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August 30, 2010

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

Clipping the wings of government to let civil society grow

By Cheng Yunjie, Wang Pan and Zhan Yijia | August 30, 2010, Monday | Print Edition

TO realize his dream of setting up a welfare society for children of migrant workers in Shenzhen, Li Guangming had to network with government officials to find a government affiliate for his society-to-be.

As such networking led him nowhere, his dream was dormant for years, until the Shenzhen authority took the lead in scrapping the rule that every civil society organization must be a government affiliate to become legally registered.

Now Shenzhen has emerged as China' s most dynamic city in the development of civil societies.

By June 2010, a total of 3,862 civil societies have been registered there, covering a broad range, including industrial development, education, culture, sports, health, scientific research, public welfare and environmental protection.

The figure was almost three times as high as in 2002.

Ma Hong, director of the Civil Society Management Department of Shenzhen, attributes the large number of local civil organizations to the Special Economic Zone Legislation's policy allowing local legislatures to use innovative laws and regulations to speed the power shift from the government to the public.

Ma told Xinhua that local legislatures have already begun primary research for a draft regulation on the establishment of non-profit organizations.

Half-step strategy

Separating government authority from civil society is no easy job in China as it requires some government officials to surrender their rights and vested interests, including official positions and pay.

Instead of accomplishing the task in one action, reformers led by Liu Runhua started the experiment with the least sensitive guilds and pushed ahead the reform, bit by bit.

By establishing a new agency called the Guild Service Division in 2004, local civil affairs authorities successfully took away the supervisory rights from dozens of government departments and made the division into the only supervisor.

That year, 211 government and Party officials were forced to resign from their concurrent posts in guilds and chambers of commerce, turning the latter into independent associations.

Two years later, the division was replaced by the Civil Society Management Bureau that immediately adopted a new "direct registration system" that no longer required guilds or chambers of commerce to be a government affiliate.

Shenzhen does not appear to be China's Don Quixote tilting windmills. Its experiment has been tightly monitored and backed by the central government.

Challenges

A document from the local civil affairs authorities showed Wang Yang, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China (CPC) and also secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee, had more than once urged local governments to "resolutely give away their unnecessary rights in hand" and "to have social organizations do what they are supposed to do in a citizen society."

Bearing this instruction in mind, Shenzhen reformers figured out a variety of ways to quicken the growth of social organizations, including purchasing public services from social organizations and providing coaching services to fledging societies.

Currently, 10 social service organizations are being coached.

They focus on the disabled, senior citizens, mentally retarded children, environmental protection and health.

Local authorities also have put into place an exit system, inviting a third-party to evaluate local organizations on a yearly basis and weed out those that accomplished nothing.

Each year, dozens of organizations would have their registrations canceled for being ineffective or breaking laws, Ma said.

Looking to the future, an expert said the biggest challenge would come from within the government.

When Shenzhen reformers envisage the long-term scenario of having a big society matched by small government, they also hoped to restructure Chinese society to ensure fewer conflicts and more harmony.

(The authors are writers at Xinhua news agency. The views are their own.)

Chinese Views


 

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