Foreign NGO Law

China Development Brief has begun posting English-language versions of the presentations and analysis offered at the workshop it hosted in July 2017. Included is a presentation from Jia Xijin, of Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and...

The State Forestry Administration has formulated “Measures for State Forestry Administration Departments and Subordinate Units Managing Cooperation and Exchange with Foreign NGOs,” meant to regulate and guide offices within the State Forestry...

The newest round of data is up! Our data visualizations include information from January-August on representative offices and temporary activities throughout China. We’ve also updated the list of entities currently serving as Professional...

Following are the Professional Supervisory Units that have sponsored a (or multiple) foreign NGO representative office(s).

The State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development issued two documents on August 22 outlining the procedures for foreign NGOs seeking to register a representative office or file a temporary activity in conjunction with...

On August 21, the China Philanthropy Research Institute (CPRI) at Beijing Normal University published an interview with Elizabeth Knupp of the Ford Foundation in both English and Chinese, discussing Ford’s history in China and its registration...

On August 16, the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Office met with Italian NGO “International Cooperation Volunteer Group—Our Homeland,” and presented the group with its registration certificate. Also present were...

Today, in conjunction with the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) issued a “Notice on Handling Work Permits for Foreign Employees of Foreign NGOs and Related Issues.” This is the first official...

Today, the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued a “Notice on Handling Work Permits for Foreign Employees of Foreign NGOs and Related Issues” to recipients at the provincial level.

Can my organization appeal if public security officials reject our request to establish a representative office or prohibit our temporary activity?According to one source, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has stated on multiple occasions that...

The Fujian and Sichuan Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Offices granted registration certificates to foreign NGOs in their respective jurisdictions. Fujian gave certificates to The Chinese Art of Tea Craft Union, the Chinese Youth...

Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Plantan compares and contrasts Russia’s and China’s foreign NGO-related legislation. Though both laws had a similar set of motivations driving their creation, Plantan shows key differences in the drafting processes as well...

Over the last several years, Russia and China have developed strikingly parallel laws on the management of foreign NGOs and foreign support of domestic civil society. While regular visitors to this site are familiar with the 2017 Foreign NGO Law in...

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has not offered clear guidance about this apparently common problem. The China NGO Project has learned from several foreign NGOs that many PSUs are either unprepared to or unwilling to sponsor foreign NGOs,...

Though the Ministry of Public Security has provided no specific guidance on this point, it appears that foreign NGOs may file one time for a program that will take place on non-contiguous dates during the year. (According to the Foreign NGO Law, no...

We’ve crunched the numbers and updated our suite of data visualizations to include the month of July. Let us know if there are other ways we could analyze the data that would be useful for you or your organization.

Today, the Guangxi and Shaanxi Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Offices issued registration certificates to the Guangxi Business Association of Canada and Plan International (United States), respectively.

Cold hard cash—it’s an issue that has come up in many of our conversations about temporary activities. As we note in one of our FAQs, it can be quite pricey for foreign NGOs operating in China to compile all the documentation and authorizations...

Andreas Fulda of the University of Nottingham has published a new article, “The Contested Role of Foreign and Domestic Foundations in the PRC: Policies, Positions, Paradigms, Power,” in the Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies...

Contributor Tee Zhuo has done a deep dive on the statistics provided by the Ministry of Public Security for the six first months of Foreign NGO Law implementation. Among his findings are that representative offices tend to skew toward trade with...

To better understand the Ministry of Public Security’s publicly-available information on Foreign NGOs’ representative offices and temporary activities, The China NGO Project has created a series of data visualizations that allow readers to explore...

According to the Guangzhou government website, Guangzhou’s Coordinating Small Group for Foreign NGO Management Work held a training class on July 11 and 12. Participants included representatives from all of the government entities represented in the...

On June 30, the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Office granted registration certificates to 15 foreign NGOs: Ford Foundation (United States), Give2Asia (United States), The Asia Foundation (United States), Caterpillar...

A total of six entities, not originally included in the Ministry of Public Security’s 2017 list of eligible Professional Supervisory Units (PSUs), have now sponsored foreign NGO representative offices. More details about the newest of these PSUs can...

Based on data released on June 28, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has permitted four additional entities to become Professional Supervisory Units (PSUs) for foreign NGOs. The addition of these four new PSUs confirms that the MPS is actively...

Today, the head of the Yunnan Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office met with representatives of MSI Professional Services (Hong Kong) and Plan International (United States). MSI thanked the Yunnan office for its guidance and warm...

On June 28, the Ministry of Public Security added more than 30 new foreign NGO representative offices to its running tally, bringing the total of approved offices to 132. The China NGO Project notes that most of the new additions were for offices...

The following includes links to the official forms (in Chinese), as listed on the Ministry of Public Security website, which are necessary for compliance with both the representative office registration and temporary activity parts of China’s...

The China NGO Project has just posted English translations of the official forms needed to apply for a representative office or file for a temporary activity. You can access them all here.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently published a new report by Edwin Rekosh exploring ways in which human rights NGOs might rethink how they approach their work internationally. Using a “business model” framework to...

Today, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office presented registration certificates to twenty-one foreign NGO representative offices.

To complement our chart on which government agencies are serving as Professional Supervisory Units (PSUs) for foreign NGOs, we’ve written a separate analysis looking at what agencies are not serving as PSUs. Check it out here.

China Development Brief (CDB) has posted its own list of foreign NGOs with representative offices in China. CDB’s foreign NGO-related content can be found under the keyword “Overseas NGOs” on its website, including document translations and news...

As of June 16, more than six months after the Foreign NGO Law went into effect, 84 foreign NGOs have successfully registered 97 representative offices. Thirty-eight unique Chinese government entities at either the national or provincial level have...

To complement our post on a successful temporary activity filing, one foreign NGO has agreed to let us present its experience of filing for a temporary activity, in which the filing stalled out in the middle of the process. The problem did not...

On June 12, the Guangxi Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office met with the foreign NGO Couleurs de Chine, including the NGO’s vice president, who was visiting from the group’s headquarters in France.

Today, the Heilongjiang Public Security Bureau (PSB) Foreign NGO Management Office, in conjunction with Heilongjiang University, held a meeting on the Foreign NGO Law. In attendance were the university's international culture and education...

On June 13, South China Morning Post published a thorough report by Nectar Gan that details the experiences of foreign NGOs since the Foreign NGO Law went into effect this year.

The Charity Philanthropy Research Institute (CPRI) at Beijing Normal University has published an analysis of the foreign NGO representative offices registered and the temporary activities that have been filed in the first five months of 2017. The...

Hong Kong University Legal Expert Fu Hualing conducts a thought experiment related to non-Chinese NGOs, asking “why does the Foreign NGO Law apply to them?” Read more here.

Here are our translations of the latest WeChat posts from the Ministry of Public Security related to Foreign NGOs.

The Beijing Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office provides this brochure in paper form at its offices in Beijing’s Haidian District. The content of the brochure is identical to the information found in numbers 1-6 of the Guide for the...

Despite the Foreign NGO Law’s taking effect on January 1 of this year, quite a number of questions regarding the law’s contents remain unanswered. Lawyers, scholars, and foreign NGOs themselves all face uncertainty as they try to understand how...

Three labor activists affiliated with the New York-based China Labor Watch (CLW) were detained in China last week. Reports suggest that they were detained for investigating labor practices at factories in Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces. This comes...

A comparison of the list of Professional Supervisory Units (PSUs) that have already sponsored foreign NGOs and the Ministry of Public Security’s (MPS’) list of eligible PSUs for 2017 shows that, as of June 1, two entities that were not on the...

Today, the Beijing Public Security Bureau Foreign NGO Management Office granted representative office registration certificates to five more NGOs, including the Business Software Alliance (United States), The Nature Conservancy (United States), the...

Despite the Foreign NGO Law’s having been in effect for five months, foreign NGOs have many unanswered technical and procedural questions about operating in China. The China NGO Project is soliciting foreign NGOs’ outstanding questions, which we...