what is the ecosystem of social media activism looking like in China today? In the old media environment, the major civic actors for NGOs, but since 2009, after social media had gone mainstream in China, this old ecosystem has changed because microblogging brought in four new groups of social actors. They are the free agents, corporate sector, software developer communities and maker labs and the university sector. And NGO 2.0 designed projects that involve participants from all those sectors. I should also note that the great majority of social actors we collaborate with are Chinese millennials and members of the Generation C. All those social actors share a commitment to making incremental change rather than throwing a street revolution. And together, those actors from diverse sectors are building an invisible coalition to bring incremental change to Chinese society in spite of censorship. If you want me to choose a single sentence to describe this book, it would be, this is a book about the gray zones in China. In the gray zones, Chinese activists practice non-contentious social actions. So let's take a deeper dive into this keyword, non-confrontational activism and ask what kind of politics it implies and how does the concept and practice of non-confrontationalism challenge the mainstream Western liberal thinking about activism. Chinese social actors I named above don't fit squarely into the profile of activists prescribed in the Western liberal tradition because Chinese change makers are walking around obstacles rather than breaking through them. And they navigate tactfully between what is lawful and what is illegitimate. We're all familiar with the Western paradigm that tend to equate action with resistance and social change with street revolutions. And I think it is time that non-confrontational activism is conceptualized, fully documented with case studies so that we can put on the front burner a very important question which is the agency of activists operating in authoritarian countries. Now generally speaking, activists practicing non-confrontationalism are anonymous because their actions purposefully attract no attention. They stay on the margins of history and they remain peripheral to academic discussions about social actions even though it prevails in all autocratic societies where activists resort to other means of serving social good than openly rebelling and openly critiquing. In my book I incorporated a chapter on the critical literature revolving around the concept and practice of non-confrontationalism. Here I want to single out one such book, James C. Scott's Weapons of the Week, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. James Scott introduced the concept of invisible agents and their quiet and piecemeal tactics. He also gave credit to what he called the practice of calculated conformity. Well, James Scott's peasants typically avoid direct and dramatic confrontation with the authorities. But instead of condemning the peasants' silence as complicitous or devoid of politics, Scott locates the sites of peasant action in micro-inconspicuous everyday forms of food dragging, false compliance, fine ignorance, and so on. And this book represents a significant milestone in valorizing the powerless as political agents. Now when we turn to a country like China or other illiberal societies where open resistance is an exception rather than the norm, we as researchers are called upon to go beyond the dichotomous mode of thinking to solve a puzzle. The puzzle is why are they exploited in those countries to accept their situation as a normal or even as a justifiable part of social order? Are Chinese people fatalistic, complicitous, or paralyzed by fear and cowardice? So this question has been sitting on a lot of people's minds. Surely if the Chinese government could hire as many as two million people to insert deceptive writings into social media posts, shouldn't we have good reasons to believe that Chinese censorship has penetrated every corner of that society and that the censors have manipulated the public opinions effortlessly? Well, that is the conventional reading of the muted consensus of Chinese people over maintaining the status quo. And that formulation relegates the entire population of China into the category of the brainwashed. In reality though, we know that Chinese people have more choices than being brainwashed and becoming martyrs. So what is missing in the scholarly research on China is the massive middle ground in which conformity is often a self-conscious strategy and that it might be possible to think of a continuum of situations ranging from the free dialogue, what Kabuma has called ideal speech situation or the public sphere, all the way to the concentration camp. So what is understudied in the China field is that continuum of situations or the middle ground or the gray zones in which the Chinese activists navigate dating and they are quite successful. As we all knew that the favorite topic, the hardest topic for digital China scholars in the West is Chinese censorship. With this book, I'm taking a different path. If we want to understand the real everyday China, it is imperative we go beyond the simple dichotomy of white and black and turn our gaze toward the gray. So all this may sound a bit abstract. What did I mean when I say Chinese activists operate in the gray zones? So let's take NGOs for example and illustrate how NGOs in China function in a tightly controlled social space or we could ask a slightly different question. What is the relationship between Chinese NGOs and Chinese state? The shorthand answer to that question is NGOs in China are compelled, are obliged to learn how to navigate within the state apparatus. Now if you want me to choose three adjectives to describe Chinese NGOs, they would be semi-official, semi-popular, semi-autonomous. Semi-official refers to the NGOs navigating within the state structure. Semi-popular refers to the self-identification of grassroots NGOs. Semi-autonomy is a concept I will explain later. There is a Chinese saying, Deng Xia, hey, you're going to learn quite a few Chinese sayings tonight. The most invisible place is the spot right underneath the light, this spot, which means no place is safer than the place of Deng Xia. In other words, under the surveillance of the party state, it is easier to carve out breathing spaces within the state structure, within the plant space, than create them outside it. So here, hence the Chinese paradox. The closer the relationship of an NGO is to the Chinese state, the more autonomous it would become. Now this may still sound abstract, so let me share with you an anecdote. In the late 1990s, I started a collaborative research project with a professor at Peking University on popular media and popular culture in China. We wanted to hold an international conference in Beijing, but finding a safe conference venue was very difficult because the word media in the conference title is politically sensitive in China. We eventually overcame the problem by holding our conference at a state-owned and state-run hotel. We were able to do this because one of our participants had a personal relationship with the hotel manager. So there was no surveillance, no questions asked, and the conference went on very smoothly. So this is a very good example that illustrates what I meant by the safest place is the place of Deng Xia. The most invisible place is the spot right underneath the light. So those habitually cling on to the Western binary thinking and the Western binary dichotomous paradigms will have difficulties grasping how Chinese people navigate in the seemingly seamless way of political control. Now I want to emphasize that all Chinese people, not just Chinese activists, have a supple mindset. They are very good at finding creative ways of walking around obstacles. This said, NGOs in liberal societies tend to practice non-confrontational activism by default and it is imperative they make change within the system. I'm going to give you a quote to further unbundle this paradox. This quote was from Anthony Sage. He was the former chief of Ford Foundation in Beijing. He now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School. So he said, Chinese NGOs volunteer subordination to the existing state structure should be viewed not as a measure of expediency but a strategic move to enhance their ability to manipulate the official and semi-official institutions for their own advantage, which means making more impact on society and gaining a louder voice and policymaking discussion than if they were to remain completely autonomous and I may add risk being crushed immediately by the authorities if they create the NGO outside of the state structure. So hearing lies the fundamental difference between Western NGOs and their Chinese counterpart. I want to take this opportunity to point out another level, another set of difference between Western civil society and Chinese civil society. Western civil society came into existence as a result of the agitating growth of the social. The Chinese civil society could only be born and flourished as a result of the voluntary retreat of the state from society and that retreat of the state from society of course has been a gradual and measured process. There is no doubt that the grey zones in China were much bigger in size under the Hu Jingtao region than under the current region. However, I would say they will always be a grey zone for Chinese activists. It will never disappear. When the politically sensitive issue areas occur that may endanger the NGO's will and its ability to negotiate with the local state out of the dilemma is critical to its survival. In the Q&A, I would be glad to share with you more examples and more strategies of how to cope with the censors. So bearing non-confrontational ethos in mind, let's move on to the examples of social media activism staged on Weibo. First, a quick definition of social media activism. It refers to social actions triggered through peer-to-peer networking between weak ties and furthermore, those social actions are mobilized via viral communications to create online support communities at scale. So I picked up five examples. The first example is called a Shaved Head Action. In the mid-2000s Guangzhou-based activist Peng Yanhui wrote a web blog calling for 1000 netizens, fellow netizens, to shave their heads as a symbolic gesture to stop the city's night illumination project on the Pearl River, which would cost the city taxpayers more than 150 million yuan without much justification. Peng Yanhui posted his photos before and after the shave on Weibo, and in 20 hours he attracted 4,000 retweets and recruited more than 20 people to follow him and shave their heads, including a young woman and a few children. So what does Shaving One's head have anything to do with energy conservation? Well, Peng Yanhui argued mockingly that a thousand shaved heads could generate enough brightness to light up the Pearl River and render the lavish city project unnecessary. So we know that every joke is a tiny revolution because it upsets the established order, and Peng Yanhui's cheeky Weibo post went viral precisely because protests triggered by humor. Humor is a potent form of non-confrontationalism. So protests triggered by humor camouflage the agitators and downfunding the censors. Under the pressure of public outcry and media exposure, the city government eventually trimmed down the original budget of night illumination by four fifths, which is quite a victory for Peng Yanhui. My second example deals with Thumbs Up Sisters. Now when Peng Yanhui made his protest against the city's night illumination project, this young woman who dubbed herself Thumbs Up Sister did a simultaneous protest against the city government for its lack of transparency about the decision-making process that led to the creation of such a wasteful project. So in the name of safeguarding public interest and in pursuit of governmental accountability, she demanded that the city government make available a crucial document that underwrote the night illumination project. Her petition for a copy of that document hit the stone wall. It was like they were passing the buck from one office to the next and never gave her a response. So she was feeling very frustrated. She then turned to Weibo to recruit 1000 citizens willing to post their Thumbs Up photos. Now Thumbs Up really is a satirical play signifying just the opposite Thumbs Down. While waiting for the responding post to trickle in, this feisty young woman raised the stakes by bringing two special presents gifts to the city hall to further embarrass the authorities. What did she bring? She brought a jumbo white pair. Now in Chinese, this kind of pair is pronounced as Ya Li which is homophonous to another Chinese word pressure Ya Li. So she was actually bringing the more pressure to the city hall. The other present she brought to the city officials was a plastic ball shaped like a porcupine alluding to the government's antics of passing citizen petitions like hot potatoes from court to court. So hundreds of Thumbs Up photos turned up under the hashtag Thumbs Up sister delivering the facetious message to targeted officials. The tactic that she resorted to was Ming Bao Ambien, then Ming by fake prison which is a form of indirect sanction familiar to the Chinese schooled in the politics of sarcasm for thousands of years. The playful Weibo fans understood her strategy instantaneously so a small sensation was created online and not surprisingly this feisty young woman got finally got a face-to-face interview with the city officials. My next example is a LGBTQ example when Iceland's Prime Minister Johanna and her lesbian lover were paying a state visit to China. This NGO supported for gay love strategized ways of using social media to promote social acceptance of homosexuality. Now during and after the state visit her wife was nowhere to be seen in mainstream media because she was removed predictably from all media reports. So the NGO founder spread the news through a blog post which Sena.com the host publisher featured on its homepage for several days and you can imagine this blog was an instantaneous attention grabber with a click rate of more than 600 I'm sorry 800,000 times within a few days it kicked off a tongue-in-cheek campaign slogan let's search for the Prime Minister's harmonized wife. Okay so my next example is free lunch for children which is a very famous Weibo campaign launched by Dongfei he's a free agent a journalist he discovered that Guizhou province lacked canteens so he launched a crowdfunding campaign on Weibo free lunch for children he successfully mobilized the millions hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens to participate in the campaign by donating one yuan he then used the funds raised to feed more than 80,000 children per day in more than 300 schools spread over central and western parts of China now most significantly the network effect of that campaign forced the Chinese government to respond in kind in 2012 China state council rolled out the policy which allocated 16 billion yuan per year to improve the nutrition of rural students by early 2015 32 million children in 1300 counties have benefited from the governmental subsidy program this case shows how micro charity can actually lead to successful advocacy why call this a shadow advocacy because neither Dengfei nor his weibo supporters were consciously engaged in policy advocacy um all right well other people may also say this is a case of uh Renhai Zhan Shu human sea military tactics the messaging goes like this Chinese style okay beware the crowd has spoken can the government please pay attention okay so my final example is an environmental activism example the arrival of social media platforms had made environmental advocacy easier and more efficient um and faster now since 2009 there has been a proliferating number of air monitoring soil monitoring matter water testing campaigns um governizing citizen participation uh the example I wanted to share is green beagle the NGO uh launched a pm 2.0 air monitoring campaign uh and they loaned uh portable uh air monitors to local residents uh who then report uh who then reported their uh testing results on weibo uh green beagle also integrated a crowd funding campaign initiative into their multi-city advocacy campaign simply put their goal was to mobilize 1000 donors per city requesting a minimum of the 25 yuan per person to purchase air monitoring equipment for each city now Beijing Shanghai Guangzhou and Wenzhou have all reached the goal true to the spirit of web 2.0 the original Beijing based movement was decentralized and um and the spread over into multiple local campaigns with the netizens all over China responding to the call by setting up their own city named weibo hashtag for example Wuhan PM 2.0 to a 2.5 air monitoring or Shanghai PM 2.5 air monitoring and so on so all those uh campaigns uh were created uh with the purpose of bringing incremental change by now we should be obvious that there are many activists in China and they are making social change in measured uh non-contentious and measured steps uh scholars in China and the other parts of the world have been debating over the vice and virtue of selectivism or fingertip philanthropy those terms are derogatory descriptions of casual random acts such as taking a snapshot of polluted river or sending a virtual leaf to create a virtual tree uh as opposed to engaging in sustained environmental activism and longer term systemic operations actions on the ground as an activist myself and a practitioner of both online and offline activism I support the argument that Twitter and other social media platforms have enabled activists to create new communities and spread their social causes to a wider public I also believe that small acts can add up and can trigger qualitative change over time so why do activists have to choose between online and offline action and why do we as researchers have to operate which which form is superior to the other well we have another saying that runs parallel to all roads lead to Rome the saying goes all rivers find their ways to the ocean so the ocean of compassion does not discriminate against small streams or drops of dew okay now we come to the final uh uh topic on my manual future village which is a designed for good project that I launched the last summer in China uh we all knew about uh smart city paradigms right which is a top-down investment driven and governmental sponsored project that gives a digital facelift to big cities NGO 2.0 is interested in helping out villages not cities we are committed to energizing grassroots network and reviving grassroots culture and we are naturally drawn to methods built on grassroots mobilization in a nutshell the future village is driven by three horses designed for good tech for good and poverty alleviation the future program uh the future village program was inspired by the MIT fab lab model uh and some of you may know the fab lab model emphasizes the making of open source hardware and collaborative design with the clientele and in this case our clientele are the villagers uh the fab lab model demonstrates how an underserved community can be powered by technology and other means uh at the grassroots level so how do we go about this program uh after we identify a future village candidate we first asked the villagers to identify and to articulate a collective need we then mobilized researchers and practitioners from different sectors to run a civic to run a civic hackathon as the first step and and I emphasize this is the first step of building trust and the working relationship with the villagers here is a working definition of this first step of the future village through hackathons we bring together makers and techie software developers researchers from material science architecture bioecology design thinking public art art practitioners and more and the participants include the villagers university teachers and students high school students programmers designers engineers artists etc and jointly we design a vision for future village we have implemented this program in four villages so here I want to share with you one village this is a village in the curtain desert in north china uh an environmental NGO there contacted us now in china the most conventional way of greening the desert is to drop the seed bombs into the desert and then leave the siblings there to survive by themselves which as you can imagine is not a very effective method of greening the desert so this NGO instead of planting trees in the desert they hand in a sandy area and build a fence around it to ward off intruding animals intruding humans to let the land recover by itself their experiment was very successful as you can tell by looking at the satellite image did you see the square square that has turned green that was their first experiment but very few people knew about what they were doing so they came to us they came to NGO 2.0 with a communication need they wanted more people to know about their unique method of greening the desert so we ran a hackathon for them we the hackathon produced four solutions and I want to share three solutions with you the first solution the first or one team resorted to the concept of earth art by working with artists to design earth shapes that look cool we know that interesting earth art is communication intensive by itself so it would create a very cool satellite image better than that the square we saw that's powerful communication the second solution is a sound project we're working with music artists to design ways of collecting sound in the in the windy desert each season would create yield different sounds we then treat the sound and sell the sound whites as ring tones to help the NGO raise funds and to also raise public awareness of the village our third solution is a we chat game the game starts with a green a piece of green land and the player has to eject animals and humans that were dropped from above onto the green land and if the ejection is successful then the green expands if it fails and the green shrinks all right so those are the solutions that came out of the hackathon so what about the next steps well after the hackathon is done we then enter the village with experts high school students university students uh at the regular intervals we engaging on site conversation with villagers and the village leadership to explore other needs that could be tackled by our team and the goal of those regular visits is to explore the possibilities of of helping villagers to discover new forces of production improve their environment and livelihood and also enrich the cultural life of village children most most of them were left behind children because their parents usually go to big cities to to work to make their ends to make a living so the cultural life of village children would like to enrich the cultural life of village children through a variety of measures some of which would involve media and technology but not everything we do is technological because we also involve other other people public art practitioners in the program for example uh this is a quick first idea of our collaborators on the future village program you can tell why there are three universities two it companies a museum and tacky communities i'm sharing the future village program with you for a purpose i wanted to illustrate how NGO 2.0 operates building multi-sectoral collaboration is our DNA we work with different sectors to produce social good and the sectors include not only the NGO sector but also the universities it companies design companies tacky communities and so on i should call all those social actors non-confrontational change makers and together we are building a decentralized multi-sectoral coalition that is purposeful but non-contentious driven by a powerful and spoken consensus of all the parties involved to build a better society this is the end of my presentation and i welcome comments and questions thank you um so if you don't mind i'm i have a question that i wanted to start off with okay um and and that is um you know in some of the examples that you um that you described and i'm thinking specifically of the young woman who um you know brought the the white pair um in some ways you know you could say that that is is confrontational but it's it's not right um okay and and um but there you know that young woman you know must have felt um like the the the that the risks were not as high as you know that that there was enough that she would have enough of a response a popular response so that whatever risks involved might have been you're minimized right um and i so i guess my i have a couple of questions that branch off from that example and that is um one you know what in in terms of your own understanding or definition of what counts as confrontational what does not what is non-confrontational okay you know is that based upon um just the western ideas of that you're pushing back against of of sort of direct on the you know boots on the ground action and then just quickly the second part of that is um you know have you seen examples where um where the where individuals or NGOs have engaged in what might have felt like or seemed like non-confrontational activism um in the way that you're describing it but the state saw that as crossing a certain line okay pushed back yeah sure this is a very good question because it allows me to talk about several things that i didn't have time to address my talk first of all uh the the sons of sister and the guy who shaved his head they live in Guangzhou now lokal is very important uh china is not a homogeneous entity uh guangzhou is known to be one of the most uh liberal uh one of one of the most open-minded and the liberal uh city uh in china and also okay uh uh so here i can i can share with you our experience in the in 2010 and 2011 we did um we did the two um literacy so social media literacy training workshops one in Yunnan and one in angui and we we had a very bad time because we were pursued by public security officers in those provinces so this is something fascinating about china because it uh well every locale has a different definition of what is tolerable what is what is the boundary right every locale sort of is a somehow autonomous in deciding on what is allowed to take place within my province so after 2010 after those two bad experiences i made a decision in 2011 to hold a workshop in beijing right under the nose of the emperor and i my logic went that if they didn't if the center if the central uh government didn't like what i'm doing then just shut me down i would i don't want to play the uh the cat and and and my scan with the local uh with the local governments so this is one thing uh guangzhou is very liberal that allowed them to do what they did i don't think what they did would be tolerated in Yunnan for example or in beijing uh the other thing i wanted to point out is that the guidelines for censorship is not what we thought in the west uh the chinese censors do not necessarily uh disallow individual dissent what they care about is to prevent individual dissent from escalating into a collective action against the government so uh to a to a certain extent individual dissent is allowed um it is because of the discrepancies of local uh it allows activists to navigate so if i couldn't do something beijing i i can do it in in jiangsu province or other places alright thanks yes hi thank you so much for your talk i was wondering what themes or cases have you noticed that get more like positive responses uh in activism and also how to cope with the i get like pro government bots who made want to obstaculate um the collective action online like uh yeah i didn't get the second part of like how to cope with the government bots uh online government bots bots like yeah like b o t s uh ops like the fake profiles that might want to um like prohibit you know like these like actions online okay all right um um first question um uh what kind of uh uh NGO issue areas that are more acceptable right through the through the government um well many chinese angeles create a state sanctioned non-profit programs for example providing educational assistance to children living in poor family in poor families in rural and urban china or providing social welfare uh to the elderly and the uh the other friend uh disenfranchised groups and so on uh i didn't quite understand the second question so could somebody maybe help uh rephrasing the question emily uh i another word i think you might be reaching for unbar is um moderators like how do moderators work on online transforms um to censor what people say oh they they have a list of taboo terms and concepts uh uh internally the every social media platform uh hired uh uh those officers uh to uh monitor the posts so they have a list um is that um and uh i more or less but how how an activist could like try to keep your own like campaign uh without you know like getting like censor okay oh yeah sure okay they are they are different strategies okay there are different strategies one strategy is to um uh to uh to to make incremental change which is crucial you know a measured step by step change agenda alleviates the anxieties of the state so that's uh rules of the thumb first one second uh it has to do how you position yourself for example ngl 2.0 i could have positioned ngl 2.0 as a media focused NGO but media is too sensitive so instead i position ourselves as a technology driven uh NGO i very rarely use the word media uh in china uh the other uh strategy would be resorting to the to the tactics of camouflage uh strategic hiding uh or systemic mimicry aimed at facing one some presence from the photographic media of surveillance uh and there are many examples of of uh of camouflage the other uh a very very popular method of coping with sensors is to resort to the rhetoric of the powerful to curb the exercise of power what i meant is legitimize legitimizing and framing your contention by employing state laws official policy discourse state propaganda governmental commitments to hamstring concerned party elites for support and for collaboration um in more concrete terms so let me give you an example about organizations run by Tibetans and Muslims in china they typically frame their mission uh as cultural perseverance rather than the promotion of religious diversity and take angel take uh hiv 8 organizations they typically frame resort to public health approach rather than dwelling on the issues of human rights so there are many many ways to walk around the obstacles but uh uh incrementalism is what everybody sort of uh yeah uh resorts to i'm very happy that i am in the us because that sort of prevented us from making jumps and leaves in our activities which is good for us uh the other thing uh the other thing is that one has to have a low profile so for the first five years uh during the ngl 2.0 uh while i was running ngl 2.0 i rejected all interviews uh by media uh because we were too weak at that time at the beginning and i didn't want to be identified so it was not until uh after 2014 after we were officially registered as an npo that i began to uh talk to journalists in china i think both eric and diego had hands up um but i didn't see who raised their hands first i guess i guess i can go uh thank you for hi for your presentation uh i really love the reference to james dot work i think it was really good uh so but i have a question probably related to uh professor bolt uh question about like north western and western this kind of like differentiation uh i was thinking about the uh this opposition uh because there is also sometimes where actions that seek social change in north western context take a confrontational stance right especially like i'm thinking in the context of latin america probably not in china right uh there are sometimes like collectibles or flentes that occupy certain terrains and suddenly build a village or sit below a shanty town because they are fighting for housing rights um and this obviously breaks the rule of law right as as we understand it that means like kind of like western city context right so i know your work is focused on china specifically but i i guess my my my question would be uh how how if we can think about like activism from a global perspective uh taking nothing to account so much binaries between north western and western perspective but more like a gradient or a more nuanced view of what is like actually confrontational probably not so confrontational uh strategies from activism yeah um uh do you mind uh rephrasing your question yeah yeah for sure i i'm thinking if we can like uh probably surpass uh binaries conceptions binary conceptions of activism between western and north western and think more about probably a nuanced view of like probably something is more confrontational that other and not so much assigning a non-confrontational or confrontational yeah there is a well as i said earlier there is a continuum of situations so there are different great there are different shades of great right um so i i i i actually don't know how to uh how to um how to respond to your question except that um that that that that it is well the gray zones is really really i think big right even though it varies from regime to regime but but it is there and one you know i think one has to as an activist you always try to walk the fine line between uh or in authoritarian countries you walk a fine line between compliance and self-empowerment which is not an intuitive exercise um so yeah well uh well in china now it's quite impossible to openly challenge the chinese government and i think uh hong kong the hong kong protests serves as a good example um that um well that um the hong kong situation i think a cause for a total of an entirely different response than what i talked about uh yeah uh what what do you think i mean what uh since since i'm not sure i completely understood your question and i would like to get a sense of how you approach your own question uh so i i guess there is like uh there are there are not necessary a correspondence between like non-confrontational and non-western activists and that's probably not in non-western context you can have confrontational strategies and so i i i i guess i i'm i'm trying to complicate the issue of like not necessarily approaching certain contexts with a certain framing of how activists should be in this context uh well you know non-confrontationalism is just a a term that incorporates all kinds of approaches right um um eric would you like to go next and then it looks like uh thomas and then emily great thanks uh and thanks for the really uh interesting talk i have a number of questions but i'm going to keep it to one i'm specifically interested in what you talked about that kind of multi-sectoral collaboration that you talked about at the end and and my question comes from work that i'm actually doing in eastern europe around the same this the same concept and trying to understand ways in which you know groups from multiple sectors can effectively collaborate towards common cause um in in uh in in the eastern european context there is government involved i imagine that in um in the chinese context government is not one of the sectors that is that is involved but what i'm interested in is um and i know the difficulty in this work is aligning the incentives of the different the different players and so i'm curious if you can talk a little bit about how sure how you how you've addressed that how you work to align those incentives to to achieve your goals all right uh thank you eric first of all i want to say that uh mit is a powerful brand name which allowed me to really quickly uh round up uh collaborators it took me like a couple of months to set up ngl 2.0 in 2008 and uh i think asian people including the chinese really worship a university like mit i i remember once writing in a taxi in beijing and uh got into a conversation with the taxi cab driver and he asked me he he knew that i was not local because i just didn't look like a local beijing so i told him that i'm a professor and he said oh you know he thought it's chinese professor but then i said mit he went like oh my god mit uh can i have a photo with you so that kind of positive uh very response to mit so the brand name helped a great deal uh the mit brand name helped me uh round up uh techies uh and the universities it is effortless for me to set up to set up a collaborative ties with chinese universities i think always the challenges it's easier to invite collaborators but it's difficult to let them go so now i'm getting very cautious about inviting people to join incentives um the those people okay uh the social sector in china is a rather small sector uh everybody knew each other sort of so if you identified one uh collaborator uh they you will be led to the others uh uh we work with it corporations uh we really don't work with the it companies themselves we work with the volunteers within the it company they are techies they are programmers or they are hardware makers um so um i guess well did i did i uh did i uh answer some of your questions or no do you want to sort of um yeah keep keep uh keep asking if i didn't give you a a full answer uh well i can follow up with you later i know we're almost out of time so let other people okay all right i know there's other other questions all right thank you uh tomas that's good um so i'm interested in the in the role of funding so i know that uh very a common um the liberal regimes used to constrain the role of NGOs is to not allow them to receive external funding or to yeah to find a way to um indirectly restrain them in that sense and i was wondering um yeah in your work how has this resulted in in bringing funding probably from the u.s right and how do chinese NGOs work with that okay so funding uh kept me uh kept me awake at night actually since i started NGO 2.0 my insomnia got worse i have to pay for my employees right we were funded by for the beginning for 10 years actually they continue to fund us uh uh and because of their funding we were sort of uh suspect right in the eyes of the public security officers and also in the eyes of other collaborators uh before we got registered in 2014 it was difficult for us to really attract funding in china uh but i do not want to get more funding from the u.s because they would make us look even more dangerous right uh so um i was able to again use my MIT uh the logo MIT logo to attract funding from from companies like a financial company actually they funded us to develop our uh crowdsourced philanthropy map um we my goal is to diversify our funding so that uh we would not be uh left in the cold if one funder walked away uh fourth one we had a very difficult year in 2008 because the chinese government clamped down on foreign NGOs meaning fourth foundation was monitored and they uh for the whole year i we did not have any funding and it was a very difficult year um but now things got better fourth foundation uh i think passed the passed another hurdle and they are fine they are uh under the jurisdiction of the u.s china friendship association and they continue to fund us but they are not the only funder so we are in a better situation uh did i answer your question tomas perfectly thank you you're welcome emily and then um we have a uh question from the attendee q and a after emily sure okay thank you very much for speaking to us today i have a question about um the people who are leading these movements to create incremental sorry like the woman whose um photo you showed who brought that pair to the like city building and then the young man who shaved his head um i'm wondering whether um there's a certain threshold beyond which if they lead too many movements they become kind of a person of interest and um can't really continue to try to create change in different ways um and then also how that varies by by region um i imagine it might uh based on what you were talking about earlier and then also by their um kind of um like level of awareness or level of um like high high-profile like if you are um you know at for example your level versus someone who's just a young person in a in a city um whether your relative sort of um command of power might affect your ability to continue to create incremental change across different movements and sorry that was really convoluted so let me know if i should i will i will adjust your question if i if i didn't give you a satisfactory answer you can always follow up with another question so yeah uh i would imagine that uh uh that uh the thumbs up sister will not do another way board campaign right because then she will be inviting uh the spotlight which is not good that explains why i have stayed low um i had i have kept a low profile until 2015 because i do not want to incrementalism is about anonymity so why are you going to why why do you want to attract the media attention to you in chinese we have another saying um a pick is afraid of being fat because that will be the time for the for the pick to be slaughtered so um so so so that uh yeah um you you're supposed to keep a low profile um and i don't think she will uh keep uh uh protesting uh or uh on another occasion it would be very dangerous but朋友 he he uh he has been working with an NGO in guangzhou uh all the time so he's fine what are the other i think you probably brought up another question but i i think i lost my focus uh i knew that was very helpful yeah now did you have another question that i haven't addressed i think you you covered it thank you all right great thank you well i have a um a question from hamed reza uh in the q&a um who asks or about culture specifically um and uh here's the question um i was wondering about non-confrontational activism in the art scene especially in underground spaces music cinema literature etc uh two things one their modes of production and distribution and second how does your argument regarding the paradox of invisibility under the light hold for that scene do you find uh do you find pasting that question on to the chat box sure i can look at it so i can oh q&a well you may be able to see it actually oh here we go okay all right i'm in the art scene and spending integral in spaces non-confrontational activism in the art scene um um in the art scene uh would you say that the um the earth art example i think that is an example of uh of uh of non-confrontational activism and how does the argument regarding well you see the thing about non-confrontationalism is that you shouldn't be afraid of being uh exposed because of this non-confrontational does that make sense is well let me why don't i follow up on that a little bit and the is there a um yeah is there a vibrant kind of underground music scene for example where um both in terms of lyrically and in terms of the kind of spaces that the young people are building um you know do those also become spaces that are under this rubric of non-confrontational activism well listen the album uh the company uh the music company will not will not release uh a song or an album that is considered problematic so and also you know i i think uh in china it's not just the censorship uh imposed on uh practitioners but internal censorship uh you internalize the uh you internalize uh as a citizen you internalize things that you think might create a stir or invite the uh the unnecessary attention from the public from the state or from the public so i would i would say uh china relies more on those kind of internal censorship inner policing inner policing than external censorship but to answer your question quickly no art new music that is made public uh will be will be problematic because they're already filtered there's already a filtering system that's screened out uh the the the the the so-called dangers or politically incorrect messaging but uh there's one thing that i think you all need to know is that the censors are not like they're not like devils uh they they communicate with you you know if they spot something problematic like with us we were approached by by censors sometimes you know they didn't understand why we were doing this so they came to us they said we have a conversation you know i have a question about this so you explain it to them uh another example i had was years ago i had an article published i wanted to seek a publisher in uh in china and eventually i got that piece published in beijing not in shanghai contrary to your intuitive perception beijing is a uh is a place that has more free room to for us to navigate than shanghai because there are two governments in beijing there is a central government there is the municipal government so you if you uh if you lost the favor with one with the father you could go to your grandfather and you get your things done uh so i that article had a few words that sort of hit the button hit the hit the flag uh so i got an email one day from the publisher saying hey professor wong this article is great we'd love to publish it but there are a few words i would wonder if you would consider revising what you would consider replacing so to my big surprise one word that they singled out was capitalism and i was like what on earth you know capitalism so i replaced that word with the commodity economy so they communicated with with you if an NGO is in trouble you will get a call from the local government and the the euphemism the euphemism is you will be invited out to have tea you're invited out to have tea meaning the censor wants to talk to you so you sit down you sort things up and you make some adjustment uh communication dialogues is crucial for NGOs to operate smoothly something that the Hong Kong protesters didn't do or didn't want to do which was really sad um okay i think we're just coming up on 6 30 um so uh i just wanted to thank you sincerely um for for this really rich talk and and discussion um and thank all of you who attended