Statistics showing the number of foreign NGOs that have filed for temporary activities or established representative offices from January 2017 through April 2018 are now available as part of our suite of data visualizations.
During the month of April, two new Professional Supervisory Units (PSUs) became sponsors for foreign NGO representative offices: the Anhui Administration of Quality and Technical Supervision and the Chongqing People’s Government Office of Taiwan Affairs. These PSUs are notable because they represent two government bureaucracies (the Standardization Administration of the People’s Republic of China and the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, respectively) that were not part of the Ministry of Public Security’s 2017 list of approved PSUs. The full list of current PSUs, and the larger government bureaucracies they represent, is available on The China NGO Project website here.
Of note, we added the work category “human rights” to our categorization scheme. We had previously not included this category because it is so broad; many other types of work could be described as a subset of human rights. However, a small number of temporary activities have the specific term “human rights” (人权, renquan) in their titles (all of which have been conducted by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law). We therefore felt it necessary to add this category but restrict its usage to only those activities or offices that specifically employ the term “human rights.”