NGO's - Writings on civil society

This week I had on different occassions discussions on the emerging civil society in China. It seems an obvious development, the central government is busy dismantling its structures of the former planned economy, but then you need to replace it with new ways of negotiating an agreement about how to organize a country. For those who want to see it, they can see over the past years an upsurge in non-governmental organizations (NGO') that seem the start of that civil society, more clear in the past few years than ever before.
In the past I have accused academics often of writing very insightful studies, while keep them away from the larger audience. In this case it is not different and I will list some of the more recent academic papers on the issue I have located up to now.

Yu Keping, professor and director of the CCCPE at Beijing University gives an overview of how existing civil organizations within the state are encouraged to operate in a more autonomous way. He says that those organization do not have a tradition of operating as independent, autonomous entities.
Dr. Liu Junning paints a slightly more optimistic picture in his case study on the Chinese Chambers of Commerce, officially the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. This institution fulfills a role the Party and the government cannot play, the author says. The official trade union in China, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) seems to fit professor Yu’s description better.
Zhang Ye, Visiting Fellow, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, wrote last year a paper for the Brookings Institute and believes Chinese NGO’s are fundamentally different from those in the rest of the world. I was unfortunately unable to download his full paper in pdf-format.
Thomas Metzger at the more conservative Hoover institute at Stanford University argues that the Western bottom-up way of organizing a civil society does not fit the Chinese tradition. That might be true, but I do see them emerging in China. Traditions can obviously change, partly facilitated by the internet.
A Swedish investigation last year discovered an emerging civil society, but says it is not yet there and might take a few years to develop. “China has seen a dramatic increase in civil society organizations, but in number, size and influence,” the authors write.
The University of Toronto Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library gives a more comprehensive overview of what is available on this subject.