NGO's - China's booming NGO-scene

Paul Mooney give for Yale Global a good and long overdue of the booming Chinese scene of non-governmental organizations. Not surprisingly, the story still leaves many questions open, even concerning the actually number of NGO's that might actually be active in China at this moment.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs reports 280,000 registered NGOs in China for 2005, including some 6,000 foreign NGOs, up from a total of 4,800 NGOs in 1988. The World Bank puts the present number between 300,000 and 700,000, while Hong Kong scholar Wang Shaoguang estimates that China has more than 8 million registered and unregistered, nongovernmental and quasi-governmental organizations.

The story initially focuses much on the security concerns some of the more conservative forces in China display: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Public Security and State Security. Any major change will trigger of this kind of concerns, not different from when private companies emerged or when the internet was being introduced. Those opposing forces are still powerful enough to keep a close eye on, since they can cause many problems for the still-emerging NGO-scene.
The central government is now convinced NGO's are not causing the social unrest in rural areas, but that in most cases local governments are to blame.

Indeed, most Chinese NGOs work in line with the goals of the central government to improve society and want to cooperate with the government, Young says, as shown by a China Development Brief study. The main conflicts, he says, are with local governments, who often do not advance central-government policies.

A few weeks ago I had discussions with representatives of the European trade unions and told them that the number of labor-related NGO's is still rather limited. Partly, I think, because the international trade unions have been boycotting China rather than working inside the country. For another part, there is still this monstrum called the ACFTU, China's only allowed official trade union. They have a profound interest in halting any labor-related NGO's. That might have a struggle that has to be fought: it did work in many other areas already.