NGOs in China: The 14th Five Year Plan for Social Organizations and the future of civil society in China

In October 2021, the Ministry of Civil Affair issued its 14^th Five Year Plan (FYP) for the Development of Social Organizations. The FYP is the first of its kind for the social organization sector and is must reading for anyone interested in understanding how the Chinese government intends to reshape the future of China’s nonprofit sector. It puts forth a grim blueprint for the sector’s development over the next five years drawing on high level policy documents[1] and major laws and regulations[2] issued over the last few years.

The dominant theme in the blueprint is the need to strengthen supervision, control and standardization of the social organization sector in order to promote “high-quality” social organizations. To improve their "quality," the FYP calls for raising barriers to entry for social organizations, increasing the proportion of charitable organizations, cracking down on social organizations violating laws and regulations, and clearing out “inefficient,” “ineffective” and “illegal” social organizations (Section 3.3).[3] It calls for supervision and control to come not only from the social organization’s management and registration organs (Civil Affairs) and professional supervising units (PSUs), but also from the Communist Party, law enforcement agencies, the use of artificial intelligence and big data, and society (Sections 1 and 3.4).

The political leadership role of Communist Party groups in social organizations is mentioned prominently in many of these sections. Below are just a few examples.

In Section 1, party groups are described as playing a vanguard, “battle fortress” role inside social organizations.
Section 2.2 brings attention to “strengthening the party's overall leadership over social organizations, continuing in-depth study and implementation of “Xi Jinping's Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era”…. effectively realizing full coverage [in the sector] of party organization and party work, integrating party building work into the entire operation and development processes of social organizations, and ensure the correct development direction of social organizations.
Section 3.2 calls for social organizations to “be guided to be thankful for the party, listen to the party, and follow the party.
Section 3.3 emphasizes strictly synchronizing the "collection of party member information during registration," "reporting of party building work during the annual inspection," and "inclusion of party-building work in important evaluation indicators."

There is little mention in this document of creating an enabling environment for social organizations. Only toward the end does it discuss the need to support the development of social organizations' branding and communications capacity, and very briefly mentions preferential tax policies for social organizations (Sections 3.6 and 3.7).

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The last five years starting in 2016 represents perhaps the most important turning point for civil society in China since the 1989 democracy movement. This period has seen an unprecedented cascade of top-down policy and regulatory initiatives aimed at remaking the social organization sector. In a blogpost I wrote back in 2016, I said that 2016 could well be the year that the future starts.[4] What I meant by this was the future of civil society as envisioned and shaped by China's party-state. Since then, analysts have tried to make sense of that future. Most have taken a wait-and-see attitude, others have put forth a more pessimistic outlook[5], while some continue to argue there is space for civil society to operate[6]. While there may still be room for debate about how civil society will survive and evolve in this difficult environment, there should be little doubt now about what the future looks like in the eyes of China's party-state. One only has to read this FYP to know.