China to open its doors to foreign NGOs
Beijing (AsiaNews) Beijing is planning to adopt new rules to cut down on the red tape Chinese and foreign non governmental organisations (NGOs) must go through to register and operate. "There are already many NGOs," sources in China told AsiaNews, "and the government must start taking them into account. They bring a lot of money and new technologies useful in education, health care and humanitarian assistance, fields where the government is increasingly unable to cope."
"It is imperative to drop the obligation NGOs now have to be sponsored by a government department," Qiao Shenqian, deputy head of the NGO Registration Service Centre of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said at a seminary on International Cooperation and Public Participation held in the capital. "I hope it will not take too long," he added.
Until now NGOs could operate only if a government department or a state agency served as their guarantor. For this reason, they were known as 'government-organised NGOs'. As contradictory as the term is, it accurately reflects the limited leeway NGOs have. Although Mr Qiao did speak of an 'urgent' need to do away with guarantors, he did not present any timetable for the implementation of the new rules.
The need for a guarantor was an insurmountable obstacle for foreign NGOs which have hitherto been prevented from operating in China. According to Lo Sze-ping, Greenpeace's campaign director in China, his group had been truing to find a government guarantor for two years so it could be legally registered. "We turned to the local environmental protection authority," he said, "but they turned us down by saying they were unable to take charge of an international organisation". Instead, many foreign NGOs were just happy to work side by side with their local counterparts without any legal existence.
According to Chan Puisi, country programme manager in China for the Salvation Army, "having to work without a legal identity creates problems. It becomes difficult to get an office or set up a public account for public donations". Some NGOs got in by registering as companies but in doing so they had to be in a higher tax-break.
For Wang Ming, head of the NGO Study Institute at Tsinghua University, rules for NGOs must include tax deductions. Under current Chinese law, NGOs fall into two categories associations and foundations, the difference lying in how and how much they are funded.
Sources told AsiaNews that registration fees at the national level are anywhere between two and eight million yuans ( 250,000/1,000,000 or US$ 310,000/1,250,000); 100,000 yuans ( 12,000 or US$ 15,000) at the local level. They are in any event too high for many groups as the authorities intended. High fees meant that powerful, nation-wide NGOs could not emerge. Yet, 262,000 local NGOs are operating.
For some observers, changing policies towards NGOs reflect the government's growing inability to cope with certain social problems and emergencies. In today's China, many state-owned companies are on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot provide services housing, drug insurance, schools, and old age pensions they once did. Furthermore, rural and mountain areas are far behind urban economic development. By opening the doors to NGOs, including foreign NGOs, the government can release some of the pressures it is facing. Whether dispensaries in remote areas, schools for the poor in the cities, AIDS prevention education, or pollution controls, NGOs can provide what the government cannot. The new rules would give civil society greater space whilst allowing the government to still retain substantial control.
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01/09/2006
