Transcript | Mark Sidel on China's Oversight of Foreign NGOs: Eight Years of the Overseas NGO Law

This week on Sinica, I speak with Mark Sidel, the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law.

Mark has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including widely cited analyses of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing foreign civil society organizations. Since the Law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas NGOs took effect on January 1, 2017, China has introduced a remarkably comprehensive, vertically integrated system of oversight for foreign NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits.

We discuss how this system combines securitization and political risk management with selective accommodation of service provision and technical expertise, Mark’s typology of organizational responses (survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers), the requirement that foreign NGOs secure professional supervisory units, the impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem, and what this tells us about the party-state’s long-term vision for controlled engagement with the outside world.

4:43 – The landscape of non-state organizations before the 2016 law
7:06 – What changed: color revolutions, Arab Spring, and domestic anxieties
9:08 – Public security intellectuals and their influence on the law
11:51 – How registration and temporary activity filing systems work in practice
13:48 – Why the Ministry of Public Security, not Civil Affairs, was put in charge
19:31 – The professional supervisory unit requirement and dependency relationships 22:48 – How the state shifted foreign NGO work away from advocacy without banning it
26:17 – Mark’s typology: survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers
35:19 – What correlates with success for those who have survived
40:41 – Impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem and professional intermediaries
45:54 – What makes China’s system distinctive compared to India, Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam
50:19 – The Article 53 problem and university partnerships
55:32 – Advice for mid-sized foundations or NGOs considering work in China today

Paying it Forward: Neysun Mahboubi and the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations

Recommendations:

Mark: Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China by Anthony Spires

Kaiser: The music of Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, The Dregs, Steve Morse Band)

Transcript:

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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I had the pleasure of hearing this week’s guest speak in Madison back in February when I was visiting the Center for East Asian Studies at the university there. The talk reminded me that we are long overdue for a conversation about an area that has quietly, but quite profoundly, reshaped China’s relationship with the outside world, the regulatory environment for overseas NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits. Since the law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas NGOs took effect on January 1, 2017 — it was promulgated in 2016 — China has introduced what is now a remarkably comprehensive, vertically integrated system of oversight for foreign civil society organizations.

It is a system that, as my guest argues, combines elements of securitization and political risk management with a selective accommodation of service provision and technical expertise. This is not simply a story of closing space, though that’s clearly a part of it. It is also one of molding the types of work foreign organizations can do, of channeling collaboration in certain arenas that are important to China, while shutting down others.

The numbers alone speak to the maturity of this system. As of January of this year, 2025, 779 overseas NGOs have registered representative offices, while more than 6,600 temporary activity filings have been made. But beneath those numbers lie a host of strategic adaptations. There are organizations that have survived and localized those that have moved activities to neighboring jurisdictions, those that have shifted in the social enterprise models, and those that have quietly withdrawn. So, understanding how these changes unfolded and what they mean not only for foreign NGOs, but also for China’s domestic nonprofit sector and for the state’s long-term goals, requires a kind of historical and comparative view that my guest brings to this issue. Mark Sidel is the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he’s a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law.

He has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including a widely cited analysis of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing foreign civil society organizations. Mark, a very warm welcome and an overdue welcome to Sinica.

Mark Sidel: Thank you. Delighted to be here.

Kaiser: Great. Well, Mark, you’ve written that China has long distinguished among different types of non-state organizations. There’s the mass organizations that we know of like the All-China Federation of this and that, government-organized NGOs or GONGOs, grassroots service groups, issue advocacy groups, and then overseas NGOs and foundations. Each are governed under quite different legal and political logics. So, maybe let’s start with the landscape prior to the promulgation of the law. So, before 2016. You’ve written that China has long distinguished among these different groups. Could you briefly sketch out how those categories emerged historically? I mean, specifically, how did the party state conceptualize civil society, or did it avoid that term altogether in the reform era of the ‘80s and the ‘90s?

Mark: Thanks, Kaiser. You know, before the reform era, what we might call the civil society community in China was almost nonexistent. Everything was state-created and subject to rule by state or Party law. It’s really only with the reform era, as you said, that things began to change. And we began to see in the mid to late 80s, the emergence of some groups that came under somewhat less state control. But those were viewed with significant suspicion.

So, for example, some of the research and policy groups around the time of Tiananmen, when I was working in China with the Ford Foundation, those groups existed, but they were treated with suspicion and then repressed after June 4th, 1989. In the 1990s, when things liberalized a bit more, it became possible for a range of research services and, in some cases, advocacy groups to emerge.

Most of those came under loose control from Civil Affairs. But as things tightened up in China, beginning in 2010, 2012, especially 2012, 2013, a number of those groups that tried do advocacy were coming under much greater control or were forced out of