ChinaFile: The China NGO Project RSS Feed

The Major Questions About China’s Foreign NGO Law Are Now Settled

Jessica Batke — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 18:29:08 +0000

And so Farewell from The China NGO Project

Five years after its first post, The China NGO Project is closing up shop. When we began in 2017, we hoped to help international nonprofits working in China make sense of the new legal regime they found themselves under after the passage of China’s Foreign NGO Law. We faced many of the same challenges as the community as a whole: a lack of detailed official information, difficulty finding candid interlocutors, and a seemingly unresolvable tension between open information sharing and the perceived need for caution and discretion.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Keywords:

Civil Society, Non-Profit Sector, Foreign NGO Representative Office, Foreign NGO Temporary Activity

Nevertheless, Chinese Civil Society Persisted

Sara Segal Williams — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 15:56:55 +0000

Crickets Unwilling to Lie Flat

In April 2021, less than two months after Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared the country free of extreme poverty, a Chinese Internet user with the handle “Kind Traveler” posted on an online forum: “I have not had a formal job for two years. Just having fun. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. . . If you keep your spending within 200 renminbi [per month], you don’t have to work more than one or two months a year.” He called this kind of existence—an existence without striving or competition, in which one simply ensures one’s basic needs are met—“lying flat.”

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Alison Sile Chen

Topics:

Politics, Society

Keywords:

Civil Society, Non-Profit Sector, Dissidents and Activists

Visually Understanding the Data on Foreign NGO Representative Offices and Temporary Activities

Sara Segal Williams — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 16:37:22 +0000

The China NGO Project has created the following visualizations based on data available on the Ministry of Public Security website, as well as on our own research. To analyze foreign NGO representative offices, we looked at organizations’ countries/regions of origin, province and date of registration, fields of work, and number of representative offices per organization. For foreign NGO temporary activities, we looked at organizations’ countries/regions of origin, locations of activity, fields of work, and lengths of activities. Only temporary activities whose start date was on or before June 30, 2022 are included here; the activities may extend beyond June, but we did not include any activities whose start date was July 1 or later.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Jessica Batke

Keywords:

Foreign NGO Law, Maps, Foreign NGO Graphics, Foreign NGO Temporary Activity, Foreign NGO Representative Office, Non-Profit Sector

List of De-Registered Representative Offices

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 21:27:21 +0000

The following is a list of foreign NGOs which have de-registered a representative office in China after successfully registering under the 2017 Foreign NGO Law. The list, based on information available on the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) website as of June 1, 2022, includes information about the work the organizations had been conducting in China.

Li Ka Shing Foundation (Hong Kong)
李嘉诚基金会
Registered: January 23, 2017
Permitted Area of Operations: Throughout mainland China
Registration Location: Beijing
Scope of Work: Provided funding to public welfare projects in the areas of healthcare, education, culture, disaster relief, and poverty alleviation
Professional Supervisory Unit: Beijing Ministry of Civil Affairs
De-registered: February 28, 2018

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Keywords:

Foreign NGO Law, Non-Profit Sector, Foreign NGO Representative Office

Tribute to an ‘Ordinary Chinese Activist’

Jessica Batke — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 15:53:56 +0000

Authorities detained labor activist Wang Jianbing and journalist Huang Xueqin on September 19 in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. After more than a month without news, their families learned that they had both been charged with “inciting subversion of state power,” though no one has been allowed to meet with them.

The author, a close friend of Wang Jianbing, works in the civil society sector. They believe writing under their own name could be harmful to friends in China, so they have chosen to remain anonymous.

* * *

I first met Jianbing on a cold Gansu winter day over twelve years ago, in the Year of the Ox. As fate would have it, the same astrological sign that brought a dear friend into my life snatched him away mercilessly when it returned twelve years later.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Anonymous

Topics:

Law, Politics, Society

Keywords:

Dissidents and Activists, Imprisonment, Activism, Mining, Coal, Feminism

Recent Articles about NGOs in China, Both Foreign and Domestic

Jessica Batke — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:30:08 +0000

In a two-part series on his blog NGOs in China, Shawn Shieh explores both the potential upsides and downsides of the “14th Five-Year-Plan for the Development of Social Organizations,” which the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued in October.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Keywords:

Foreign NGO Law, Civil Society

Hong Kong’s National Security Law Made Amnesty International’s Departure All But Inevitable

Sara Segal Williams — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:33:29 +0000

Deeply saddened, but not surprised.

That was my main reaction when I awoke on October 25 to the news that Amnesty International would be closing both of its offices in Hong Kong. It would be shutting down its local branch by the end of the month, and the office for East Asia, also located in Hong Kong, would cease operations there by the end of 2021.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

William Nee

Topics:

Law, Politics

Keywords:

Amnesty International, Hong Kong National Security Law, Foreign NGO Law, Non-Profit Sector, Human Rights

EURICS Analysis on Foreign NGOs’ COVID Relief Efforts

Jessica Batke — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 20:32:13 +0000

In an article for The European Institute for Chinese Studies (EURICS), University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Law and Public Affairs Mark Sidel assesses how the Foreign NGO Law framework functioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at donations made through both the representative office and temporary activity mechanisms, Sidel concludes that the structures set in place over the last four years held up under crisis conditions and allowed international funding to flow in for COVID-related causes.

Read the full analysis here.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Overseas NGOs and Foundations and COVID in China

Jessica Batke — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 20:22:03 +0000

Using a Securitized Framework in a Time of Crisis

The COVID crisis that enveloped Wuhan, Hubei province, and some other parts of China in late 2019 and early 2020 might, in another era, have encouraged China to temporarily relax constraints on international aid and engagement. In the current Chinese political environment, such relaxation of constraints wasn’t going to happen. China accepted some overseas aid at the beginning of the COVID crisis, but almost entirely on the restrictive political and legal terms laid down in the Overseas NGO Law and framework enacted in 2016.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Mark Sidel

Keywords:

Coronavirus, Foreign NGO Law, Non-Profit Sector, Aid, Foreign Aid

Police Issue Administrative Warning to Australian NGO, Global Times Reports

Jessica Batke — Thu, 13 May 2021 18:52:00 +0000

According to the Global Times, local public security officials in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province issued an administrative warning to Australia-based non-profit Nying-Jey Projects in April for operating in the area without permission. It is not clear from the wording of the Global Times article whether police censured the NGO for failing to register a representative office or for failing to file for a temporary activity.

The Nying-Jey Projects website shows that the organization had provided education- and medical-related financial support to hundreds of students, nuns, and monks in Garze as recently as this month. The website also states that the organization will not be taking on new sponsorships in the area “due to the ongoing situation,” though it does not provide any further details.

ChinaFile Contributor(s):

Keywords:

Non-Profit Sector, Foreign NGO Law