Week 11: NGOs

This week we talked about NGOs and civil society in China. While Harmony focused on the facts (for instance, she presented a timeline of the development of NGOs in China), I concentrated on the more abstract, theoretical aspects of the topic.

China is still in the process of reforming and opening up, and while civil society, as evidenced by growth in NGOs over time, has grown in size, the semi-authoritarian context of China limits the way in which civil society, specifically NGOs, can grow. As Harmony mentions below, though in the West NGOs are often conceived of as organizations that keep the government in check or protect civilian rights, in China, they are often conceived of as government “helpers” – in order to even exist in China, many NGOs (especially environmental NGOs) spin themselves as working in the interests of the government. Essentially, Chinese NGOs occupy a unique – or as some authors phrase it, an “embedded” – space within China. They pick up where the government is able to acknowledge it left off, but if they overstep the bounds for action implicitly set by government too much, they are in danger of being shut down or otherwise affected/reprimanded. The lines between government and NGOs thus blur somewhat in China: not surprisingly, the country has many Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations (GONGOs) operating within its borders. Is this necessarily a “bad” thing? We often think that NGOs entirely free from (the control, but also the help of) government work best, or that grassroots social change is an absolute essential. But are these notions in any way ethnocentric? Is the Western way NGOs are organized the way NGOs and civil society should be organized everywhere? Could/are NGOs in China as they exist now be as effective as NGOs in other, more open parts of the world? We asked these questions and others, and came up with mixed answers.

The issue of NGOs in China has many fascinating details, but something particularly helpful about examining it was that it crosses paths with many of the subjects we studied earlier in the course. Some of the features of Chinese environmental NGOs discussed above emerge partially because of aspects of China/the Chinese government we learned about throughout the semester. For instance, the decentralization but continued power of government in China we studied in the first weeks of class leads to a situation in which a) citizens have an increasing ability to act if they stay within the lines of Party rhetoric, and b) local government does not always follow through on environmental laws or policy laid out by central government. These effects intersect in such a way that groups of citizens are “allowed” to, can criticize local government officials or the job they’re doing without technically criticizing central government, if they’re careful about the way they word their complaints or go about their campaigns for more effective environmental regulation, better conservation, etc.