How do activists act or not act when the limits of state tolerance are unclear? How do they gauge the appropriate distance from the state? This book answers these questions by studying a group of labor NGOs in Guangdong Province and Hong Kong, and Western funding agencies and investigating the dynamics of state control and the specific workings of state power in post-socialist China where rapid economic and social transformations since the 1970s have unleashed diverse social forces and cultivated an environment of uncertainty in social, political, and moral terms. The book treats uncertainty as an analytical and ethnographic space that is productive of emergent practices, discourses, and modes of existence that strategically configure and reconfigure social relationships among different actors while masking and unmasking the state. By focusing on how the state as an idea is embedded and enacted in networks of relationships among different actors in the labor community, this book offers an ethnography of the Chinese state which illustrates an intimate and complicit modality of self-governing in which neoliberal ideas, represented by international development, are reconfigured and deflected in grassroots development.