xiaoyong luan's blog: A Brief Report on Chin...

A Brief Report on China's NGOs
Earthquake Rocks China's Civil Society
by Amy Gadsden
In the days following the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, volunteers began streaming into affected areas bearing medical supplies, food and money. The media quickly began covering these efforts, highlighting stories of urban Chinese professionals driving their new cars overnight to reach the earthquake zone and retirees sending their monthly incomes to help purchase medicine. A “shock of consciousness,” as one scholar called it, swept the country, as citizens instinctively set aside their decades’ long push to get gloriously rich and turned their attention to helping victims.
But the media was interested in more than the collective grief that drove schoolchildren to raise funds for earthquake relief or a middle-aged woman to board plane loaded with supplies. Across China, volunteers were coming forward spontaneously and working through local organizations and in small groups to coordinate their efforts. In the days after the quake, the Communist Party was not leading the public response, and that, as much as the responses themselves, was noteworthy. With volunteers racing to the site to help and the Internet teeming with campaigns to raise funds, a new question surfaced: does China have a civil society?  Is the earthquake, as the Toronto Globe and Mail put it, “a historic moment, the first signs of the emergence of broad-based civil society in a country where emperors and autocrats have ruled for centuries”?
Talk of civil society and nongovernmental organizations began in the 1990s, but truly independent grass-roots organizations engaged in community development or social issues were few if any. Even the terminology caused problems. For reasons of political sensitivity, people used “nonprofit organization” instead of NGOs when describing community-based groups and the roles that they might play in China. In the mid-1990s, academic research centers were established in leading universities across the country. Conceived in part as clinics aimed at giving students practical experience, they emerged as leading advocacy centers in their respective fields, running hotlines, generating research and policy documents, and pursuing strategic litigation aimed at protecting the environment or women’s rights or legal reform.
The university-based centers were proto-NGOs in many ways. In the early 2000s, they began giving way in numbers to more independent, grass-roots organizations working directly with citizens on development or rights issues. Unlike the university centers, these NGOs are not formally ensconced in a university or research center. They often occupy small commercial spaces or residential apartments. Though modestly funded and staffed, they are spread throughout the country and focused on a range of important social and political issues. In Qinghai Province, an NGO run by ethnic Tibetans works with minority populations to address resettlement and poverty relief and piloted a legal-awareness campaign translating Chinese laws into Tibetan and running workshops to educate nomadic herders about their rights under the law. In Guiyang City, the capital of the poor southwestern province of Guizhou, an NGO Development Forum provides office space to local community groups and runs workshops for them on fund-raising, program design and community outreach. One labor advocacy NGO maintains offices in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shenyang to help migrant workers integrate into cities and recover garnished or unpaid wages. Its near-term plans are to open offices in 10 cities throughout the country.
The official number of NGOs in China, like so many other statistics on Chinese growth, is dizzyingly high and generously calculated. A 2005 Ministry of Civil Affairs report pegged the number of “social organizations” at 168,000. But this number includes everything from philanthropic groups to arts and culture associations to sports clubs. Whether or not these are “real NGOs” is subject to debate. Of these thousands of civic organizations, there is a small handful that is directly engaged on critical issues facing Chinese society. Many of these are unregistered or registered as commercial entities to avoid scrutiny.
Within the NGO community there is debate about which organizations are “real NGOs.”  Grass-roots NGO activists in China generally assume that registered NGOs have traded their autonomy in exchange for official sanction. Newly founded NGOs will disparage older ones for maintaining more collaborative ties with government, which was a necessity for an organization founded in the mid-’90s when there was less latitude for establishing NGOs than there is today. The debate also focuses on distinguishing between NGOs that are doing “safe” NGO work, which might include things like working with children or the elderly, and more politically sensitive work, such as on the environment or migrant labor. But the line between safe and political is a fine one as many NGOs have found out.
NGO leaders themselves go to great lengths to downplay the political nature of their work. Rural development NGOs talk about poverty relief, economic development, and efficient market strategies for farmers. Underlying their work is the importance of rural representation in policy making and the need to protect rural property rights, but few NGO leaders would articulate their mission in that way. aids NGOs might be focused on antidiscrimination. But they do not make a constitutional claim to workplace protection. Women’s NGOs are working to increase the numbers of women in government at the local level. But they focus on cultural bias toward women, and less on the endemic corruption and lack of fair, transparent balloting procedures that keep many men and women out of office at the grass-roots level.
This kind of semantic finessing is not merely a survival strategy. It reflects what seems to be a widely held desire by Chinese NGOs to be good partners for government. They want to be taken seriously and brought into discussions about community development. New NGO programs are aimed at building better links with local government agencies. For the most part, NGOs want to be honest brokers, highlighting problems when the see them and calling on government to take action, but not opposing government on a broader political stage.
There is evidence that the Chinese government sees the potential of NGOs as partners as well. In 2007, Sichuan Province released a report calling endorsing NGOs as “irreplaceable” partners in preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS. The Xinhua news agency quoted a local health official, who said, “‘Fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a protracted war, during which the NGO is a force not to be ignored. They can go to the places, and initiate some activities that government organizations are unable to.”  These kinds of statements, while few in number, raise hope within the NGO community that they might be given increased space to play a role in policy discussions and in provision of services.
Independent NGOs face not only government and Party unwillingness to accept them as interlocutors. Government sponsored “mass organizations” are also standing in the way of civil-society development. These long-standing organizations such as the All-China Women’s Federation or the All-China Federation of Trade Unions have tentacles that extend all the way down to the grass-roots level through local offices. When grass-roots NGOs try to work in local communities, the often step on the toes of these quasibureaucrats.
China’s mass organizations also are wise to the benefits of NGO status on the international stage. The All-China Women’s Federation was the designated NGO representative at the United Nations when China presented its report to the Committee to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 2006. Several independent women’s groups also attended the meeting, but their presentation time was significantly curtailed, and, most importantly, they did not feel that they could write the critical “shadow report” to express their concerns about the state of women’s rights. It is unlikely that China’s mass organizations will quietly fade away to make room for independent NGOs to take the lead on civil-society issues.
Survival Strategies
The obvious question about civil society in China is, “How free is it?”  Are Chinese NGOs really able operate, organize, and tackle issues without political constraints or pressure. This—like so many other questions one might pose about China today—is a blind man and the elephant type of question. China’s NGOs work within the constraints of the system, but they are not creatures of it. They set their own agendas and design their own programs, but they also know where the limits are and are savvy about positioning themselves safely. When the head of a small labor advocacy group in southern China was attacked by thugs following his efforts to educate local workers about the newly passed labor contract law—an attack that many believed was ordered by factory owners with the complicity of local police—other labor advocates in the area began discussing “survival strategies” for their grass-roots outreach work. These strategies include talking to local officials and factory owners before reaching out directly to workers, and, most importantly, enlisting the support of local media to write feel-good stories about their work that make it hard for local officials to crack down on them. Other NGOs make it a point to involve universities in organizing conferences or workshops in order to make the programs appear more theoretical or academic. Still another tactic is to find sympathetic sponsors within the mass organizations or at the local government level who can provide cover for workshops and training seminars.
The government maintains an atmosphere of low-level harassment to keep NGOs in check. Security officials show up at NGO offices to question NGO leaders and their staff. For those who wear two hats with an official position and as the head of an NGO, they suspect that they hit glass ceilings in their official capacities as a result of their civil society work. And the heat can be turned up when needed. Last summer, several aids NGO leaders were harassed by government authorities. In some cases, they were forced to cancel planned workshops. In one particularly troubling case, Henan Province authorities removed aids orphans from the home of one aids activist and his wife, who had been caring for the children. And, there are additional examples of civil-society leaders who have been sentenced criminally for reasons that are seen to be associated with their activism.
Despite the pressure they face, few NGO leaders are deterred. The people who are going into NGO work, and in particular the people who are emerging as NGO leaders, are determined and talented. In some cases, they left government positions frustrated by the corruption and ineffectiveness they witnessed. In other cases, they left the private sector or academia hoping to do more hands-on community work. Their ages range—some are in their 50s, many are in their 30s—but they share certain personality traits. They are ambitious and motivated to help people, but also eager to become leaders and enjoy the authority and respect associated with leadership. In this respect, they are strikingly like politicians in democratic societies.
Increasingly, university graduates and young professionals are choosing to go into NGO work, not to enter the country’s sclerotic political system to serve corrupt local bosses. A college senior in Beijing broke down into tears following her participation in a rights awareness training sponsored by a women’s development NGO. She had struggled with her future, thinking that if she wanted to work on women’s issues her only option was to join the ranks of the All-China Women’s Federation. After participating in the workshop she realized that there are grass-roots organizations dedicated to helping women that she might join.
Currently China’s grassroots NGOs are small and relatively weak. They compete for limited funding, which comes mainly from international donors. Domestic funding sources are directed to official NGOs only. On a research mission to the United States, Chinese aids NGO leaders marveled at the relationship between local governments and local aids organizations, which not only receive funding from state and local agencies, but which, by law, must sit on community planning councils to determine the use of federal aids funding.
The Chinese government at present shows little sign that it will engage with NGOs as equal partners in the near future. There are limits on NGOs collaborating nationally or even within a particular field. When a group of environmental activists signed a joint letter calling for a fair trial for a fellow NGO activist, Internet authorities ordered Web sites to remove the letter. But in penning the letter NGOs are challenging these limits.
AIDS NGOs in particular, are at the leading edge of pushing the boundaries on collaboration. As a recipient of funds from the Global Fund to Fight aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Chinese government convenes a country coordinating mechanism (CCM), which is a kind of stakeholder advisory group made up of government health agencies, donors to the Global Fund, embassy and multilateral agency officials, and civil-society representatives from local NGOs and people infected with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria. The Global Fund mandates that the civil-society voices on the board be “of the sector.”  With only 17 NGOs participating, the first election for civil-society representatives failed miserably in 2006 amidst accusations of government interference and double standards.
A Global Fund investigation into the election called for a new ballot in one year’s time and urged China’s aids community to find ways to expand participation to include the many unregistered and grass-roots groups working to fight aids. The second election, which took place between February and March of 2007, saw 124 NGO participants. A third election, scheduled for spring 2009, is expected to see an increase in the number of NGO participants.
But the story of the Global Fund NGO election is not simply one about increased numbers of NGOs in China. The NGOs participating in the election are spread throughout the country, working with diverse constituencies to fight aids, such as intravenous drug users and sex workers, gay rights and advocacy groups, rural communities, women and children affected by aids, groups of farmers from Central China who contracted aids as a result of blood-plasma selling at government-sponsored clinics, hemophiliac groups, and organizations focused on aids in ethnic minority and border areas. Chinese citizens typically don’t have the opportunity to come together to work on such sensitive issues.
As part of the process to elect an NGO representative to the CCM, the aids NGOs elected representatives to an NGO working group, which has the potential to become a coalition-type body able to speak for organizations across the country. No such other directly elected grass-roots representative body exists in China. One could only imagine if environmental NGOs, migrant-worker groups, women’s groups, home-owners associations or farmers’ associations were able to similarly elect national bodies like this and the impact of these groups on the Chinese political system.
To date the government’s response to independent NGOs has hovered between ambivalence and hostility. Neither outlawed nor embraced Chinese NGOs have independently pushed forward, stepping into whatever political space they can. The big question is whether they will emerge as the “islands of positive deviation”—to quote Vaclav Havel—that emerged in Central and Eastern Europe and facilitated the region’s political reform. The earthquake has certainly revealed that NGOs can play a positive role, but the question of “deviation” is of greater concern to the ruling party and where the challenge will lie for these young organizations.
It would be shortsighted to consider the role that Chinese NGOs will play on the domestic stage alone. Chinese NGOs are increasingly in regular contact with counterparts from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the US to discuss climate change, globalization, aids, antidiscrimination or whatever the issues of the day are. The Chinese government may not just face its NGOs at home, it may also see them abroad, and so will other governments and multi-national corporations who have often been at the focus of global civil society campaigns.
China’s first NGOs are growing out of their infancy period, and their future, like the future of any child, is limitless. But the adolescent period may be difficult. They face funding pressure, program pressure and political pressure—any one of which could shut an NGO down and none of which show signs of abating. Chinese NGO leaders are confident in their goals, but uncertain about their ability to achieve them. As one thirty-something leader of an AIDS NGO in Heilongjiang said recently, “Chinese NGOs lack everything, except enthusiasm.”
Ms. Gadsden is an independent consultant and a former resident country director in China for the International Republican Institute.
Gadsden, Amy. "Earthquake Rocks China's Civil Society" Far Eastern Economic Review June, 2008. (26 June, 2008)