Are there any real NGOs in China?

Outsiders interested in the country’s social development frequently ask whether there any ‘real’ NGOs in China. Certainly China remains one of the most government-dominated societies in the world, and in the past some international NGOs have ruled out working there because of the lack of suitable non-government partners. Other Western observers, however, have argued that ‘civil society’ is beginning to flourish.

Indeed, although government remains the major player, over the past few years a number of private individuals have found space, within a highly restrictive legal framework, to establish various kinds of social service facility. These essentially spontaneous efforts broadly reflect the release of private initiative in economic management, with the phased transition to a market economy
 
The beginnings of private initiative

In 1995 Ms Gao Yali of Shanghai, having travelled the country in search of therapy for her son with cerebral palsy, despaired of existing provision and set up her own facility. She has since received funding support from local and joint venture companies, and training from rehabilitation specialists in Hong Kong.

In the city of Nanjing, a ‘Dispel Worries Kiosk’, erected in a central city street by retired factory worker Mr Dai Guohua, has for several years dispensed free tea and sympathy to the passing citizenry. Mr Dai offers to connect people to a network of volunteers offering services as diverse as legal advice and, for older people, the repair of TV sets.

Last year in Beijing, migrant workers converted a disused paint factory into a school for their children who, because not formally registered as urban residents, encounter legal and financial barriers to local state provision. The school now has more than 800 students, a staff of 20, and volunteer assistants from the Capital Teachers College.

At the same time, several larger and basically independent agencies have emerged or resurfaced. Notable among these is the Amity Foundation, a social service organization of the 12 million strong Chinese Protestant church, which has grown rapidly since its founding in 1986. Last year it spent nearly US$5 million, most of it donated by international church groups, on rural development and social welfare projects. The YMCA of China, which was actually established in 1885 but lay extremely low during the first decades of Communism, is in many cities resuming a prominent and innovative role in community development.

However, the Chinese government and Communist Party’s attitude to the emerging non-profit sector remains decidedly ambivalent. Party and government are increasingly keen to mobilize non-government resources for social provision, but extremely reluctant to release social forces they may not be able to control. At present the result is a non-profit sector which is still dominated by government-led and government-controlled agencies. This raises the question whether it is possible for ‘civil society’ to be fostered from the top down. In China this may be as much a cultural as a political issue.

From Marx to market

Recent worldwide interest in the idea of civil society is notable for the apparent convergence between those departing from the traditions of what used to be distinguished as the ‘right’ and the ‘left’. For the right, civil society implies the retreat of government and the release of private initiative. For the left, the attraction is more with participatory forms of association and empowerment. Broad consensus is reached in the thought that, with national and global economies increasingly driven by market demand rather than government plan, civil society organizations can represent concerns which the market neglects, such as the environment and the welfare of the poor and socially disadvantaged.

These issues are highly pertinent to China’s present situation. In economic management the government has over the last 20 years gradually but steadily retreated from the market place. While this has stimulated rapid growth and raised incomes for many, it has been accompanied by growing inequalities and reduced social provision for the most vulnerable, with progressive dismantling of the Maoist ‘iron rice bowl’ of cradle-to-grave employment and social security. A competitive economy implies risks as well as opportunities, losers as well as winners.

At the same time, the Communist Party, which is constitutionally enshrined as China’s ultimate political authority, has tried repeatedly to downsize government. Last spring saw the most recent, and probably most earnest, attempt, with the shedding of several ministries which controlled industrial sectors, and 40 per cent staff cuts in all areas. As of this year, similar measures will begin to be applied to provincial and county administrations too.

Faced with growing gaps in provision and diminishing government capacity to meet need, the Communist Party and government have been keen to tap non-budgetary resources for social services. A 1980s drive to universalize basic education, for example, relied heavily on establishing ‘community’ schools in rural areas. These were built with donations from local enterprises and individuals, and staffed by teachers paid directly by the community.

‘Government NGOs’
 
The 1980s also saw the establishment of numerous new agencies which Western observers were quick to label as ‘GONGOS’ – government-organized non-government organizations.

Typical of these was the Youth Development Foundation, set up by the Communist Youth League, which launched the highly successful Project Hope to build primary schools and provide scholarships for poor children. (Basic education is nominally free, but subject to various ‘administrative’ fees.) This managed to attract multi-million-dollar funding, much of it from the ‘overseas Chinese’ community in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South-East Asia. Substantial funds have flowed from the same source to the China Disabled Persons Federation, a quasi-ministry for the disabled which has been spectacularly successful in advocacy and resource mobilization for disabled people.

GONGO staff and premises have typically been provided by government; indeed GONGOs have often been seen by government departments as a useful means of absorbing staff cuts. This has led many Westerners to dismiss the organizations as mere overflows and fundraising mechanisms for government. But some have shown increasing signs of independence. For example, the China Charities Federation, which after its 1994 founding confined itself mainly to raising funds for orphanages, emerged during last summer’s floods as a major force not only in fundraising but in targeting and distribution of relief supplies, in more or less open competition with its parent Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Moreover, in a society so dominated by government, where else was the initial impetus for civil society to come from? You can’t jump from A to C without an intermediate process. Optimists might argue that GONGOs represent B, or at least an important part of it, on the evolutionary scale.

In support of this view, several cases can be cited where GONGOs have spawned second-generation, more innovative and more independent social groups. In 1997, for example, under the auspices of the Shaanxi Province Social Reintegration Society, an official GONGO concerned with rehabilitation of prisoners, former prison worker Zhang Shuqing founded a home for ‘prison orphans’ -- socially ostracized children whose parents have been jailed or executed. The home has been funded almost entirely by a local entrepreneur who was himself jailed during the Cultural Revolution.

Also in 1997, in the south-western city of Jinghong, a local judge set up a Psychological and Legal Counselling Centre for Women and Children under the auspices of the official Women’s Federation.

Yet such groups have to contend with a restrictive institutional and legal environment, and invariably rely on the efforts of highly determined, and often well-connected, individuals. It takes an unusual person to start up an NGO in China. This also implies inherent institutional weakness, as it is hard for new organizations to survive and outgrow their founders.

Finding legal space

The ground rules require that all ‘social organizations’ be sponsored by and accountable to a government or Communist Party work unit. Diversity and competition are excluded by a requirement that there should be only one organization of each kind at each administrative level (national, provincial and county). This requirement has in the past been invoked to refuse registration to or shut down several community initiatives, such as rape crisis centres and refuges for battered wives, which were seen as treading on the toes of the official Women’s Federation. (Whether the Women's Federation endorses or opposes such initiatives is less a matter of policy than of personal, local contacts and influence.)

Moreover, all organizations are constitutionally bound to support the leadership and programme of the Communist Party. Thus there is overwhelming pressure for agendas to be set by government rather than the grass roots. Most organizations see and articulate their role as being to help government achieve its social and economic objectives. The more autonomous and innovative groups, which invariably also declare themselves to be supporting government, have had to exercise considerable ingenuity in finding space for themselves. Some affiliate as subgroups of registered organizations, using personal contacts. Some register as businesses. Some attach themselves to universities as research institutes.

The basic situation has not been altered by new, long-awaited regulations, published last November. The least charitable interpretation of these is summed up in the title of a report by the US-based group Human Rights in China: Bound and Gagged: Freedom of association in China further curtailed under new regulations. But in fact there are few areas of social life where Chinese law is systematically applied. If past indications are a reliable guide, those with a sense of mission will find ways around or between the rules, and will be tolerated as long as their activities are seen as socially beneficial.

A fear of losing control

Fundamentally, government and Communist Party are torn between the desire to release private initiative and funds and the fear of relinquishing control. Any campaigning, advocacy or political group is especially likely to receive short shrift, as was demonstrated last December when several individuals were jailed for attempting legally to register a China Democracy Party.

To some extent, environmental campaigning is exempt from this severity. Government is acutely aware of the immense environmental pressures contained in economic growth, and is willing to condone environmental activism to raise awareness among a public fully bent on higher levels of consumption. A number of environmental campaigning groups are tolerated, such as the Beijing-based Friends of Nature, which has held public demonstrations at street markets, objecting to trade in endangered species and caged birds. However, a harsher response awaited those who had the temerity to object to the ongoing Three Gorges dam project, which has entailed the resettlement of more than a million people to make way for the world’s largest reservoir.

The Communist Party’s fear of losing control is hardly surprising. It is attempting, at a time of financial crisis in Asia, to push forward a painful reform programme that means mass lay-offs and probably long-term unemployment for an urban proletariat with no experience of competing for work. At the same time, tens of millions of migrant workers are flowing from agriculture to manufacturing and service industries, in what may be the only way of easing the pressure of chronic land shortages. Inter-provincial rivalries are developing, and indigenous groups in Tibet and the north-west are seen as raising the spectre of ‘splittism’ before reunification (through reincorporation of Taiwan) has been achieved. It is not a situation in which any government would wish to court instability by opening up political space.

The challenge of ‘participation’

On a cynical view the Communist Party, having relinquished any serious commitment to Marxism Leninism in favour of ‘Deng Xiaoping thought’ – summarized in the famous complementary aphorisms ‘To be rich is glorious’ and, in regard to getting rich, ‘Some will lead, the rest will follow’ -- simply wants to retain power. But political authority in China has seldom rested on ideological coherence so much as on a drive for strong government.

Partly this derives from the historic difficulty of holding so vast a country together. But it is also grounded in Confucian traditions of respect for authority. It is worth reflecting, for example, that the discipline required to achieve literacy in Chinese script is underpinned by a deeply rooted deference to magisterial authority. The teacher is always right -- and this lays the foundation of a radically top-down society. Most of today’s emerging NGOs stake their claims to legitimacy not on how many ordinary people they can mobilize but on how many ‘top leaders’ they can recruit to their cause.

This is why participatory, empowering approaches to building civil society represent such a challenge to contemporary China. Yet a growing lobby, including many international NGOs, foundations and aid agencies, is urging their relevance to such critical areas as rural development and poverty alleviation. Government has ploughed billions of dollars into poverty alleviation projects, and set itself ambitious targets. Initially, it pledged to eliminate absolute poverty by 2000, but only a miracle could now secure this goal. There is, however, no doubt of government’s commitment to reducing poverty, if only to legitimize its reform programme; yet it has become increasingly apparent that top-down, centrally controlled programmes are inadequate. Many international organizations and Chinese rural development practitioners are vigorously advocating the kind of community development approaches that are familiar in other countries. These involve encouraging grass-roots organizations, such as credit unions and farmers' associations, to represent the poor and catalyse development on their behalf.

It all, perhaps, comes down to the question ‘Whose civil society?’ Many of those enthused by market mechanisms argue that the rapidly expanding entrepreneurial and professional classes will demand, and eventually get, new freedoms of association, the benefits of which will finally trickle down to the poor. But China has ample experience of restricting privilege, particularly through the marked urban/rural divide, which has for hundreds of years placed a disproportionate tax burden on peasant families. It remains to be seen whether privilege can be restricted in the context of a dynamic economy and a society opened up to international political and cultural ideas.

Nick Young lives in China and publishes out of Hong Kong a newsletter for international development agencies working on the mainland, 'chinabrief'.  He has previously worked as a journalist in Africa and Latin America. He can be contacted at cbrief@public.km.yn.cn