Abstract

Under authoritarian regimes, citizen-led NGOs such as environmental NGOs (ENGOs) often operate under close scrutiny of the government. While this presents a challenge to a single ENGO, we propose here - in line with existing research on network effects - that there are opportunities for multiple ENGOs to coordinate and thus work in ways that supersede government controls, affect public opinion, and contribute to policy revision and/or creation. In this paper, we specifically examine the possibility that the gamut of citizen-based ENGOs in China are coordinating. Based on network analysis of ENGOs web pages as well as interviews with more than a dozen ENGO leaders between 2014 and 2016, we find that ENGOs have few direct and public connections to each other, but social media sites and personal connections offline provide a crucial function in creating bridges. A closer examination of these bridges reveals, however, that they can be substantive to the environmental discussion or functional to the dissemination of web page information but typically not both. In short, ENGOs in China are not directly connected but rather are connected in a way that responds to the available social media and the government's censorship practices.