At a party working conference held at the end of November in China’s Guangdong Province several important civil society issues were discussed, including reducing restrictions on registration and social service outsourcing. Guangdong Province’s Communist Party Chief, Wang Yang, linked the two in one of his speeches. After the conference was over a new notice on loosening entry barriers for CSOs was posted to websites in the province. A new provincial development setting out a new policy, you say, so what’s the big deal? It was such a big deal that it was featured (with analysis) in the Legal Daily, a national Communist Party (CCP) newspaper, and the story was picked up by virtually every large newspaper in China and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. It also appeared on the national Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) website and numerous provincial civil affairs bureau websites.

The card carried by the heart says ‘Registration’ and the other text says ‘public welfare types organizing’.

For people who do not know China well (and perhaps even for some who do but are not long-term civil society watchers), the significance of the new policy can be discussed from several angles. The first of these is the government’s long-standing antipathy to independent civil society – something that amounts to a fear of independent organizations. That is certainly not going to change under the new policy. There will not be a burgeoning of activist organizations advocating for change all over China. The range of organizations that will be able to avail themselves of the new rules is, on the other hand, fairly broad, as discussed below.

It is also important to note that the developments in Guangdong were blessed at the highest levels of the Ministry in Beijing and also apparently had CCP backing in the form of Wang Yang’s endorsement mentioned above. What that means is that the government and the party are finally making more concrete their decision to partner with civil society organizations for the greater good of the Chinese people.

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Post tags: civil society, NGOs, social services
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Post tags: environmental protest, Mao Zedong, NGOs, special reports
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Liang, a senior member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a group that advises parliament, quit his job at a state-owned publishing house to set up Friends of Nature in 1994.

“Mr. Liang played an irreplaceable role promoting ordinary Chinese’s participation in supervising pollution problems and protecting the environment,” Friends of Nature secretary-general Li Bo told Reuters.

“He practiced what he preached,” Li said.

Liang biked to work at the consultative conference every time, local media said.

At age 67, Liang travelled to Kekexili in Qinghai province to protect endangered Tibetan antelopes, media said.

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Post tags: environmental activism, Friends of Nature, Liang Congjie, NGOs
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Meng Si: How would you judge the NGO activities in Tianjin overall? What were the highlights and the problems?

Lu Sicheng: This was the first United Nations climate-change conference to be held in China. Sixty Chinese NGOs participated, and one of the highlights was the scale, the diversity, the closeness of coordination and the pace of events that we saw.

We only learned the talks were to be held in Tianjin in early August. In less than eight weeks, Chinese NGOs organised 20 events and published a position paper on the civil society response to climate change. We brought everyone’s original plans together and combined several events, such as a fringe meeting on corporate innovation jointly held by WWF, the Institute for Environment and Development (IED) and Alashan Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology, and another meeting on impacts of and responses to climate change, organised by Shanshui Conservation Center, IED, Oxfam and Green River.

Our events won praise from some of our international colleagues. For example, an employee of the Global Climate Change Alliance said that “the Chinese NGO events had been better than those of the local NGOs at all previous talks.”

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While fund raising is part of the battle in disaster relief, ensuring those resources reach the people in need is the most challenging part. Wang Zhenyao, former director of the Department of Disaster and Social Relief of the Ministry of Civil Affairs said that local governments do not allocate disaster relief funds efficiently.

“Government investment all goes to construction of infrastructure. It lacks the targeted precision for small projects that the victims need. If charitable organizations with private donations can handle these projects, they can offer a lot of personalized, flexible services that can increase the well-being of victims.”

However, two recently-released policies require the Red Cross, China Charity Federation (CCF) and other funds to directly appropriate the donations they receive to the Qinghai provincial government, who will then oversee the reconstruction efforts.

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Post tags: charity, earthquake relief, NGOs, Red Cross
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The category of registration is critical for access to funds. The center, according to Yu, receives 80 percent of its 1,000,000 yuan ($146,436) annual funds from foreign sources. A regulation, effective from March 1, bars entities like Beijing Yirenping Center – categorized as “domestic enterprises” – from overseas contributions.

As the center is not registered as a social group recognized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, this regulation of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) has in effect cut its lifeline. Circular of the SAFE on Relevant Issues Concerning the Administration of Donations in Foreign Exchange by Domestic Institutions notified in December 2009, asks “domestic enterprises ac-cepting/making donations from/to overseas non-profit institutions” to provide “notarized donation agreement specifying the purpose of the fund” for foreign exchange account in the bank.

Two months since the regulation came into effect, banks, notary service providers and non-profit outfits are in the dark about how to get a donation agreement “notarized”. Thus, “domestic enterprises” have not been able to withdraw a single foreign donation from the bank, claims Yu. “More than 100,000 yuan is locked up in our foreign exchange account, and some cases have been postponed for lack of funds.”

The financial squeeze may affect thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were registered as enterprises, said Fu Tao, director at China Development Brief, an NGO studying China’s civil society since 1998.

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Guo heard the news over phone, not from the authorities. “Your legal aid organization has been scrapped by Peking University? Is that true? I’m watching it being broadcast on television in the Metro right now,” a journalist friend shouted in the phone.

Guo was shocked by the news. She couldn’t understand how the parent organization, which had built, supported, and took pride in its achievements since it was established, could abandon its own creation in this manner.

“Scrapped” is a too strong a word for the once-honored center, according to Guo. It is not “as if we have done something wrong,” she said. She was so stricken that she cried for almost three days, she said.

The notice of the center’s termination has led to a heated discussion in academic circles and on the Internet.

Huang Xuetao, a graduate of PKU law school who works as a lawyer in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province wrote an open letter to PKU and the Principal Zhou Qifeng, asking him to publicly declare the reasons for termination of the center.

Update: Also related, see “Why the chill in the air for NGOs?” from the NGOs in China blog.

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Post tags: Beijing University, civil society, legal aid, NGOs, women
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In the 1990s, at the time of the country’s economic opening, Chinese leaders actively encouraged the formation of grass-roots groups that could assist the government in areas where it was weak. And thousands of NGOs sprang forth, mostly tiny mom-and-pop, kitchen-table operations, largely unregulated and often receiving funds from overseas donors eager to assist in the growth of Chinese civil society.

Strict Chinese government rules make it extremely difficult for groups to register officially as NGOs; most register instead as “companies.” The government has largely turned a blind eye.

And there has long been a kind of tacit understanding that NGOs would be tolerated as long as they didn’t stray too far into political activism or criticizing the government. But as Young said, “You never know where the line is, and it does shift.”

Added Wan Yanhai: “I think there’s no clear boundary between a political and a non-political organization. And there’s no clear boundary between action-oriented and advocacy.”

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Post tags: activism, civil society, NGOs, Wan Yanhai
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Wan said he decided to leave because of mounting mental stress due to the authorities’ intimidation of him as well as their move to regulate overseas donations to local groups, complicating efforts to get money from supporters in other countries.

“As an organization and personally, the attacks from the government had become very serious. I had concerns about my personal safety and was under a lot of stress,” Wan said.

“When I am in China, the authorities look at me like I am a bird in a cage. They say: ‘If you don’t listen to me, then I will eat you’,” he said. “But after I leave the country, they will see me in a new light, because I am no longer in their cage.”

Despite greater openness in recent years and an acknowledgment that the spread of AIDS is accelerating, China’s communist leadership is deeply suspicious of independent activists, and Wan has one of the highest profiles among those working on AIDS in China.

See also articles from the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

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The Oxfam controversy started with a notice posted last month on the student recruitment webpage for Minzu University in Beijing calling the NGO an “ill-intentioned” organization with “ulterior motives”.

The notice, attributed to the Education Ministry, accused Oxfam of “trying hard to infiltrate China”, adding: “All education departments and institutions of higher education must raise their guard and together recognize and take precautions against the unfriendly intentions of Oxfam Hong Kong’s recruitment of college volunteers.”

It also referred to the Hong Kong head of Oxfam, Lo Chi-kin, a member of the city’s Democratic Party, as “a key member of the opposition camp”. The party, considered moderate in Hong Kong, nevertheless continues to push for greater democracy 12 years after the city’s handover from British to Chinese rule.

In response to the notice, Oxfam Hong Kong suspended a program aimed at helping impoverished migrant farmers on the mainland.

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