Interview - Nick Young

Nick Young founded China Development Brief in 1995 to report on efforts to achieve fair and sustainable development in China. Twelve years later it has been closed down by the Chinese government and Young’s visa cancelled. What does this tell us about Chinese government attitudes to the country’s fledgling NGO sector, Caroline Hartnell asked him. The picture he paints is of a government that is on the one hand wary of pluralism and oppositional attitudes and on the other keen to promote charitable giving and service delivery by NGOs.

The background story
In 1995, journalist Nick Young founded China Development Brief (CDB). In 2002, a Chinese-language edition was launched. Though neither newsletter complied with China’s highly restrictive publishing laws, the authorities turned a blind eye to their existence. Sometimes central government officials even sought Young’s opinion on issues such as the development of a legal framework for China’s non-profit sector.

The past two years, however, have seen a hardening of official attitudes towards civil society. On 4 July last, CDB’s office was visited by officials, police and security agents. They were ordered to stop publishing. Young was made to sign a statement admitting to ‘conducting unauthorized surveys’ while his Chinese-edition colleagues were charged with distributing an unlicensed publication and fined 12,000 yuan (about $1,500).

Events then took a bizarre and rather sinister turn. Young had two meetings with an apparently high-ranking Chinese security official who claimed to be ‘in charge of watching terrorism and NGOs’. At the first of these, he offered Young, on conditions of absolute confidentiality, the choice of either working closely with the Chinese government and helping the world to understand China better or leaving China permanently. At the second meeting, he was simply told that unless he obeyed local laws, his presence would not be tolerated. On 26 September, on his return to Beijing after spending several weeks in Europe, immigration authorities refused him entry, put him back on the plane to Helsinki, and cancelled his multi-entry visa.

Can I start by asking you what you see as the wider significance of the closing down of China Development Brief.

Generally, the Chinese government manages information in society through a system of self-censorship. The authorities take action each year against a small number of newspapers, closing down a few publications, things of that kind, so Chinese journalists never quite know what they’re allowed to say and what they’re not, so their natural response is to be careful. It’s a management technique that is very administratively efficient and requires minimum resources. It means that you have a more or less compliant media and anyone who sticks their head too far above the parapet can expect to have their head chopped off. This is the government's way of ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkey’, as the Chinese proverb goes.

It may be that what happened to us was just part of that. At the same time, I think that because we were very closely associated with the growing Chinese non-profit sector it was probably also a signal to the sector as a whole, and to the international organizations who are support the development of civil society in China, that it’s time to step back a bit. Over the last three years, prompted by concerns about colour revolutions elsewhere and at the behest of the state council, which is China’s cabinet, the Chinese security forces, social scientists, and academics at the Communist Party central cadre training school have been doing systematic investigations of the non-profit sector in China and of international funding for social science research and non-profit activity. During that process, they all saw CDB as a valuable source of information – and I’m glad that we were able to shine at least some rational light on the sector for them.

It appears that towards the end of last year, the final results of that investigation came in and the government felt that it was time to damp down some of the internationally funded advocacy efforts that were going on in China. I think closing down the English-language edition of CDB was a good way of signalling what the state was thinking.

At the same time, CDB had become much more visible in the last couple of years. A few things that happened within the last year showed that we were taken seriously in the Chinese NGO community. We had become large enough to be caught by the security apparatus mesh.

So the fact that you had become more visible made you more likely to be caught in their net?

Yes I think so. China’s a very large, very complicated society, with all sorts of things going on. The government can’t respond to all of them, so it responds to those that become noticeable. I think, during the broader investigation I was talking about, the security forces decided that we weren’t a two-bit player, we were a significant force in the development of China civil society – and obviously that’s very flattering. I was trying to be a significant force in the development of China’s civil society!

Do you feel that the Chinese government sees civil society as representing a threat generally?

Broadly, the government of China fears pluralism because it has the history and perspective of an imperial government. It’s not like a European nation state, it governs a huge area and some of the outlying provinces are a long way from Beijing. There is no sign of China moving easily or comfortably towards a federal system of government. The relationship between the centre and the provinces is very complex and very uneasy, and pronounced regional differences are beginning to emerge.

So the Chinese state fears pluralism because it fears the division that would follow more or less automatically. This is why they always say, ‘we want democracy in China but we don’t want the western kind.’ Political pluralism, they feel, would be disastrous for the country. I think that view is rational and some days I agree with it. Some of the most forward-thinking Chinese scholars on civil society believe that China needs a unified, and therefore one-party, government, but that it should be a broad government, and that to balance the power of government it needs a vigorous civil society. I think that’s a rational, very intelligent view.

The Communist Party definitely wants to mobilize social resources for charitable activity. The Ministry of Civil Affairs came to see me to ask me how they can promote charity in China. They are very keen to promote a social service delivery sector, just as they are keen to promote the market in areas like care for older people and disabled children. But while they want to encourage certain parts of the non-profit sector, they definitely want to discourage advocacy that has any potential whatsoever to unite citizens around broader social objectives in a way that’s oppositional to the state.

The state’s view is that it doesn’t want hectoring from too many civil society voices. It wants consultation, but it wants it on its own terms. There’s no doubt that during the 12 years I was in China the government became each year more consultative, listening to scholars, business leaders, and other groups that it invited to submit opinions. But it wants to manage, it wants to say, ‘All right, it’s your turn to speak to us now.’ It doesn’t want people outside the room knocking on the doors saying ‘Hey, let us in.’

So basically it wants to consult with the NGO sector as it chooses and to have NGOs deliver services that the government can’t easily deliver themselves?

Yes, that’s a fair summary. What concerns me about the government’s closing us down is that it suggests very strange priorities. There are so many pressing issues they need to deal with that it seems like a terrible mis-priority to spend time hassling a non-profit sector that is still in its infancy.

My feeling is that their approach is basically precautionary. I don’t think, when they launched this colour revolution investigation, that many people in the security forces were potty enough to believe that the Chinese state was at risk of being overthrown by a handful of environmental activists, with me egging them on from the sidelines. I think their analysis is more long-term: you have to be careful not to let these weeds start growing because in five or ten years time they might overrun us. So I think it’s precautionary; they are encouraging loyal, patriotic organizations that are performing social welfare delivery roles but discouraging those that look as if they might have an oppositional, trouble-making agenda.

So it’s not a very encouraging situation for the growth of civil society in China?

Well, it really depends on how you see civil society. There are people in the Communist Party of China who want to establish the idea that harmony is Confucian and culturally Chinese. They would argue that oppositional public advocacy of the kind done by Greenpeace, for example, is a product of western systems. In a parliament like the UK’s, you have something that’s called an opposition and people sit on opposite benches and shout at each other and they look at that and think, ‘Well, that’s a bit primitive. We’re culturally superior, we talk to each other in civilized ways.’ I can understand those feelings, though I don’t agree with them.

Does the Chinese government fund NGOs at all? If not, how do they fund the services they offer?

Small independent organizations find it extremely difficult to raise funds locally because they’re not allowed to engage in public fundraising. Only a very small number of government-backed, government-created organizations, called foundations, can publicly fundraise, and an even smaller percentage have the right to tax benefits. Private organizations, created by ordinary citizens, have to appeal to friends or family. If someone has a cousin who owns a factory that’s doing quite well, they may get a small amount of funding that way.

If they set up a social service provider organization, basically it will be on a cost recovery model but subsidized somehow or other. The groups that the government is most concerned about – those doing public advocacy around issues of environment or labour rights or gender – usually have international funding. To the official mentality in China, that seems to be further evidence that they’re up to no good: if they’re taking foreign money and all they want to do is complain, what good can they be doing?

Do these advocacy organizations try to raise money in China?

No. They should, but it’s easier to go and ask for money from the Ford Foundation or the Canadian Embassy than to go out and raise small amounts of money from your own constituency. Years ago, at CDB, we did a series of local resource mobilization training workshops for small Chinese community organizations, including some environmental NGOs. One of the reasons we did this was that these organizations needed local resources to have legitimacy – particularly political legitimacy: one Chinese yuan is worth much more than 10,000 Ford Foundation dollars when it comes to speaking on behalf of other people in your own country. There’s been some progress since then, but not a lot. While international organizations continue to dole out money, it will remain easier to get it from them than to start the long and difficult process of trying to build a local support base.

You said earlier that the Chinese government is very keen to encourage charity and charitable giving. Is philanthropy growing in China among wealthy individuals?

There’s a long tradition of wealthy individuals donating at significant levels directly to government agencies from patriotic motives. We did research among Chinese private companies some years ago and found that people were donating to causes like the Three Gorges Dam, the Peoples Liberation Army and veterans’ pensions. But you are now beginning to see some of the nouveau riche, though by no means all, interested in newer forms of private philanthropy.

The government created new regulations for foundations in 2004 after a very long drafting process. This shows how difficult it is to create regulations that encourage the things the government wants to encourage and discourages the things it doesn’t like. It’s hard to do all that in a single document.

The regulations are in many ways very restrictive, still requiring foundations to have a government sponsor as well as registering with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, but they do, for the first time in China’s communist history, allow for the creation of privately endowed foundations – grantmaking foundations, that is, not money-raising mechanisms. Some of those have begun to register and they include some quite interesting organizations.

One is the Narada Foundation. It is going to focus on education, which is central and traditional in Chinese philanthropy, but its plan to deliver quality education to the children of rural migrants to urban areas is quite new, an area where the government’s policy is not clear. There’s an enormous urbanization process going on in China; all Chinese cities depend absolutely on migrants. The government wants to regulate the process but doesn’t quite know how. Some areas have been quite encouraging of what they call ‘new citizens’ and are building townships on the edges of cities for them, but others have stigmatized the migrants, and generally the impact has been widespread social exclusion and exclusion from service provision.

So this new foundation is not merely reacting to what government wants philanthropists to do, it is setting its own agenda. To lead the foundation, they’ve recruited a man called Xu Yongguang, who used to manage the Communist Youth League’s Project Hope. This is an educational foundation that is very close to government and raises money for things like paying school fees and building primary schools. The new private foundation, while it’s not out building barricades, appears to be slightly more adventurous than the old state foundation was.

You don’t think these private foundations are likely to be out building barricades or funding advocacy groups then?

I think they may be. I think people like Xu Yongguang and others who came out of the governmental foundation sector have a much more inclusive attitude towards citizen-created groups in China than the Communist Party. It would have been very easy for these governmental organizations to present themselves to the outside world as China’s third sector, to have said ‘we’re the real thing and the others don’t belong’. But several of them did in fact give some kind of institutional shelter to much smaller initiatives which were started by ordinary people. So yes, I think there might be funding in the future from some of the private foundations for organizations that are doing work that American liberals would regard as progressive.

Are Chinese NGOs concerned with climate change?

A bit, but China’s environmental NGO community is young. It’s had a fair amount of foreign funding, but it struggles with wanting its own agenda and not wanting to adopt a foreign one.

My reading of the environmental community in China is that what it’s really interested in is water. Some are concerned about hydroelectric developments. There’s been an anti-dam movement of sorts, and a lot of people are concerned about pollution in rivers. That’s their choice of focus at the moment and the rest of the world should respect that. When I was in Beijing, barely a week went past without some large international organization coming to talk to government about climate change. Every one of them would want to consult with civil society and 14-15 environmental NGOs would line up with their two-minute Powerpoint presentations, I guess because they thought there might be some money available for them to go and work on their water projects. These are young organizations and one has to respect their integrity and allow them to decide what they think is important.

So they see climate change as a foreign agenda at the moment?

I wouldn’t go as far as that. But the Chinese feel – and when I was in China, I felt it on their behalf – that there are all these messages coming from the West saying, ‘Well, it’s not that you can’t do it, but there have to be constraints on your growth, you can’t imitate the models that we used.’ It feels like pulling up the ladder, and I think the Chinese environmentalists feel that too. It’s not to say that they are rabidly patriotic or anti-western, because of course they’re not. But in China water is an absolutely critical issue, and it seems to be where people’s hearts are.

If you could give one word of advice to a private foundation that hasn’t worked in China before and wants to, what would that be?

Don’t hurry, I think. People go to China on seven-day fact-finding missions and then they go back and write a report to their board, and the next thing is they’ve made an inappropriate partnership that they can’t get out of for the next five years. I would say, employ someone full time, someone known and trusted, and make them spend at least six months in China before you venture in. I’ve reported on hundreds of different organizations, and there’s no doubt that the most frequent mistake has been undue haste and getting into relationships, places and situations that you don’t really understand and then finding it very difficult to extricate yourself from them.

Will they be welcomed by the government, or does it depend on what they are going to do?

It depends. It’s important to understand that China’s government is huge, and at many different points in the system people are interested in outside ideas. It’s not just money or resources, they are genuinely interested in a different take on how things might be done.

In order to work in China you need a relationship with these people, and the quality of your work will, to a large extent, be a function of how good your relationship with them is. I don’t mean in a corrupt sense, but in the sense that you really listen to them and understand their perspective sufficiently to say things that are relevant.

This is an important year for China. The Olympics are coming up and it’s a big coming out for them, and they are naturally nervous about it. I think generally the government is becoming aware that global public opinion is yet another thing that China has to contend with. That really didn’t matter at the time when America was going through industrialization, or France or the UK. The Americans managed to prosecute a war against the Philippines that wasn’t reported in the American media. We can’t get away with that now. One soldier dead in Afghanistan still makes the front page of the New York Times. I think the Chinese are very aware that global media and global public opinion will affect how China can make its way forward.

For that reason, too, they are interested in getting inside the heads of foreigners. If you look at the way the Chinese corporate sector is working now, it’s very interesting. They are buying up stakes in foreign banks to learn how foreigners do banking. All the joint venture companies over the last 20 years or so weren’t just about capital and jobs, they wanted to learn how foreign companies were making cars, or whatever. So in a sense China’s government is open-minded, it’s interested in outside ideas.

Nick Young worked as a journalist in Central America and Africa before founding China Development Brief. Archived articles remain on www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com Email nickyoung888@gmail.com