Dr. Timothy Hildebrandt's Summer Course in Beijing on NGOs

 Timothy Hildebrandt, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Social Organizations and the Authoritarian State in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), will be offering this summer school course for the second year in a row. It will be a great opportunity to learn from one of the leading authorities on civil society in China. Check out the course link below and spread the word!

Course Title: "From NGOs to Social Enterprises: Chinese Social Organisations in Local and Global Governance"

Course Location and Time: Beijing University, August 8-19, 2016.

Course Description:

This course explores the unique context within which NGOs and other social organisations have emerged in China, revealing how they have been able to often coexist with the government. This course does not examine Chinese social organisations in isolation but rather places them in both an historical and comparative context, highlighting the difference in character, activity, and effect of NGOs in China from the rest of the world. In doing so, this course will familiarize students with relevant theories and literatures from a wide variety of fields, including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and management. Important conceptual issues pertinent to the study of NGOs and social enterprises include: development and management of NGOs, role of transnational activism, views and practices of volunteerism, philanthropy and funding, and the effect of NGOs and civil society on Chinese society and politics.It will also highlight the new role of Chinese NGOs going outside domestic borders to do international work of their own. Throughout the course, empirical cases of NGOs will be discussed, including organisations working in the areas of public health, poverty alleviation, labour rights, environmental protection, and education.

Course link: http://www.lse.ac.uk/study/summerSchools/LSEPKUProgramme/courses/sa301.aspx

Please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Hildebrandt for further information: T.R.Hildebrandt@lse.ac.uk

China's Charity Law Passes, Finally! (Civil Society 2, National Security 2 Halftime)

After more than 10 years in legislative limbo, the Charity Law of the People’s Republic of China was finally passed on March 16 at the 4th full session of the 12^th National People’s Congress (NPC) with 2636 yes votes, 131 no votes, and 83 abstentions. The law will go into force on September 1, 2016. The Charity Law seeks to promote the cause of charity/philanthropy in China by clarifying the scope of charitable activities and regulating the establishment and operation of charitable organizations and the sources and uses of charitable property and services. For more about this law, see the analysis I wrote in this blog back in November when the second draft had come out for public comments.

Using my admittedly less-than-scientific categories, we could count the Charity Law, which is generally viewed positively by those in the Chinese nonprofit sector, as the second piece of legislation over the last year that was the product of significant input from those in the sector. The other piece of legislation was the Anti-Domestic Violence Law that was approved by the NPC Standing Committee last December. Of course, the Overseas NGO Law also concerns civil society, but I put it in the national security camp for now because that law had no input from the NGO sector and is widely viewed as controlling rather than enabling. There's still a chance the next draft of the Overseas NGO Law incorporate suggestions from NGOs and end up being very different and more enabling. If so, there's a chance I may change my mind and put it in the civil society camp.

Now if we're keeping score and treating the legislative process as a game (which doesn't mean I don't think we shouldn't take these laws seriously), then the civil society-related laws matches the number of national security-related laws that have come out over the same period of time (see Tables 1 and 2 below). We're still waiting for two other pieces of national security-related legislation - the Overseas NGO Management Law and the Cybersecurity Law - so if they are passed in close to their current form, then national security will come out on top in terms of the number of laws passed. Stay tuned.

Table 1: Timetable of national security-related NPC legislation

	1st reading	2nd reading	3rd reading	Approved
Counterterrorism Law	November 3, 2014 (public comments)	March, 2015	??	Dec 24, 2015
National Security Law	December 2014 (internal)	May 7, 2015 (public comments)	July 1, 2015	July 1, 2015
Overseas NGO Management Law	December 22, 2014 (internal)	May 5, 2015 (public comments)	N/A	N/A
Cybersecurity Law	July 6, 2015 (public comment)	N/A	N/A	N/A

Table 2: Timetable of other civil society-related NPC legislation

	1st reading	2nd reading	3rd reading	Approved
Anti-Domestic Violence Law	November 25, 2014 (State Council, public comments)	August 2015 (NPC, public comments)	October 2015	December 27, 2015
Charity Law	October 2015 (public comments)	December 2015	March 2016	March 16, 2016

I'll be posting more about the Charity Law in the coming weeks. One thing to note is that the law that passed went through more changes in the third reading and so will be somewhat different from the second draft that was made available last October for public comments. According to China Development Brief's (CDB) summary of a New China News Agency article about the law, as a result of the 4000 comments made concerning the second draft, 110 changes were made to the second Charity Law draft, of which 38 were substantial changes. We'll need to see the text of the law to see how different the final version is from the second draft. CDB says it will have an English translation of the Charity Law by the beginning of April.

Below are some news items concerning the discussion of the draft law during the NPC session:

Charity Law draft limits public fundraising foundations’ management fee to 10% of expenditures
Clarifications provided regarding the Third Draft of the Charity Law
The Draft of the Charity Law specifies regulations concerning fundraising activities 

Josh Chin also has this piece - The Good - and Bad - About China's Charity Law - on the Wall Street Journal's blog.

The Politics of the Overseas NGO Management Law

As the National People’s Congress (NPC) winds to a close today, there’s been more interest in the status of the Overseas NGO Management draft law. The draft law was issued last May for public comments, but since then there has been little word from the NPC about it. During the NPC session, a foreign journalist asked the NPC spokeswoman, Fu Ying, about the draft law and what she said was interesting. She responded that the NPC was still reviewing the comments that had been solicited on the draft, and there was a suggestion in her phrasing that comments were still being solicited. She further stated that no decision had been taken on which NPC Standing Committee meeting (which take place about every two months to review and pass draft laws) the draft law would be sent to for review and adoption.  In other words, it was still unclear when or if this particular draft law would be passed.

Fu Ying’s admission that the draft law is essentially in legislative limbo is revealing in what it tells us about the politics behind the law. I spoke a bit about this to Didi Kirsten Tatlow of the New York Times when she interviewed me for her recent article about the draft law. I said that the delay – it’s now been more than 10 months since the draft law was issued for public comments - suggested that there was some debate over the draft law within the Chinese government. I also made this point in an earlier blog post where I noted that the National Security Law followed almost the same timeline as the Overseas NGO Law, yet passed much more quickly in July of last year.

I think though that we can go one step further and see the protracted passage of the draft law as saying something about the politics of policymaking under Xi Jinping.  The conventional wisdom is that Xi is the one who is calling the shots. He’s the one behind the anti-corruption campaign, the growing nationalist rhetoric and turn against Western values, the slew of national security-related laws, the crackdown on NGOs, lawyers, and labor activists, and the latest visit to state media (the media organs such as the New China News Agency, the People’s Daily and CCTV who are supposed to serve as the party’s mouthpiece) reminding them to serve the Party.

In short, according to this narrative, policymaking under Xi is much more top down and centralized. Whereas under Hu Jintao, power was more fragmented and decentralized and there was more give-and-take and compromise between different factions, departments and localities over policy.

There is something to this contrast between Xi and Hu. Under Hu, there were a number of  ongoing local experiments in the NGO and charity sector with different local regulations emerging in places like Guangdong, but the movement toward a national level Charity Law was slow and halting. Under Xi, these local experiments are no longer in the spotlight and instead we’ve seen a number of national security-related laws come out all in one year, while the Charity Law has emerged from its long hibernation.

I would argue, however, that we can and have taken this contrast too far. Despite our enlarged sense of his power, Xi is still part of a collective leadership (Alice Miller makes this case quite convincingly in his China Leadership Monitor reports) and he still has to work in an immense bureaucracy full of considerable factional, departmental and local interests. The delay in the Overseas NGO Law (and this is only one example) should make us reconsider whether this seemingly outdated framework is still relevant. If Xi is really the one driving all these top-down initiatives, then why is he unable to get the Overseas NGO draft law through the NPC? The answer is that he is not as powerful or secure in his position as many of us think he is.

The delay in the draft law becomes more puzzling if we consider events that have transpired since the draft was issued for public comment.  Dozens of rights lawyers have been detained in the months leading up to the NPC meeting, several labor rights activists in Guangdong were detained and criminally charged in early December 2015, and a Swedish citizen was detained in January and forced to give a televised confession for the rights defense work his NGO carried out in China. A state media smear campaign launched against the labor activists in late December accused them of using foreign funding to stir up workers to engage in strike activity. These recent actions, approved at the highest levels, and carried out by the police and state media apparatus, could be interpreted as lobbying by conservative policy entrepreneurs to strengthen support for passing the Overseas NGO draft law in its current draconian form.

If there is some truth to this interpretation, then it is striking that these “lobbying” efforts have not succeeded in breaking the legislative logjam in the case of this draft law, and suggests considerable debate and discord over this draft law.  Of course, the end result could still be that the draft law passes without significant revisions. But the drawn out process that the draft law has gone through lends more credence to the political narrative that even strong leaders like Xi need to work within a fragmented, bureaucratic system.  More mainstream observers see this system as one in which there are formidable interests seeking to water down Xi’s policy initiatives.  More cynical observers, however, see a system in which there are interests with more nefarious motives who want to go further and bring Xi down.

Remembering the Feminist Five

The Feminist Five was the name given to the five women activists who were detained on March 7, 2015 on the eve of International Women's Day for planning an event in several cities to spread awareness about sexual harassment on public transit in China. Those five are Li Tingting (also known as Li Maizi), Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong, and Zheng Churan.  They were eventually released after 37 days in detention but the charges against them have yet to be withdrawn.

On the first anniversary of their detention, a number of the Five made public statements about continuing the fight on Facebook and YouTube, accompanied by media articles and events about their cause and expressions of support from the international community. It's encouraging to see their defiant spirit in the face of the repression they've experienced. Below I've collated some of the postings, speeches, articles and events that have taken place in the last week in remembrance of the Feminist Five. I'm sure we'll be hearing more from them soon.

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Here's a Facebook post from Li Tingting dressed as Rosie the Riveter, and her statement on the first anniversary of her detention and its significance for the women's movement in China. She notes rightly that the detention had the ironic but important effect of getting their work to a larger audience both in China and in the international community.

Today is a special day. It's one year anniversary of ‪#‎freethefive‬.

2015 boasts to be a significant for the development of the feminism movement. I’d like to express my gratitude again to our government for pushing the feminist movement in China to another peak. We five sisters suffered a lot in the past, but at last we are free.

What happened to us had enormous impacts in China and overseas. It was actually the first time that the international community knew that there are real feminists in China. Therefore, the connection between the feminists from China and the other countries was enhanced. As a matter of fact, the sisterhood of us five played a key role in the process of the action of anti-sexual harassment.

So why did the Young Feminism Activists emerged in China in 2012? It is because the strategy of the feminists in the academic circle to advocate gender equality in the mild way has been proved ineffective. We thus need a more intense way to break the stereotyped feministm movement. However, since such determination was deficient in the system and the academic circle, the young feminism activists finally stood out.

With the “occupation of the men’s room” as a start, the young feminists who are given the title of “feminism activists” have taken numerous high-profile actions: From the bloody bride, we appeal Chinese ppl to pay close attention to the domestic violence; from the occupation of men’s room, we appeal the public to pay attention to the inequality of the number of the toilet cubicles between the men’s and women’s lavatory. The women group in China thus is given more right of speech. Besides, changes have been taken place in the policies such as the extension of the women’s lavatory.
Surely, what we did was under the rigorous surveillance of the police. The feminists have been under various investigations frequently. On March 7, 2015, after the “Feminism Five Girls” were detained and then released, the street action of us have been forbidden. Now no one dares to appear in the public occasions. At present, the Young Feminism Activist are confronted with new challenges and new missions.

How far can we go in the future? We have made attempts to open up a new path, for example, cooperating with the market and proposing the anti-forced marriage topic. In China, patriarchal system, as one of the forms of paternity, strictly restrains the young people. Every time when the single young people return to their hometown, they would be forced to get married soon by their parents, which confuse them a lot. Aiming at the phenomenon, we initiated anti-forced marriage movement: we funded an advertisement position, promoting that single life could also be happy. We do not have to build up a family and make compromise to the mainstream family values to live a happy life.

Like all the social movements, the Chinese feminist movement has experienced climaxes and bottoms. Although it is greatly restrained at present, we believe that the feminism activists in China will promote it with our wisdom and brave heart.

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YouTube statements by Li Tingting (in English), Wurongrong (in Chinese), and Zheng Churan (in English).

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More postings about the Feminist Five can also be found on the Facebook page, Free Chinese Feminists.

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A great article by Didi Kirsten Tatlow of The New York Times that puts it all in context.

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An event held at Fordham University:

Crackdown on China's Feminist Five: One Year On
March 7, 2016 12:30 PM - 2:30PM
Location: Room 2-01A, Fordham Law School, 150 W. 62nd St. New York, NY 10023

The Leitner Center for International Law and Justice and the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers are pleased to host a discussion with Chinese women’s rights advocates, U.S. academics and activists. One year after the detention of China’s Feminist Five right before International Women’s Day, join us over lunch for an update on the latest developments in women’s rights and the crackdown on feminist activists and female lawyers in China. The speakers' bios are below. RSVP is required, as space will be limited.

SPEAKERS:

Lu Pin is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and Chief Editor of Feminist Voices, the most popular social media account on feminism in Chin. She used to be a senior journalist on women's rights and has been working for NGOs focused in gender equality in China since 1999. She has worked with China's Feminist Five for four years.

Wang Zheng is a Professor of Women's Studies and History, and a Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Professor Wang's publications focus on feminism in China, both in terms of its historical development and its contemporary activism, as well as changing gender discourses in relation to China's socioeconomic, political and cultural transformations. Wang Zheng is the director of the U.S.-China Gender Studies program that collaborates with Chinese universities on developing women's and gender studies in China. She actively advocated for the Feminist Five’s release last March.

Sharon Hom is the Executive Director of Human Rights In China and Professor of Law Emerita at CUNY School of Law. A participant of Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, she was named one of the “50 Women to Watch” by the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

Lu Jun is a Visiting Scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Beijing-based anti-discrimination NGO Yirenping Center, and a winner of the Italian Pino Puglisi Prize. Lu Jun initiated Yirenping’s women’s rights program together with three of the Feminist Five.

MODERATOR:

Elisabeth Wickeri is the Executive Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.

The Fight Against Inequality: Martin Luther King and China's Labor Activists

The issue of inequality is arguably the central issue of our time. On this last day of February, I can’t let January (MLK’s birthday) and February (Black History Month in the U.S.) go by without making a connection between Martin Luther King and China's labor activists. The two seem like strange bedfellows but both have fought long and hard for the one percent to share more of its wealth with the 99 percent.

Many Americans know that King was assassinated in 1968 on April 4, but few know that he was assassinated in Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by sanitation workers. Many know King as a civil rights leader, but few know him as a democratic socialist who was broadening his activism beyond racial and religious lines to take on the issue of economic justice.  In 1968, he and the Southern Leadership Religious Conference (SLRC) began the organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to call attention to the problem of poverty in the U.S. and worldwide. That campaign took him to Memphis in that fateful month of April where he was shot in the neck on the balcony of his motel at the tender age of 39.

Few people also know that one of the signal events in modern Chinese labor history was a strike by more than 200 sanitation workers in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in August of 2014. The workers went on strike because the management company that employed them decided not to renew their street cleaning contract with the district government. When the management company refused to talk to the workers about severance pay and their future employment prospects, the workers went on strike.

With the help of a local labor NGO, the Panyu Workers Center, the workers organized, elected representatives and approached the management company with their demands. When the company again refused to talk, the workers went on strike. Soon after, with the encouragement of local government and union officials, the workers representatives and management company sat down and came to a collective bargaining agreement in which the management company agreed to a severance package that totaled nearly three million yuan (about U.S.$476,000). 

Several things made this case unusual and important in the annals of Chinese labor history. One was that workers succeeded in getting a collective bargaining agreement in an authoritarian country where the official union stands on the side of the government and management and does not engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers. Second, the local authorities and unions encouraged the workers and management to negotiate, instead of arresting or firing the workers for striking as is the norm in China. Third, the workers received support from other sectors of society - local students, journalists and other members of the public.

In his speech to the striking Memphis sanitation workers on February 12, 1968, King sought to lift the spirits of an overflow crowd with words that would have sounded familiar to the Chinese sanitation workers in Guangzhou[1].

“You are doing many things here in this struggle. You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor….One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive… All labor has dignity.

 

But you are doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America.

Now you are doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issue. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is a distinction.

Now let me say a word to those of you who are on strike. You have been out now for a number of days but don’t despair. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice…. Let it be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that you are struggling for, you are also struggling for the right to organize and be recognized.

We can all get more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power.  Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power.”

The story of U.S.-China relations over the last 30 years can be read as the story of how inequality was accelerated within and across borders. The tremendous growth in trade and investment between the U.S. and China led to the hollowing out of industrial urban centers in the U.S., and the lifting of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. In the process, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few in both countries. China, in particular, went from a relatively egalitarian country to one of the most unequal countries in the world. 

The Guangzhou sanitation strike is, in a sense, a natural product of this decidedly unnatural inequality in a communist country. It is also a product of a growing consciousness among Chinese workers of their rights and their collective strength, or as King noted, their power to induce change.  In King’s words, “never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.”

King’s universal language would have resonated deeply with the Guangzhou sanitation workers. It’s unfortunate that he did not live to see their achievement, one victory on the battlefield in the long war on inequality. He would have been only 86.

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[1] “All Labor Has Dignity,” in Cornel West, ed., The Radical King (Boston: Beacon Press).

The Regenerative Power of Civil Society

I’ve always been more of an optimist when it comes to the future of civil society in China, even in these dark days under Xi Jinping’s rule. In early March of 2015, I wrote the response below to some hand-wringing among academics about the growing restrictions on labor NGOs and activists. Soon after I wrote this, five women activists around China were detained in a coordinated high-level campaign, and then about nine months later, a number of labor activists were interrogated and some detained and criminally charged. So was I wrong? I don’t think so. Re-reading this response, I think it’s as relevant as it was when I wrote it about a year ago. My point then and now is that we need to be more attentive to the organic way in which civil society multiplies and regenerates itself. Indeed, months later, some of these same women activists, who were released after a month in detention, have gone back to working on the same issues they were working on prior to their detention, and for all I know they may have found a few more supporters, and I’m confident the same will be true of some the labor activists.

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March 2, 2015

At a macro level, the recent campaign against lawyers and activists in China is not sustainable, nor is it meant to be sustainable. In this sense, the crackdown is not the “new normal”. It is instead a means to an end. What that end is remains to be seen, whether it’s laying the foundation for the reforms laid out in Xi Jinping’s ambitious Third Plenum Decision, or revitalising the relationship between the party-state and society, or strengthening China’s national sovereignty and security, or perhaps all three. Those are the new normal, not the crackdown. 

The end is not, as some people believe, the eradication of civil society. If that is the end, then the Xi Jinping administration has a lot more work to do but I don’t believe that is a priority.  The leadership has too many other burning issues to attend to than try to stamp out pesky activists - the economy, the anticorruption campaign, territorial and sovereignty issues on its periphery, and North Korea come to mind. Nor am I saying Xi Jinping is a closet liberal who will turn around to save civil society. He wants to save and strengthen the party and the nation, not civil society. But if Xi Jinping’s affirmation of “social governance” in his Third Plenum Decision’s is still valid, then there’s still a chance that he is willing to work with civil society if it helps him achieve his larger goals.

At a more micro level, I wish journalists and academics would do more to recognise the hard work of civil society activists and organisations on the ground and their achievements rather than their setbacks. Activists, NGOs and lawyers seem to attract more attention and support for being repressed than for making progress. No disrespect to the journalists which have done a great job covering China under tight deadlines and editorial demands, but if I was just trying to understand China by reading the media, I’d wonder how civil society could make any progress at all on the ground because it always seems be getting shut down.

To illustrate the power of the media, I always think about people I met when I was reviving the English version of China Development Brief whose founder, Nick Young, was barred from China in 2007. When I told them in 2011 or 2012 that I was working for CDB, many would tell me that they read CDB’s newsletter and would cite some piece from the pre-2007 days. Well you know, I would say, that was the old CDB, but you know there’s now this new CDB and it’s not the same as the old one. I could tell though it was hard for them to get their mind around this piece of information. It was like once the media reported that Nick had been barred, CDB ceased to exist in the minds of many people.

The reality is that in China, as I’m sure happens in other countries, detaining activists and lawyers and closing down NGOs is like the whack-a-mole game. They just pop up in other forms. Or maybe a better analogy is to understand these civil society actors as an organism. Hurting that organism, killing some of its cells, is only a temporary setback because over time that organism will grow new cells to replace the ones that died. Just as I was able to resurrect the old English-language CDB through the Chinese-language CDB that had spun off of the English-language organization and had managed to survive the closing down of Nick’s operation. Count that as yet another achievement of civil society. Once it begins to multiply, it’s very difficult to exterminate.

Ironically, this seemingly novel way of looking at civil society is applied to uncivil society actors, or what we might call bad civil society, such as terrorist organizations and networks. We often hear how killing leaders of an organization like Al Qaeda may not be that be that effective because other leaders and cells will arise to take their place. How prophetic that insight has become! But it’s that not great of a leap to say the same of civil society actors.

I recognise that there are exceptions to this tendency in the media to play up the negative, but the grand narrative plays in favor of seeing activists and NGOs as weak and powerless rather than as fighters, objects to be pitied rather than admired. Progress made by civil society is rarely reported, whereas their failures almost always are.

I think our myopia with regard to civil society is one reason we are often caught off guard when social movements succeed in causing a political rupture, as in the Solidarity movement in Poland, Arab Spring in North Africa, and the democratic opening in Myanmar. Experts very rarely predict these events. They end up trying to explain them using the benefit of hindsight, working backwards from the rupture to see what they had missed. But maybe if we were more attentive to following the various ways in which civil society multiplies and regenerates, we might have more forewarning of when a rupture is coming.

Cao Yaxue's article on Guo Jianmei and the closure of Zhongze Women's Legal Counseling Center

Cao Yaxue, the founder of the ChinaChange website, has written a nice, in-depth article detailing the work and accomplishments of Guo Jianmei and her legal aid NGO over the last 20 years, and possible reasons for the order to close Zhongze. In that article, she also cites Guo's Wechat message saying that her Qianqian Law Firm is still in operation.