The top 16 "public welfare" events of 2010

In a previous blog, I listed what I saw as some of “The Best and Worst of 2010 for China’s NGOs”.   In the their most recent issue (Winter 2010), China Development Brief came out with the top 16 major "public welfare" (gongyi) events.  The term “public welfare” is often used in China in place of nonprofit, civil society, or philanthropy. 

These top 16 events were selected from a survey of readers of three major media platforms that cover the “public welfare” or “civil society” sector in China: China Development Brief (with which I am working now), Social Entrepreneur magazine (published by the NGO, NonProfit Incubator or NPI) and NGOCN (NGOCN’s founder, Lu Fei, was profiled in an earlier post on this blog).   The list provides a window into what Chinese observers of the civil society sector think have been important trends.   Many, but not all, are events that I also listed in my Best and Worst List, which is a good thing because it suggests that I haven’t strayed too far from the perceptions of the Chinese NGO community.

The readers who responded to the survey were from all over China, including Hong Kong, and draw mainly from those working in the “public welfare” sector, but also include people working in government and business, students, and researchers.   Many are young, about 84% between 20-40 years of age, and about 42% are from Beijing and Guangdong. 

Here in order of the top vote getters are the 16 biggest “public welfare” events of 2010 with the percentage of votes in parentheses.  A number of these events were covered in my previous posts, including “The Best and Worst of 2010 for China’s NGOs” so I don’t go into them in detail.

1)  Jet Li revealing, in a September 2010 CCTV interview, problems he was having trying to register his One Foundation as a private foundation due to China’s restrictive registration laws, and rumors that the One Foundation might close (61%).

2)  The new regulations from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange that went into effect in March 2010 making it more difficult for grassroots NGOs to transfer foreign funds into their accounts (51%)

3)  The September visit by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to discuss philanthropy with some of China’s wealthiest individuals (46%).

4)  The establishment in June of 2010 of the Public Welfare (or Philanthropy) Research Institute at Beijing Normal University.  The Institute is funded by the One Foundation and headed by a former Ministry of Civil Affairs official, Wang Zhenyao (45%).

5)  The announcement by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in July of 2010 requiring 15 national public fundraising foundations to turn the funds they had raised for the Yushu (Qinghai province) earthquake relief over to the Qinghai provincial government, provincial Red Cross and provincial Charity Federation.  This decision was criticized for harming the cause of philanthropy in China (43%).

6)  The participation of almost 60 Chinese NGOs in the UN climate change talks in Tianjin in October of 2010.  The NGOs issued a joint statement, and organized 20 joint activities.  It was the largest number of Chinese NGOs to participate in the area of climate change (40%).

7)   The slowness of the NGO response to the drought in the southwestern part of China  in the spring of 2010 provoked some discussion in the media, especially compared to the quick NGO response to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (35%).

8)  The establishment of the China Foundation Center in July of 2010 (33%).

9) The Green Choice Alliance, a group of 34 grassroots NGOs, among them Friends of Nature, Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and Green Beagle, released two investigative reports in April and June on heavy metal pollution from the information and technology sector (32%). 

10)  The Qinghai Gesanghua Educational Assistance Association raised more than 2.59 million yuan online for the Yushu earthquake highlighting the use of new media platforms for NGOs to fundraise and carry out relief work (32%).

11)  The Yunnan provincial government piloting new regulations governing international NGO management.  The regulations came out in December of 2009 and were implemented in January of 2010.  These are the first regulations explicitly aimed at international NGOs (31%).

12)   The first New Public Welfare Carnival held in Shanghai in August and September of 2010, an event that brought together businesses, government, academics and NGOs to promote social innovation (30%).

13)  The notice by Beijing University cutting its association with the Peking University Women’s Legal Aid Center in March of 2010 (30%)

14)  Strikes by workers at Honda Motor Company’s factories in Guangdong starting in May of 2010 (30%).

15)  Cao Dewang, chairman of the Fuyao Group, gave the largest one-time donation in the history of the PRC to the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation to help poor farmers in the five drought-stricken provinces in southwest China (28%).

16)  The folding of “Friends” publication which was aimed at the gay, HIV/AIDS and public health community and had been publishing since 1998.  “Friends” closed because it lost its major source of funding from an international foundation (21%). 

The Best and Worst of 2010 for China's NGOs

January 13, 2011

I generally avoid these kinds of lists, but then got emails from two different people in the NGO community, each with their own list of what had happened in 2010 that were complete opposites.  One listed all good things, and the other listed all the bad things.  This led me to construct my own list that seeks to reconcile these very opposite views of what happened in China's civil society sector in 2010.  The reality is that if you combined both of these lists, you wouldn't be far off the mark.  The year 2010 was truly a schizophrenic year for Chinese civil society with rapid progress in the Chinese philanthropic sector, but setbacks for grassroots NGOs in other sectors.  If 2008 was seen by many as the “Year of the NGO” then 2010 could be said to be the “Year of Philanthropy”.  It was (with apologies to Charles Dickens) the “best of times and the worst of times” for China’s civil society. 

Following are some (and I stress “some” because this list is by no means exhaustive) of the best and worst moments of 2010 for China’s civil society.

The Best of 2010

APRIL – after the Yushu earthquake in Qinghai, a number of NGOs participated in the earthquake relief, including NGO networks that had formed in response to the Wenchuan earthquake, as well as new networks.

APRIL – The Green Choice Alliance, a group of 34 grassroots NGOs, among them Friends of Nature, Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and Green Beagle, released an investigative report on heavy metal pollution from the information and technology sector.  The Alliance is yet another sign of the growth and maturation of China’s civil society networks.

JUNE -- The Beijing Normal University Philanthropy Research Institute was established with funding from Jet Li’s One Foundation.  In a move that signals how much progress civil society has made in China, Wang Zhenyao resigned his post as a government official in the Ministry of Civil Affairs to head the Institute.  The Institute will provide training and counseling to promote professional philanthropic talen in China.

JULY -- The China Foundation Center was established after a decade of effort led by private foundation leaders such as Naruda’s Xu Yongguang.   The CFC is modeled after the U.S. Foundation Center and seeks to strengthen transparency and accountability in China’s foundation sector, and thereby strengthen public trust in philanthropy, by providing a database on foundations' financials, activities, and performance. 

In response to public dissatisfaction with government restrictions on fundraising for the Yushu earthquake (see the Worst of 2010 below), the Ministry of Civil Affairs established a special office to collect public opinions. With more than 420 million internet users and more than 805 mobile phone users in China, this mechanism may be an opportunity for social media to shape policy making in China.

SEPTEMBER -- The Social Innovation Forum in Shanghai—also called the New Philanthropy Carnival—was organized by the China Social Entrepreneur Foundation (or YouChange) to encourage new thinking on addressing China’s social, economic, and environmental challenges. The Shanghai municipal government was one of the first local governments to invest in and support social innovation centers in China.

SEPTEMBER -- Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) launched CiYuan, an initiative that builds innovative, cross-sector partnerships to enhance the value of social investment in China. Working with the Taproot Foundation, BSR will introduce a skills-based volunteerism model in China to leverage corporate human capital to build NGO capacity.

SEPTEMBER --Bill Gates and Warren Buffett held a dialogue with Chinese billionaires about investing their money in philanthropy.  The dialogue generated a nationwide discussion on how China’s growing class of wealthy entrepreneurs in China can make social investments and become strategic philanthropists. 

About this time, news also came out about the Shenzhen experiment to make it easier for NGOs to register.  Jet Li’s One Foundation was able to use the more liberal rules to register as a public foundation (see below).   These experiments have been going on for some time and in different localities for different types of social organizations, and illustrate just how complex and fluid the regulatory environment for nonprofits is in China. 

OCTOBER -- Liu Xiaobo receives the Nobel Peace Prize.

JANUARY 2011  (Ok, technically not a 2010 event but close enough!)  The Jet Li One Foundation was the first private foundation to be legally registered as a public fundraising foundation in Shenzhen— yet another sign that the government is loosening its control over philanthropy.  

The Worst of 2010

FEBRUARY -- the Ministry of Education issued a notice asking all Chinese universities to not work with Oxfam HK and other international NGOs that seek to recruit college volunteers for their projects. 

MARCH (This story did not come out in the media until March, 2010 when these new regulations went into effect but other sources say the regulation was first issued in December of 2009) -- the State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued a new set of regulations that made it more difficult for Chinese enterprises to receive donations from foreign organizations by asking for notarization and additional paperwork.  These regulations have especially made life harder for grassroots NGOs registered as businesses who are receiving funds from international donors.
 
MARCH – Peking University announced that it was disassociating itself from the well-known NGO, Peking University Women’s Legal Aid Center.  The Center continues to operate and has registered as both a law firm and an enterprise.

MARCH -- NGOCN (NGO Development and Exchange Network), a Kunming-based NGO that serves as a information clearinghouse and training center for grassroots NGOs was closed down, supposedly for encouraging NGOs to participate in activities to combat the drought in southwestern China.  It has since reemerged as NGOCN.info.
 
MAY -- Since January 14, 2010, Beijing Aizhixing Institute, one of China’s foremost HIV/AIDS NGOs has been investigated and harassed by numerous government departments, and faced difficulty in getting its funds.  In May, saying he could no longer tolerate the harassment, Wan Yanhai, founder of Beijing Aizhixing, left for the U.S. with his family.

SUMMER – Authorities sought to restrict NGO participation in the Yushu earthquake, asking a network of Qinghai NGOs to disband, and restricting NGOs from fundraising for the earthquake.  The Ministry of Civil Affairs asked 15 national-level foundations to turn the relief funds they had raised over to relevant government agencies so the funds could be better managed.

NOVEMBER – One the eve of World AIDS Day 2010, another AIDS organization, Ai Yuan, “Beijing Loving Source Information Consulting Center" announced that it was closing its doors because of tax audits by Beijing tax authorities.
 
NOVEMBER – Liang Congjie, founder of Friends of Nature and one of the leaders of the first generation of China’s NGO leaders, passed away in Beijing.

DECEMBER – A number of activists who were invited to Oslo for Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony were not allowed out of the country.

Finally, the Charity Law that was expected to come out this year was held up for further review in the NPC.  Revisions of the registration and management regulations for social organizations continue to be held up as they have for the past few years.

The big question of course is why we’re seeing this schizophrenic pattern in China’s civil society.  I’ll address this question in my next blog. 

Why the chill in the air for NGOs?

May 10, 2010

I’ve generally been an optimist about the future of NGOs in China, but recent events have gotten me thinking otherwise. In the last few months, we’ve witnessed the Oxfam Hong Kong incident, the SAFE regulations on foreign donations, the closing down of NGOCN’s website, the Beijing University Women’s Legal Aid Center’s losing its Beijing University affiliation, and just today, the news that China’s leading AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, has left China for the U.S. because he was being harassed by multiple government departments. So what does this all mean?

First of all, let’s get some perspective on these events. Last year (2009), Xu Zhiyong’s legal aid NGO, Gongmeng, was closed down on tax evasion charges, and Yirenping, an anti-discrimination legal aid NGO founded by Lu Jun was raided. The Olympic year saw the Sichuan earthquake, a coming out event for Chinese NGOs which played a visible role in the earthquake relief. The year prior (2007) saw the closure of an Lu Jun’s support group for Hep B carriers, a magazine called Minjian that published stories of NGO development projects, and most notably Nick Young’s China Development Brief.

In addition, the last few years has seen significant growth in grassroots NGOs, persistent rumors of revisions to the NGO registration and management regulations, a new Charity Law, and easing of the registration and management procedures for private foundations.

In short, what we have here is a mixed bag. Some bad news, and some good news. How do we make sense of all this? A few possible explanations come to mind.

One explanation is that the government is of different minds about NGOs and is trying to figure out how to best manage (codeword for control) them. The Chinese government is a very diverse, not always unified collection of agencies and individuals. The Civil Affairs department is only one of the agencies charged with supervising NGOs. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of NGOs in China that are not registered with Civil Affairs and thus not under their supervision. Because many NGOs are registered as businesses, the Commercial and Industrial department also plays a role, as do tax authorities, and now apparently so does the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). And last but not least, there are the security people. It’s not clear to what extent there is a coordinated campaign among all these agencies to regulate NGOs. Civil Affairs seems to be the most supportive. They are encouraging various experiments around the country to make NGO registration easier, and they support a change in the NGO regulations that would make it easier for NGOs to register with Civil Affairs. But other agencies seem to just be interested in controlling NGOs, and not figuring out a way to regulate them in ways that would improve the effectiveness and transparency of NGO work.

If this explanation is right, then we’ll see authorities continue to adopt an ad hoc approach to regulating/controlling NGOs, and continued swings in the government’s attitude to NGOs. We’ll also see further delays in the much-anticipated NGO legislation as debates and deadlock over the value of NGOs continue in policymaking circles.

Another explanation is that government leaders have arrived at a consensus about how to deal with NGOs, and that consensus is not to liberalize the environment or find a smarter way to regulate them, but to continue restricting their development. This means tightening an already restrictive regulatory environment, and cracking down on “illegal” NGOs that are engaged in advocacy and sensitive issues such as migrant worker rights, and are particularly open to foreign influences. What seems to be new here is the way in which the government is cracking down on NGOs. They are doing so not by closing down NGOs as they did with China Development Brief, but by harassing them for improper finances, or fire codes, or not properly registering their website. But they are not doing this across the board, but only targeting selected NGOs. A form of “salami tactics” or “death by a thousand cuts”.

If this explanation is correct, then recent events represent the start of a chilling trend. It means we won’t see revised NGO regulations come out, or if they do come out, they will reaffirm the status quo or be even more restrictive.

Still another explanation is a combination of the previous two explanations. That is, authorities have arrived at a consensus but that consensus represents a compromise whereby certain sectors are encouraged, but NGOs with more foreign connections or engaged in more sensitive work are targeted for harassment.

If this explanation is right, then we should see the revised NGO regulations, and other related legislation, coming out soon. Those revisions will probably represent a gradual change, e.g. liberalization, and their content will give us a better idea of what sectors are being encouraged.

Which of these explanations is closer to the mark of course requires an understanding of what is going on in high-level decision making circles. Unfortunately, that arena is a black box that we can only speculate about.

At this point, I favor the first explanation because I don’t see a consistent line or approach toward NGOs which suggests there is still debate and deadlock over just how to regulate this growing sector. But I may change my view as I get more information. Stay tuned!

Shutting down of NGOCN's website

April 21, 2010

Sometime in early April of this year, the website for NGOCN was shut down. I profiled one of the founders of NGOCN, Lu Fei, in an earlier blog. NGOCN was established in 2005-2006 in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and serves as an information platform for NGOs. It also started to offer capacity building training to NGOs, mainly those located in southwestern China (Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou). It appears that only the website has been affected up to now. NGOCN still operates, maintains a blog, and sends out newsletters on a regular basis, msot recently about NGO participation in the Yushu earthquake in Qinghai.

There seem to be several reasons for the closing down of NGOCN’s website. One has to do with a national trend to reregister websites and blogs in China. If this is the main reason, then the closing of NGOCN’s website will most likely be temporary and we can expect it to resume in the near future. Another reason that has been mentioned is that NGOCN was involved in rallying NGOs to participate in drought-relief activities in Yunnan. If this is the real reason, then NGOCN may have a bigger problem on their hands.

I called the director of NGOCN to ask her about the situation, but she didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, suggesting that the reasons for the shutdown were sensitive, but she did say that the shutdown was temporary and she seemed quite confident that their website would be back up soon.

Is it getting a bit chilly for NGOs in China?

April 8, 2010

Over the last month, a number of events have transpired that suggest an effort by Chinese authorities to better regulate (some might say "control" or "restrict") the NGO sector. In the next few posts, I'll be posting some of the offending notices/regulations and trying to make sense of what this all means for both Chinese and foreign NGOs in China.

Just to summarize these events, the earliest was a Notice issued by the Ministry of Education's Party Committee calling on Chinese universities to prevent the international NGO, Oxfam Hong Kong, from recruiting student volunteers for its projects around China. This was followed by a Notice from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) that required domestic institutions (not just NGOs or nonprofits, but also enterprises, though government organizations, mass organizations and a number of GONGOs appear to be exempted) to provide documentation verifying the nonprofit nature of any foreign donations they received. Then, there was Beijing University's disassociation with the Beijing University Women's Law Studies and Legal Aid Center which will no longer be able to attach itself to BeiDa's Law School, and will have to find a new home. Finally, and most recently, the NGOCN website was closed down with very little explanation.

In the next few posts, I'll provide more information about each of these events, and speculate on whether we're seeing a chill descend on NGOs in China.

Profile: Lu Fei, founder of NGOCN

November 1, 2009

In this blog, I hope to put a human face on the emerging NGO scene by profiling some of the NGO founders and activists I’ve met and interviewed for my research on NGOs.

I’d like to start out with a profile of a young man I met in Kunming. His name is Lu Fei. He’s not one of the better known activists out there, but he’s an interesting character and has done a great deal for civil society organizations and social causes for someone so young. He’s really an atypical Chinese youth, but also at the forefront of a growing interest among many Chinese youths in volunteerism and social issues.

I met Lu Fei at my hotel room near Yunnan University. I had called him because he was mentioned as one of the founders of NGOCN Development and Exchange Network (NGOCN Fazhan Jiaoliu Wang), otherwise known by its website address, ngocn.org. NGOCN is one of the most popular and widely used communication platforms serving NGOs in China. Like its Beijing counterpart, China Development Brief, NGOCN posts articles, job listings, news about conferences and funding opportunities, and a regular newsletter on the NGO/nonprofit sector.

I was surprised by Lu Fei’s youth. He looked like your typical college computer science student, spiky hair, not much of a fashion or social sense, and a dreamy look in his eyes. But when he started talking, you began to realize he was more a doer than a dreamer.

Lu Fei started NGOCN with a friend, Ben Li, in January of 2005 when they were both working in the Kunming office of Oxfam Hong Kong. They felt international NGOs had a dominant presence in Yunnan, and wanted to create a platform to promote the growth of domestic NGOs in China. In the first year, they relied on volunteers to run the office. In 2006, he left Oxfam and went to work full time for NGOCN with funding from Oxfam.

Lu was only in his mid 20s when he started NGOCN but he surprised me when he told me NGOCN was the fourth organization he’d started. He started his first venture after he graduated from high school and spent the summer traveling in the west of China and seeing the obstacles to education in poor areas. He decided to set up a fund using the internet to raise money for disadvantaged children in western China.

Lu spent one year in college in Beijing, majoring first in computer science, then in public administration, but then dropped out and went traveling in Tibet. There he saw many children who lacked books, so he and a friend started a website to contact publishers, friends and others to contribute books to schools in Tibet. He would track the books to make sure they got to the children.

In 2004, he returned home to Guangdong and started an organization with some friends devoted to poverty relief. He had some differences of opinion though with the board of directors and left soon after.

Lu tells me his parents haven’t approved of the direction he’s taken his life. When I asked him what his parents do, he said they work for the Civil Affairs bureau in Guangdong, the government agency that regulates NGOs.

Days after that interview, I went to Chengdu to interview NGOs there about their response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. There I found that Lu was responsible for organizing what turned out to be largest NGO network in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. On the day of the earthquake, he contacted a number of NGOs who got together and formed the Sichuan NGO Earthquake Relief Coordinating Office (Sichuan minjian jiuzai lianhe bangongshi). This was a virtual network of NGOs formed to secure and deliver supplies from around the country to the earthquake areas. Within a few days, it grew to include more than 100 organizations.

Lu never mentioned his role in this network to me, and it has never been mentioned in the many articles I’ve read about the participation of NGOs in the earthquake relief. But I count it as another important achievement in Lu’s short career as an NGO activist.