Civil Society Emerging Around Calls for Sustainable Urbanization

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In January, an official with the HIV/AIDS Prevention Committee of China's Gansu province announced a desire to find community partners to promote education on AIDS prevention. When asked why the group didn’t just work with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the official explained that grassroots groups were hard to find, given the low number of reported AIDS cases so far in the province. But, he added, “We do plan to do something and help catalyze the birth of NGOs this year.”

This remark may signal a shift in official attitudes toward China’s fledgling civil society. A decade ago, many government officials looked with suspicion at grassroots NGOs, regarding them as “hostile” rather than “cooperative” groups. The authorities typically only recognized the so-called GONGOs (governmental non-governmental organizations), such as trade unions, women’s federations, and Youth League committees.

But now they are beginning to seek out and even “catalyze the birth of NGOs” with whom to collaborate. While the survival conditions for grassroots NGOs in China are still harsh, the ice is thawing as more and more officials come to see that these groups can be effective in many areas where governmental authority is limited. In the case of HIV/AIDS, it is difficult for government departments to access certain segments of the population, such as sex workers, injection drug users, and homosexuals. It is often more convenient for NGOs to conduct peer education among these groups.

Many government officials also have found NGOs to be indispensable in addressing challenges related to China’s rapid urbanization—particularly rising environmental challenges. When 21 domestic environmental NGOs from across China sent out a petition in late March encouraging consumers to boycott products from certain polluting companies, an official with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) praised the act as “a boost to the enforcement of environmental laws.”

Through its Green Choice campaign, the Beijing-based Public and Environmental Affairs Institute is helping shoppers make more conscientious choices, using government information to compile a “blacklist” of polluters and their products. Such activities have interpreted the government’s data in a positive way, extended “healthy supervision” over government work, and put pressure on the polluters, says Guangfeng Mou, who is in charge of policy and law enforcement at SEPA. Without these NGO efforts, many good ideas might end up only in official documents, he adds.

The change in the official mindset toward grassroots NGOs may explain the surge of China’s civil society in recent years, despite the considerable obstacles these groups still face in getting registered. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of registered NGOs had reached 346,000 by the end of 2006, up 8 percent from the previous year.

The role of civil society is becoming particularly critical as China undergoes rapid urbanization. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s 1.3 billion people now live in urban areas, up from less than 20 percent in the late 1970s.

Chinese civil society, composed of intellectuals, the media, grassroots NGOs, and citizen communities, is raising a louder voice for rational urbanization characterized by equity and social justice. One proponent, Dadao Lu, an established geographer and academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has captured considerable media attention in recent months for his outspoken criticism of the “great leap” in China’s urbanization.

Lu sent his criticisms to both the State Council (China’s parliament) and the media, denouncing the “exaggeration in statistics” and “irrational urban construction.” He enclosed some 135 pictures he took of what he termed “unhealthy trends” in urbanization around the country. He also openly criticized the “misconduct” in the country’s urbanization at the latest session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, in March.

Lu said the “great leap” in China’s urbanization has gone astray from the normal track of urban development and is becoming a campaign of “city building,” or little more than covering land with high-rise structures. “Cities vie with one another to build 130-meter-wide boulevards that pedestrians find it hard to cross,” he observed. “And many extravagant local government office buildings are utterly inconsistent with China’s reality.” All this, he said, “is simply a waste of resources and is certainly not urbanization, let alone sustainable.”

An entrepreneurial awakening to social responsibility is also noticeable in China’s movement for sustainable urbanization. In June 2004, some 100 entrepreneurs established the Alxa Association of Society, Entrepreneurs, and Ecology (SEE) to improve and restore the degrading environment in Alxa, a desert area in Inner Mongolia. With desertification devouring a land area equivalent to a medium-sized Chinese town each year, Alxa is believed to be a seedbed of sandstorms that hit Beijing and North China frequently each spring.

Each SEE charter member is committed to contributing 100,000 yuan (US$12,500) a year for 10 years, with the goal of first slowing desertification in Alxa and then promoting greater harmony between humans and the natural environment. Shi Wang, a real estate tycoon and SEE member, considers the group’s activities “democratic training for business people” like him, helping him to behave as a “corporate citizen.”

China’s urbanization would be impossible without the contributions of migrant workers from rural areas, and official statistics show that some 100 million surplus rural laborers have flowed into cities to seek jobs. Many of these new city dwellers suffer from discrimination and tough living conditions in a hostile urban environment. But dozens of organizations have sprung up in recent years to help safeguard these vulnerable groups, offering services from training to legal assistance. Some have even launched their own websites, such as the Chinese Farm Workers site, to spread their voice.

Yuancheng Wang, 38, is one of a few lucky migrant workers to make his way into politics, serving as a deputy to the National People’s Congress. He notes that at the different levels of China’s legislature, there are very few peasant or migrant worker representatives. Even though China’s rural population far exceeds the urban population, “the current regulation requires that every 220,000 urban residents send one deputy to the NPC, while nearly 880,000 rural residents are allowed only one representative,” he explained.

Peasants account for only 18.4 percent of China’s nearly 3,000 NPC deputies, though they represent 32.4 percent of all officials and 21.1 percent of intellectuals. And many of these “peasant” deputies are actually rural entrepreneurs or officials. In the three main provinces with outbound peasant workers (Henan, Anhui, and Sichuan), and the three main provinces with the most inbound migrants (Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Fujian), no peasant worker is represented on the delegations to the national legislature.

Without adequate representation in the legislature, Wang said, “you can’t expect the policies to tilt in favor of us.” His recent motion to increase the representation of migrant workers at the NPC has been accepted, and the current official line is to encourage greater public participation. Dingjian Cai, a professor at China University of Political Science and Law, observes that many poor policy decisions in China’s reform process can be traced to the absence of public participation in decision making.

Cai believes public participation is “ever more essential” to guarantee equity and justice in China’s rapid urbanization process. But an effective mechanism for public participation is still lacking, he says. Jun Ma, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, agrees that civil society needs greater capacity building to participate in the decision-making process.

Xiong Lei is a senior journalist with China Features. This article was coordinated through the Global Environmental Institute (GEI) in Beijing. Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.