The shifting ecology of opportunity

In terms of the ecology of opportunity, Chinese NGOs faced particular structural and cultural challenges in terms of securing resources at the beginning of the 21st century. According to institutional research, the newer and more innovative an organization is, the greater the challenge it faces in establishing legitimacy and securing the flow of resources.Footnote ⁴¹ Many Chinese, including our interviewees, believed that NGOs were a new phenomenon in China and that charitable organizations were not an established convention in “traditional Chinese culture.”Footnote ⁴² This assumption was reinforced by Chinese media coverage, which treated NGOs as a recent foreign import.Footnote ⁴³ In reality, late imperial China had a rich tradition of private philanthropy.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the collective memories of those practices were effectively erased by 30 years of Maoist socialism, which saw providing social welfare services as the prerogative of the party-state. Private charities were replaced by government-controlled welfare organizations, or GONGOs, like the China Welfare League or Red Cross Society of China.Footnote ⁴⁵

The market reforms shifted the burden of social welfare from the central government to local government, local communities and individual households, and it also made it possible for independent associations to emerge.Footnote ⁴⁶ Then, following the 1989 Tiananmen protests, the Chinese party-state clamped down on citizen organizations, placing them under the authority of the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MOCA). By the early 1990s, almost no Chinese social welfare NGOs existed outside of GONGOs.Footnote ⁴⁷

In the first decade of the 21st century, the number of Chinese NGOs rose sharply. However, neither the Chinese legal nor social welfare system took into account NGOs. The 1998 and 2004 regulations for social organizations seemed designed to hinder rather than facilitate NGO work.Footnote ⁴⁸ All Chinese NGOs were required to register with MOCA, a process which was difficult and confusing. To register, an NGO had to have a “supervisory agency”: a government institution or GONGO.Footnote ⁴⁹ Supposedly “non-profit public welfare institutions” could be certified to fundraise domestically, but only a few state-connected organizations were granted permission.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although all NGO funds were to be regularly audited, there was no system to carry this out.Footnote ⁵¹ The majority of NGO-like organizations in China never officially registered, and compliance with other regulations was similarly uneven.Footnote ⁵² As a result, most Chinese NGOs operated in a legal grey area.

Lack of public recognition and legitimacy has also affected Chinese NGOs. Most Chinese citizens and businesses were still not familiar with the practice of charitable giving to private organizations.Footnote ⁵³ Even in 2008, the NGO beneficiaries we interviewed had never heard of a “non-governmental organization.” They assumed that they were being served by the state or the Party.Footnote ⁵⁴ The only NGOs in our sample that had successfully raised money domestically had powerful ties to state agencies which could compel donations from their underlings.Footnote ⁵⁵ Many of our interviewees found it difficult to negotiate the world of foreign funding.Footnote ⁵⁶ Others complained that foreign donors did not understand China and had inappropriate constraints and expectations.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, working in the domestic NGO sector was not seen as a respected career path and so it was challenging to hire and keep staff members (all the NGOs in our sample suffered from a high staff turnover).

An ecology of opportunity is not static but dynamic, and it can shift dramatically.Footnote ⁵⁸ One significant difference between the circumstances faced by Chinese NGOs founded before 2000 versus those started afterwards was the rise of Web 2.0. Internet-based social networking offered Chinese social entrepreneurs a way to access volunteers and gain publicity at a much lower cost than previously available. The cultural perception of Chinese NGOs also shifted over time. NGOs were active in relief work following the 2008 Wenchuan 汶川 earthquake, and this raised their public profile. Volunteering at NGOs became trendy for middle-class educated youth even before the earthquake but really took off following the disaster.Footnote ⁵⁹ (Nevertheless, even after the earthquake, these volunteers expected their NGO activity to be a temporary jaunt before getting a “real” job.Footnote ⁶⁰ ) In 2013, legal policies were revised with clearer and friendlier regulations for NGOs.Footnote ⁶¹ Meanwhile, the party-state explored new ways of partnering with private organizations.Footnote ⁶²

The evolving habitus of Chinese social entrepreneurs

According to institutional theories, organizations do not react to the ecology of opportunity in a perfectly rational and objective way. In a mature organizational field, actors in new organizations mimic the practices of successful predecessors, whether they are the best choice or not.Footnote ⁶³ For the first generation of Chinese NGO leaders, this was not an option because there were no successful NGOs before them to copy. Instead, they devised strategies of action according to their own interpretation of the ecology of opportunity – an interpretation shaped by their own habitus (experiences, beliefs, tastes and habits).Footnote ⁶⁴

Under these circumstances, people tend to choose strategies of action which utilize their own areas of expertise, and they avoid practices which feel unfamiliar, even if those practices may be objectively better than the alternative.Footnote ⁶⁵ For instance, if an NGO is run by a 22-year-old who spends his free time hanging out on Facebook, RenRen, and Baidu, it would be natural for him to utilize internet-based social networking to achieve his organizational goals. For a 50-year-old, however, Web 2.0 would be more likely to evoke feelings of discomfort and incompetence, so that person would be less likely to take advantage of the new opportunities that it offers. Previous studies have discovered that organizational actors tend to replicate their own institutional experiences when they move to new firms and even to new fields.Footnote ⁶⁶ People become socialized in the practices of their workplaces, and they carry skills, experiences and expectations from their former organizations with them. Organizations that ask their people to move too far outside their repertoires of competence have a higher rate of failure.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a result, new organizations will tend to adopt the institutional practices with which their members are familiar, regardless of efficiency.Footnote ⁶⁸

In our own research, we found that an organization's resource strategy tended to be highly influenced by the organizational background of its founder – at least for the first generation of Chinese NGOs. If NGO founders had had substantial experience in the party-state bureaucracy, their organizations usually utilized resource strategies that focused on partnerships with party-state agencies. If NGO founders did not have this type of background, their organizations' strategies often focused on avoiding state attention, for example by locating the NGO in cyberspace.

However, it is important to keep in mind that a person's habitus is not set in stone, but constantly evolves as a result of new life experiences.Footnote ⁶⁹ Starting an NGO at the turn of the century was in and of itself an unusual activity to undertake in the People's Republic of China. Running such an organization forced a person to develop new skills, networks and areas of proficiency. Fifty-year-olds can learn how to negotiate Web 2.0, and the more time they invest in it, the more eager they will be to utilize social networking in the future. As organizational fields mature, successful models become available. Organizational fields can also develop institutions of professionalization that socialize actors to adapt certain strategies of action.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the last decade, some NGO leaders and employees have gained new skills and knowledge through training programmes run by foreign foundations and NGOs.Footnote ⁷¹

Strategies of state alliance

Half of the organizations in our dataset relied upon resource strategies that focused on alliances with state actors. Six out of seven of these organizations were founded by former party-state bureaucrats: Chengdu Urban River Association (CURA), China Youth Development Foundation (CYDF), Global Environmental Institute (GEI), Global Village Beijing, Golden Key, and LiangShuMing Village Construction Center (see Appendix). At the time of the interviews, these organizations ranged in age from four years (LiangShuMing Village) to 23 years (Golden Key). They varied widely in their missions, staff numbers and the wealth of their budgets. Yet, all were founded by people who had spent years working in the party-state prior to setting up their NGOs. These founders were highly competent in negotiating government bureaucracy, forging links with state agencies and extracting state resources. From their perspective, the most reasonable way for their organizations to accomplish their missions was to use the party-state as the key source for resources. A number of these founders explained to us that, “China is a society with a strong government.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Their point was not that the Chinese government ought to be feared, but that it was the centre of resources and power, a site for one-stop shopping for everything an NGO needed.

Although all of these organizations received some level of private/foreign funding, their central resource strategy was to partner with the state. This strategy was to create an effective model of how to solve the social problem and then to persuade a state agency to adopt it and implement it on a large scale. Their goal was not to solve social problems directly, but to motivate the Chinese state to use state resources to serve their constituents. Jin Jiaman 金嘉满 of GEI explained:

Jiang Chao 姜超 at Global Village Beijing agreed: “Some sample programmes can be shown to the government. If they are proven to be successful and appropriate, they will be copied.”Footnote ⁷⁹

State alliance resource strategies gave these NGOs the potential to create a large impact relative to the size of the organization. For example, Peter Xu 徐白仑 of Golden Key, who is himself blind, wanted to serve blind and visually-impaired children. In the 1980s, the vast majority of visual impairment in China was caused by diseases of poverty, so those who were stricken usually lived in rural areas served by poorly equipped schools. Since these schools were not equipped to deal with disabled children and because the families had no money to send their children to schools for the blind, these young people remained uneducated and illiterate. However, when Peter founded Golden Key, his vision was not to build schools for the blind; instead, the organization attacked the obstacles that prevented state schools from serving disabled children. It developed teacher-training modules so that even poorly educated rural teachers could serve these children. It designed and produced inexpensive lamps, magnifying glasses, braille writers and other tools that facilitated learning. Peter and his wife travelled to China's poorest provinces and counties and lobbied local officials to adopt Golden Key materials for their schools. Every time they succeeded, the visually-impaired children of an entire region would benefit. Although Golden Key never had more than four paid employees, it transformed the poor rural schools of Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia from sites of exclusion into service providers for visually-disabled children.

Why were state actors willing to work with Golden Key? What Peter Xu and the other former state bureaucrats understood was that the party-state was not monolithic, but a collection of organizations that faced their own challenges in securing resources for survival. In an era of government downsizing, local state offices were under pressure to demonstrate their effectiveness. Party-state bureaucrats needed to demonstrate a list of accomplishments in order to earn promotions.Footnote ⁸⁰ NGOs like Golden Key could help them accomplish their goals and serve the needy at the same time.

In our dataset, we found several different types of organizations that used state alliance strategies. Golden Key was a small, private charity that marketed products to provincial and local governments. CYDF was a GONGO founded by the Chinese Youth League. Its founder, Xu Yongguang 徐永光, managed to make CYDF largely autonomous at the administrative level while utilizing Youth League manpower and expertise to implement CYDF programmes.Footnote ⁸¹ Environmental NGOs, like GEI, engaged in a third strategy. The Chinese government extracted a substantial amount of funding for environmental protection from foreign foundations and then outsourced much of the actual work of environmental protection to NGOs, both foreign and domestic. Well-connected Chinese environmental NGOs, like GEI, positioned themselves to be at the receiving end of those international funds.Footnote ⁸²

The limitations of state alliance strategies

As people who had grown up under the ideology of state welfare, these NGO founders genuinely believed that only the state had the power to solve social problems in a country as large and complicated as China. They were convinced that it was impossible for an NGO to scale up direct impact past a certain point, so their strategy was to work through the state rather than expand the size of their own organization and privatize the social problem. Yet, their picture of the state was not rose-tinted, but utilitarian. These former bureaucrats/NGO founders took pleasure in complaining about the party-state, its corruption and incompetency – and in noting how they took advantage of its weaknesses to benefit their organizations. They noted that the ponderous and conservative nature of the state bureaucracy made it difficult for state actors to find creative solutions, even when their careers depended on it. GEI's Jin Jiaman explained: “there are various regulations and there are position ranks and levels, and all of these will control what you want to do. So actually, if you have some ideas and you want to implement them, it is almost impossible.”Footnote ⁸³ In return for state support, NGOs could run the risks that state organizations could not take in order to test potential solutions to social problems.

However, there was a cost to the strategy of state alliance. In order to foster state partnerships, all of these former bureaucrats operated by the same set of unspoken rules. They avoided politicized topics and never publicly criticized state officials in power. They pushed for social transformation, but not for democratization or political change. Organizations that failed to comply with these conditions would risk having their support cut, being denied access to their clients and even being prematurely shut down. Our interviewees at state alliance NGOs did not complain much about these constraints. We did not get the impression that they felt inhibited – many of them were willing to offer scathing criticisms of the government on our recording devices. Instead, these former bureaucrats who had lived their entire lives within these boundaries took these limitations for granted and were at ease with them.

The resource strategy of state alliance succeeded best when NGO goals coincided with those of the state agencies.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although these NGOs could expand the purview of state concern, they could not publicly advocate for social changes that would reduce the power of the party-state. Indeed, their resources strategies increased state power rather than reduced it – their mission was to push the state to address more social problems, pass more regulations and provide more benefits. The members of these organizations did want to transform the Chinese party-state, specifically to make it more responsive to its citizens' needs, more effective and less incompetent and corrupt. But, strategically, they advocated transformations that were so gradual that they would not register as political reforms, much less revolution.

Strategies of state avoidance

In this section, we analyse five organizations from our dataset that engaged in resource strategies designed to avoid the Chinese government: 1 KG, Aibai, Children's Art Initiative (CAI), Hua Dan, and VJoin (see Appendix). At the time of the interviews, the oldest NGO was Aibai (ten years in operation), and the youngest was VJoin, which had just opened. In all five cases, the organization's founder had no previous work experience in the party-state bureaucracy. In contrast to the NGO founders in the previous section, who were usually middle-aged when they began their organizations, all of these NGOs were started by people in their twenties or late teens. The founders of 1 KG, AiBai and VJoin worked in the private sector or were still students when they set up their organizations. Judy Shen of CAI is Chinese-American, while Caroline Watson of Hua Dan is a British citizen.

In contrast to the former state bureaucrats described in the last section, these NGO founders viewed the Chinese state as a powerful, corrupt entity that sought to control and neutralize NGOs. Zhao Ke 赵柯 at Aibai described the dangers of forming a relationship with the state: “Chinese NGOs would flatter their leaders [of a state foundation] and lose their independence … Once I give you the money, you cannot violate my rules.” He insisted that NGOs who worked with the state became infected with corruption: “Once you have good relationship with the government, officials will give you my project. But you will never discuss the purpose of the NGO. You will end up doing it just because it is the way to make a lot of money working with your friends.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Because these NGO founders had never worked in the party-state bureaucracy, they lacked the skills and competencies for exploiting state actors that came so easily to former party-state bureaucrats. While the former bureaucrats understood that “the state” was comprised of a myriad of individuals and organizations with competing agendas, these younger NGO actors talked about it as a monolithic entity that was powerful, uncontrollable and untrustworthy. Unlike the former bureaucrats, they could not see how the state's resources could be accessed and manipulated to their advantage.

Although these organizations worked in different sectors (ranging from AIDs awareness to rural education), their initial resource strategies shared one commonality: they were designed to avoid state attention. They sought resources and arenas of operation that they perceived to be outside of state control, or at least unlikely to attract state attention. One way to hide from state attention was to disguise the organization as a private business and to register it as such.Footnote ⁸⁶ This was Caroline Watson's plan for Hua Dan, an organization that offered confidence-building drama workshops for migrant schoolchildren. As a business, Hua Dan could also provide team-building workshops for companies for a fee, which supplied the funding for the charitable work and avoided MOCA regulations.

One of the most effective ways to avoid institutions controlled by the state was to move out of the physical realm altogether and into the virtual world of cyberspace. The Chinese party-state does police the internet, of course, but the world of web-based social networks is too fragmented and too personal for easy surveillance. All of the Chinese NGOs we studied had websites, but these five organizations utilized Web 2.0 networking through Facebook, RenRen, Baidu, and other similar sites to a much greater degree than the organizations founded by former state bureaucrats. If the former bureaucrats had spent decades learning the ins and outs of the Chinese party-state, these younger NGO leaders had spent their lives on the web, gaining skills and competencies in using and exploiting the internet. They were fluent in the language of blogs and social networking websites. For 1KG, Aibai, and VJoin, the internet was not just another media outlet: these organizations existed primarily in cyberspace, not in a physical set of offices. One of the benefits of this approach was that they could claim that they were not formal organizations but rather informal social networks – and therefore did not come under the purview of state regulations for organizations.

The internet allowed these NGOs to scale up their impact without having to raise large funds or hire a lot of people. If former bureaucrats essentially outsourced the work of their NGOs to party-state actors and agencies, these NGO leaders outsourced their organizations' work by breaking it down into tiny components and parcelling it out among large populations of volunteers/clients accessed through internet-based social networking technologies. For example, 1KG began as a website where hikers could pledge to bring one kilogram of school supplies in their backpacks to needy rural communities near their hiking routes. By exploiting the characteristics of the internet, 1KG's founder, An Zhu 安猪, was able to access enormous manpower at almost no cost. Five years after its inception, 1KG still had only five paid staff members, but was able to boast thousands of volunteers.

The founders of VJoinFootnote ⁸⁷ used another aspect of their web experience. VJoin started as a riff on the Common Application, a web-based application that allows students to apply to colleges online. Wang Chen 王琛, Wang Yimeng 王一萌, and Xu Anting 徐岸汀 decided to adapt the model for NGOs. VJoin's mission was to increase access to NGOs by encouraging volunteerism and providing a valuable service for NGOs seeking labour and skills. The founders explained:

Their vision was impressive enough to earn them a grant from Google.

The limitations of state avoidance strategies

By not forming any state alliances, these NGOs avoided some of the potential compromises and entanglements that state alliance NGOs had to negotiate. However, state avoidance strategies also had their downsides. Because the party-state controlled so many aspects of Chinese society, there was little room left in which these NGOs could manoeuvre. For example, Hua Dan's Caroline Watson and CAI's Judy Shen wanted to serve schoolchildren but wished to avoid having to deal with the state, even though almost all primary and middle schools in China are run by the state. Both Watson and Shen declared that they would never consider working with the Ministry of Education.Footnote ⁸⁹ Instead, they focused their efforts on the miniscule fraction of schools that were outside of government control: the semi-legal migrant schools that had no official standing in the state educational system.Footnote ⁹⁰ These two organizations ended up confined to the margins, both geographically and socially.

State avoidance resource strategies also prevented NGOs from engaging directly in political advocacy. This was not because they were afraid to offend political patrons, but because they did not wish to draw any attention from the state sector. Their motivations may have been quite different from those of state alliance NGOs, but their tactics produced similar results: they had to skirt around controversial topics and refrain from both criticizing the government or officials and advocating for democratization. In fact, state alliance NGOs were in a better position to engage in political advocacy than those organizations which prioritized autonomy to the point of shunning any connection with the government. The members of state alliance NGOs worked directly with state actors and had the opportunity to influence them to act differently.Footnote ⁹¹ However, by the standards of democratic nations, both types of resource strategies constrained all the NGOs in terms of any direct political action.