The Chinese New Middle Class and Green NGOs in South China: Vanguards of Guanxi (Connections)-Seeking, Laggards in Promoting Social Causes?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND China's non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whether organised by the government or not, have proliferated under the country's socioeconomic transformation. According to official figures, there were only 4,446 registered NGOs in the country in 1988, but they mushroomed to cross the threshold of 200,000 in 2001. By 2009, there were more than 431,000 NGOs registered with the Chinese government with an overwhelming majority (99.5 per cent) operational at the provincial or local levels. (1) In the area of environmental protection, according to the All-China Environmental Federation (Zhonghua huanbao lianhehui), a government-organised NGO (GONGO) founded in 2005 by then-State Environmental Protection Administration, there were 2,768 registered environmental NGOs by the end of 2005, (2) and by October 2008, there were altogether 3,539 non-profit environmental organisations (including 250 from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). Among the 3,289 Mainland Chinese environmental NGOs, 1,382 (42.0 per cent) were formed by college students, 1,309 (39.8 per cent) were GONGOs, 508 (15.4 per cent) were civic or grassroots organisations and 90 (2.7 per cent) were Chinese branches of international NGOs. Guangdong was one of the six provinces (or municipalities or regions) that experienced the fastest growth in civic environmental NGOs. (3) The first group of Chinese environmental NGOs appeared in 1994 shortly after China suffered a setback in 1993 in its bid for hosting the Olympic Games when the Chinese delegation could not properly address a question posed by the International Olympic Committee about whether there were any environmental NGOs in China. (4) One of the earliest environmental NGOs was the Academy for Green Culture, now known as Friends of Nature, founded in 1994 by Liang Congjie (1932-2010), the grandson of the renowned constitutionalist reformer Liang Qichao in the late Qing dynasty. The development of the green NGOs has accelerated since then. (5) Accordingly, NGOs have received growing attention in the scholarly world since public awareness of health and environmental conservation has increased. The focus of attention is on government-organised NGOs (GONGOs) and civic NGOs, as they likely have more impact on public policy than the student-organised NGOs. (6) As the name suggests, GONGOs are affiliated with and funded by the central or subnational governments. (7) They are superficially non-governmental but de facto owned by the government because of their financial dependency. Essentially, GONGOs operate in the policy domains related to the agendas of their official supervisory agencies, i.e., government-mandated functions such as disease prevention or social-welfare matters. (8) Civic NGOs are by and large self-funded and often address social issues of environmental protection, hygiene and labour disputes. Not affiliated with any government bodies, they have greater autonomy to decide their own businesses. Since registration procedures are quite complicated, many self-organised social and cultural groups go unregistered and their number may well exceed the registered ones by a large margin. Though not organised by the state, many Chinese NGOs are not run by ordinary people but by higher-status groups like the Chinese new middle class, which has emerged during the phenomenal changes in society that have taken place over the past 30 years or so. Previous studies have concluded that due to resource--funding and staffing--and political constraints, many of China's civic environmental NGOs have limited autonomous influence in the environmental policy-making process except those managed by high-profile personalities, and are averse to taking oppositional stances towards the state. (9) Tang and Zhan attribute the lack of political clout on the part of the NGOs to a dearth of strong support from the middle class. (10) They suggest that were these constraints loosened, the NGOs would be more effective in bringing about policy change in environmental protection or even broader political transformation in the country. …