Senior Fellow Jamie Horsley Leads Panel on NGOs in China at the Brookings Institute

On December 6, 2017 Paul Tsai China Center Senior Fellow Jamie Horsley moderated a panel discussion at the Brookings Institute on the current status of NGOs in China. The event explored the implications of recently passed laws and policies on the continued development of China’s civil society, which currently encompasses approximately 675,000 registered domestic social organizations and as many as 7,000 foreign NGOs. After an introduction by Cheng Li, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, Ms. Horsley was joined on the panel by Professor Rachel Stern of the University of California, Berkeley; Professor Carolyn Hsu of Colgate University; and Fang-Yu Chen, visiting research associate at George Washington University.

In her remarks, Horsley, a leading expert on Chinese governance and regulatory reform, explored some seemingly contradictory developments currently at work within Chinese civil society. On the one hand, measures like the Foreign NGO Law scheduled to come into effect on January 1, 2017 will impose a new range of restrictions on foreign NGOs operating in China, and some of the domestic organizations they collaborate with. On the other, China’s new Charity Law will relax requirements on the majority of domestic NGOs with regard to registration and fundraising.

To provide the proper context for understanding these developments, Ms. Horsley invited the audience to consider the broader trends playing out in China’s overall regulatory processes. Here, she stated, there is a long-term movement toward a more participatory and law-based model of governance, which ultimately seeks to reduce government intervention in the market and in society. At the same time, however, there has been a complementary move to tighten what the State Council calls “ex-post regulation” to ensure business and social organizations alike behave themselves and are accountable for their actions.

“So how do we make sense of all of these conflicting trends?” Horsley concluded. “[President] Xi Jinping has talked of bringing power within a cage of regulations. We can think about everybody in China being subject to a cage of regulations: markets, civil society, as well as government. My own view is that this cage continues to expand, but it’s very real…and the consequences of trying to break loose from that cage appear to be getting harsher.”