Civil Society and COVID in China: Responses in an Authoritarian Society

Emergency Service by CSOs and Partnerships

Chinese CSOs have provided extensive services and support to those involved at the front lines of the anti-COVID responses in China. Specifically, foundations collected and donated funding to support state-approved implementing organizations, mostly emergency response authorities and their affiliated charities. Only a handful of foundations coordinated and funded NGOs’ epidemic response. For NGOs, a few emergency management NGOs and public health NGOs worked with state agencies, medical institutions, and foundations by delivering materials and services and assisting in epidemic prevention and control. Community-based NGOs assisted local governments in their responses. Admittedly, a large proportion of NGOs took no responsive action in the epidemic. In addition, volunteer, mutual aid, and grassroots groups comprising active citizens acted to help their neighbors and other affected people by providing personal and community services and collecting individuals’ money and in-kind donations. Finally, business associations and professional associations have participated in collecting financial and in-kind donations, mostly to state-affiliated charities and medical institutions.

Compared to the civil society responses to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, more NGOs acted to help fight the COVID crisis. NGOs with expertise in emergency response, health care, and information technology have increased. And more NGO networks were established to facilitate collective response. The changes can mostly be attributed to the striking increase of the number of NGOs in the past decade. However, NGOs have generally become less active and less autonomous in their emergency response due to the state’s increasingly restrictive policies (Dong & Lu, 2020). And few overseas foundations and other organizations have been able to respond usefully to the COVID crisis in China, largely due to the increasing constraints on overseas charitable activities since the passage of the restrictive Overseas NGO Law in 2016.

Fundraising for the Epidemic Response

Funding by Chinese foundations, corporates, and individuals has been a key way for civil society and individual Chinese to provide assistance to affected persons and areas during the COVID crisis.

The crisis has been most pronounced in Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital and primary city. The national Ministry of Civil Affairs (2020b), based in Beijing, assigned five state-affiliated foundations to receive donations to Hubei. In other words, other Hubei CSOs were not allowed to receive donations directly in response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Those five state-affiliated foundations received (at last count) a total of 13.6 billion renminbi (RMB; about US$1.9 billion) from firms, individuals, and other institutions (China Philanthropy Research Institute [CPRI], 2020).

This principle of limited recipients of fundraising for local use did not generally apply to other provinces and other parts of China, but was a specific measure for Hubei. There have been significant problems with state-affiliated charities in China, historically and in the current crisis. The restrictions on fundraising recipients seem to have been an attempt to control responses to the virus, but the policies were not welcomed among many donors and recipient agencies.

The total amount of donations (including in-kind donations) nationally reached 35.1 billion RMB (US$4.9 billion) by early April (CPRI, 2020), accounting for 26.4% of the total charitable giving in China in 2019. In principle, only charities having special fundraising permits have been allowed to collect private donations, generally in line with existing national fundraising regulations. Those charities permitted to raise funds for COVID relief include primarily public foundations (mostly state-affiliated) and a handful of major social service NGOs. These fundraising eligible organizations are allowed to raise money online through 20 internet platforms assigned by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. So far, the COVID-19 fundraising largely repeated what had happened after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake: generous individual and corporate donors, state-assigned donation recipients, and government allocation of most donations.

One of the features of the 2020 COVID crisis in China is the relatively significant flexibility and privilege given to state-affiliated charities and foundations to act in the crisis, as shown in donation collection and service provision. Those are vetted organizations, subject to extensive reporting and supervision requirements. So, the Chinese governance system in effect has it both ways—encouraging civic activity by groups that are considered flexible compared to government departments, while retaining control over major actors.

Volunteering in the Crisis: A Restricted Form of Civil Society Activity

In addition to giving, according to estimates in May, 8.81 million registered volunteers joined 460,000 volunteer projects and contributed 290 million hours in response to the epidemic (State Council News Office, 2020). Their prominent participation even earned an unusual praise from the Party’s top leadership (“Resolutely Defending Hubei, Defending Wuhan in the Epidemic,” 2020).

However, the majority of volunteers were organized or even directly managed by state agencies such as CYL branches and Party branches, in addition to NGO-led volunteers and autonomous volunteer groups. In addition, regardless of their organizational status, all volunteers were required to “submit to the arrangement of local Party committees and government departments” and not to provide offline service out of their own (local) region (Ministry of Civil Affairs, 2020a). Given that the state has in recent years actively sought to develop a state-led volunteer management system in its state legitimacy building project (Hu, 2020), the unprecedented volunteer participation in the epidemic response may suggest the resilience of state power rather than the rise of volunteers as a civil society force.

It is already clear that in the more restrictive political environment in China in 2020, volunteering was a considerably more constrained force than in 2008 in Sichuan. Volunteers are limited and controlled through volunteer service providers and the structures of new national regulations on volunteering, allowing for much less spontaneous volunteering activity and affording state institutions, down to the neighborhood level, with much more control over volunteers and what they volunteer for.

In-Kind Donations: A Permissive Attitude Toward Measurable, Non-Controversial Service Activities

Data on the total value of in-kind donations in the 2020 Chinese COVID crisis remain scarce at this point. But we know from reporting in China that it is likely to have been significant and that it does not generally challenge the state, but complements state activities. By early March, enterprises donated nearly 30.3 billion RMB (US$4.2 billion) to fight the virus, of which 7.8 billion (US$1.1 billion) was given as in-kind materials (Tencent Atom Thinktank, 2020). Major Chinese foundations and overseas Chinese communities were also active in in-kind donations.

Generally, because in-kind donations were needed, complementary to state assistance, and non-controversial in legal and political terms, a fairly wide array of registered CSOs were allowed to collect in-kind donations. The permissive sphere here was broader than in financial fundraising, which is in keeping with recent Chinese policy that has kept a firmer watch on fundraising and fundraising organizations. But in Wuhan, the authorities still suggested that donations be distributed by government-affiliated institutions.

Mutual Aid: More Autonomous Civic Action, More State Limits

Mutual aid between individuals and communities has been generally allowed during the crisis, and grassroots NGOs, volunteer groups, and community-based networks have had a high profile in emergency relief. For example, in some neighborhoods, residents organized their own collective action in setting up checkpoints, buying daily supplies collectively, and giving psychological support to each other.

But this more autonomous citizen action has real limits: In most areas of China, those activities generally had to be endorsed by the local Party or government agencies. And in a number of areas, neighborhood-based mutual aid was in fact directly organized by local Party or neighborhood committees, making it less autonomous but not necessarily detracting from the spirit and commitment of those organizing mutual aid and those receiving it.

Policy Advocacy: A Casualty of the Authoritarian State in the COVID Crisis

There has been relatively little policy advocacy involvement by Chinese civil society in the current crisis that we have been able to document thus far. Censorship on social media, some of which were run by CSOs, was significantly reinforced. Many WeChat and microblog accounts were hacked or attacked. Numerous news stories on the crisis were removed, including those from state-affiliated media. However, state propaganda was made a top priority in the crisis response.

And yet, this is China, and not everything can be silenced. The public outcry and respect for Dr. Li Wenliang, who sought to provide information in medical circles about the virus very early in Wuhan and was disciplined for it before his death, was prominent throughout China. Citizen activists launched an online campaign to advocate the welfare rights of women (particularly women health workers) and other vulnerable groups such as widowed older people, the disabled, and the homeless in the COVID response. They received generally positive responses from the authorities. Small labor-focused NGOs have sought to protect workers who have been forced into mandatory overtime, or who have been made redundant during the crisis. A citizen filed a lawsuit against the Hubei Provincial Government for its mismanagement of the epidemic; news of that suit was also removed from media. Generally, the policy advocacy environment in the epidemic has deteriorated and will likely further deteriorate in the years to come.

COVID and the Future of Civil Society in China

Given the civil society responses to the COVID-19 epidemic as presented above, can the crisis help in expanding the civic and working space available to the significantly restricted Chinese civil society in recent years? Our initial answer is generally no: Given very significant state control of the civil society in China, especially since 2012, and during the COVID crisis, the crisis will not likely lead to an expansion of civic and civil society space in China. Specifically, the Party and government have concluded that China’s policies in the COVID crisis have been a victory of China’s highly centralized political regime under the Party’s leadership. Given the important role that grassroots Party branches/committees and the extensive neighborhood management system have played in crisis response, political control of that infrastructure may be further enhanced (and certainly has been in recent years). Also, though numerous NGOs participated in response to the crisis, they were criticized by NGO leaders and academics for their unpreparedness, shortage of expertise, dependence on the state, and inadequate collaborative capacity. Foundations lacked capacity to lead NGOs in terms of mission, strategy, and management. Even more, most corporate foundations merely donated money to government agencies or their affiliated charities and did little else. In addition, state-affiliated charities were given significant roles and privileges in the crisis, in line with Party and government policy—their dominance continues regardless of their sometimes poor performance in emergency relief. The government–NGO partnership in emergency response, in which they would be expected to play a critical role, was absent in most regions. Finally, the continuing rise of nationalism and populism during the epidemic may well further encourage the Party-state to continue and strengthen its grasp on CSOs.

And yet, are there, over time, some long-term potential opportunities for civil society out of the crisis? Several such opportunities may emerge.

First, China saw the rise of spontaneous but capable volunteer groups, led by active citizens to organize mutual aid and provide support to medical institutions and staff and others; some of them worked quite well with professional NGOs and foundations.

Second, China saw the rise of productive NGO networks, coalitions, and partnerships during the crisis. For example, the China NGO Consortium for 2019-nCov, a network of largest foundations and service providers, funded more than 300 NGOs in their response to the epidemic. The largest nationwide network of disaster management NGOs was led by the One Foundation and included more than 700 grassroots NGOs. Many NGOs built local networks, thanks to the lessons learned from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and other disasters. The rise of interorganizational partnerships may contribute to the growth of NGO industrial associations in the future, though necessarily under government supervision. The role of these networks and coalitions are among the more interesting and significant civil society developments during the crisis (see Zhang et al., 2020).

Third, the high incidence of mobile internet in China empowered civil society actors’ partnership building and synergetic action beyond institutional, regional, and sectoral boundaries, which has showed some potential in negotiating space for public participation.

Fourth, many of the largest Chinese foundations provided overseas aid to other affected countries. That may, over time, help to open new space for Chinese civil society by building a sense of global citizenship and bridging cultural gaps.

To sum up, Chinese civil society forces made significant contributions to the COVID-19 response, despite the very restrictive environment in China. But despite rapid growth in the NGO and philanthropic sector after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the prospects for a healthy civil society in China still look uncertain given restrictive policies and the mandate for Party and state control that has ramped up in recent years.