According to a 2012 NGO Blue Book published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in January, the growth rate of social organizations in China decreased 0.6 percent year-on-year in 2012, and has continuously fallen in the past five years, while the distribution of social organizations remained unbalanced.
Among a total of some 462,000 registered NGOs in the country by the end of 2011, more than 82 percent are focused on business, technology, and social services, and less than 5 percent are involved in religion, environmental protection, international and foreign affairs.
Easier regulations
But things have changed since the government finally decided to weaken the registration restrictions for grass-root NGOs.
The State Council announced earlier in March that since this year, four kinds of social organizations, including business associations, technology groups, charities and community service organizations can directly apply for registration from the Ministry of Civil Affairs without needing a government partner.
However, organizations involved in political and religious affairs are not included.
In fact, a year ago, the Guangdong government had already launched a pilot program to loosen and simplify the application requirements.
From January 1, 2012, most social organizations in Guangdong have only needed to submit their application to local civil affairs bureau without having a competent business authority.
Meanwhile, the application procedure has also been largely simplified and shortened. The application can be approved within three weeks and most of the work has been possible to do online since last September.
By the end of February, 19 provinces had put similar policies for NGO registration in practice.
According to figures from the Guangzhou Civil Affairs Bureau, by the end of 2012, Guangzhou had more than 5,000 registered social organizations, 227 new NGOs registered in the first six months, a 36 percent year-on-year increase.
An official surnamed Wang from the registration department of Guangzhou Civil Affairs Bureau told the Global Times that the entire preparation process for a newly registered NGO is approximately six months, and the application for registration normally takes 20 work days, but in fact, most can be approved within a week.
Hard road
"It is definitely a good thing to see the threshold of registering NGO lowered," Zhou Runan, assistant director at the Institute for Civil Communication of Sun Yat-sen University, told the Global Times.
But Zhou said it should be clearly understood that the road of NGO development in China is long and hard, as some common problems for China's grass-roots NGOs, such as the lack of a comprehensive organizational structure and shortages of talent, money and social credibility, remain big issues.
"The government used to ignore the existence of NGOs and let them live and die by themselves. And most NGOs did not have healthy systems and professional training, even for the most basic things like project proposal writing, team building, or financial and human resource management. It's all a blank for many NGOs, and they need a lot of help," Zhou said.
Meanwhile, certain major obstacles remain in practice. For example, under current policies NGOs can only carry out activities within the area it is registered.
"Many NGOs serve people province-wide, but they register in a district level civil affairs bureau because it only required 30,000 yuan in capital, but provincial level required 300,000 which many small NGOs can't afford," Zhou said.
Deng also believes NGOs commonly lack a sense of mission and team spirit.
"Many people set up NGOs to seek money or fame, but not out of ideals or social responsibility, which are what makes NGOs different from government and enterprise. And cooperation among NGOs in China is inadequate. NGOs did good teamwork in the Wenchuan earthquake, but it was a pity that it disappeared after the relief work was done," Deng said.
And not everyone is optimistic about future developments.
According to a report published by the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and the NPO Research Center at the Renmin University of China in January, although the government had tried to solve the registration difficulty, it is only limited to a narrow range of NGOs that mostly provide social services and won't cause much "trouble" for officials.
Lu Jun, director of the Beijing Yirenping Center, an NGO focused on legal rights support for disadvantaged groups, argues that the government's control will stay as tight as ever.
"The new policy only offers limited convenience for registration for very few kinds of NGOs. The Chinese government made big progress in opening up non-political organizations. However, it didn't secure social organizations more scope to work and certain NGOs might face even stricter supervision than before," Lu said.
"It is still too early to say the spring of NGO development has come," Lu said.
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