Past Actions Result in Loosening Restrictions on NGOs

On February 26^th, the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau announced during it’s annual meeting that the four categories of social organizations: 1) Commerce & Industry , 2) Public Charities, 3) Public Welfare and 4) Overseas Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs, also known as the Third Sector), no longer need affiliations to supervising departments in order to register with the Civil Affairs Bureau. As such, the practice of placing public servants into social organizations in a supervisory capacity will slowly be phased out. Moreover, RMB 20 million of capital will be allocated to support services of social organizations. These announcements come a week after Chinese Premier Hu Jintao made a speech about “Social Management and its Innovation” at a seminar to the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.

Beijing has been chosen as the pilot site for the gradual implementation of a series of moves to promote and facilitate social organizations. These measures include lowering the barriers to registering social organizations, gradually withdrawing state powers from the social organizations, raising the awareness of the state organizations to serve the social organizations, and increasing the volume of government purchases of social service projects. These recent announcements indicate a change in the government’s attitude towards social organizations as they adopt a more hands-off approach. Recent progress can be attributed to both top-down government initiative, but also to the continuous support and advocacy of NGO practitioners who have long urged the government to ease up restrictions. Prior to the announcement, there have been pilot projects in Shenzhen (September 2008), Chengdu (June 2010) and Beijing (December 2010), where NGOs directly registered without permission of the supervising departments.