BEIJING — At around 10 p.m., Su Heng, an investigator for China Labor Watch, was whisked away from his hotel room in southern China by police on May 27. The next day, his colleague Li Zhao met the same fate. A third activist from the New York-based workers’ rights organization was also detained around the same time. All three, who were held in Ganzhou, had been involved in an investigation of two shoe factories in China that supplied Ivanka Trump‘s fashion line, seeking evidence of alleged mistreatment of workers — a highly sensitive subject in the country.
The case stands as a stark reminder of the perils nongovernmental organizations face when pursuing their mission. Under its Communist regime, traditionally distrustful of citizens’ action, China has long been an unwelcome environment for human-rights campaigners and other activists. Even scarier for the advocates of civil liberties is that such hostility to NGOs is spreading throughout much of the world.
From Bolivia to Ethiopia to Bangladesh, NGOs are encountering stiffer restrictions on their activities. The Washington-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, or ICNL, has identified 120 laws and regulations that have been enacted by 70 governments since 2012 that curtail NGOs’ access to financing, limit the ability of citizens to form and operate them, or prevent public protests, among other hurdles.
“We’ve seen a paradigm shift in the view of civil society in the past 20 years,” says David Moore, ICNL’s vice president for legal affairs. “There is a perception, promoted by some governments, that civil society is somehow ‘other,’ seeking to undermine national goals and priorities.”
The causes of that shift are many and complex. The Arab Spring uprisings, for instance, woke many governments, especially illiberal ones, to the threat of social media and civic action. NGOs are also being caught up in measures aimed at fighting terrorism, such as greater scrutiny of cross-border financial transactions.
Mandeep Tiwana, head of policy and research at Civicus, a Johannesburg-based organization in South Africa that promotes civil society, sees the clampdown as a sign of something greater: the decaying of democracy itself. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this euphoria that the world would unite and democratize,” he says. “But since the beginning of the 21st century, we’ve been experiencing a regression in democratic norms around the world.”
Activists in China are all too familiar with the consequences. After about a month in detention, the three China Labor Watch investigators were released on bail, but their trial still awaits. (China Labor Watch says lawyers for the three believe their clients did not engage in any wrongdoing.) Ivanka Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment.
Such heavy-handed tactics, though, were still not enough for the Chinese government. On Jan. 1, a controversial law came into effect that some in the NGO community fear will allow Beijing to more closely control their activities. Its stipulations hand oversight of foreign NGOs to the police, require that they find an approved Chinese partner — government ministries and state-linked agencies — and submit plans for their programs for scrutiny. The new law is considered just one measure of a wider clampdown by the administration of President Xi Jinping to tighten the Communist Party’s grip on the country.
Chinese officials have tried to present the measure as a positive development for NGOs. One commentary on Xinhua, the state news agency, argued that the new law has been “misunderstood” by critics and offers benefits as well as restrictions. NGOs “with solid reasons to operate in China will have a legal identity, a clear code of conduct and protection of their rights and interests from the government and legal system,” it said.
Many of the early problems NGOs have with the new law in China are less political than bureaucratic. NGOs are simply having trouble finding suitable partners and figuring out how to adhere to the new requirements — issues that have slowly been getting resolved.
Critics, though, counter that the legislation hands the state sweeping powers to investigate NGOs, block their activities and withdraw their licenses for vaguely defined reasons. Without a partner, a foreign NGO cannot operate full time in the country, giving authorities a mechanism to force out those working in areas considered dangerous to the state — such as human rights and labor issues. Human Rights Watch warned last year that the legislation is just one of Beijing’s “ever-stronger tools to legalize China’s human rights abuses.”
Even NGOs with long standing in the country have been sucked into the confusion surrounding it. In December, the Rule of Law Initiative of the American Bar Association shuttered its Beijing office, temporarily relocated its one expatriate employee to Washington and laid off three Chinese staff due to the uncertainty created by the new law. The program had been operating in China with hardly a glitch since 1998, conducting legal training, judicial exchanges and other projects with a wide range of institutions, from government ministries to grassroots organizations. Its program might have some trouble reopening. Not only has its purview become a touchier subject in Xi’s China, the ABA may not have endeared itself to Beijing when it gave a human-rights award last year to a Chinese lawyer who had been jailed.
Yet the ABA is maintaining its commitment to China. Elizabeth Andersen, ABA’s associate executive director, said via email she is hopeful the rule of-law program will reopen in China. The ABA, she noted, is currently working to identify a Chinese partner and then plans to register the program under the new NGO law. “We remain optimistic that the ABA’s application for registration will be approved,” she wrote.
Autocracies are not solely responsible for the worldwide crackdown on NGOs. In India, with a very vibrant history of active civil society, critics contend that the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has abused regulations to monitor overseas financing to local NGOs — which were tightened in 2010 — to stifle dissent. The Home Ministry has said the government is merely enforcing regulations. But officials also seem to believe that NGO activity is holding back the government’s economic agenda. Modi himself has accused NGOs of attacking him and trying to destabilize his administration.
One of the most prominent victims is Compassion International, a Christian charitable group based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that funded programs providing aid to nearly 150,000 poor children in India through local churches. Last year, the government ordered that Compassion could transfer funds to its local operations only with state approval — which never came. Compassion says it was never given a clear explanation for this decision, though press reports suggest the Modi government believed the NGO was promoting religious conversion. Eventually, unable to pay its own staff, Compassion decided to close its India operation in March. (A spokesman for Compassion International had no further comment, and India’s ministries of home affairs and external affairs did not respond to requests for comment.)
The road ahead for NGOs might not get any easier. Amid rising nationalism and anti-globalization sentiment in many parts of the world — symbolized by growing ire toward trade and immigration, Britain’s plan to exit the European Union, and President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda — governments continue to throw up hurdles to NGO activities. ICNL’s Moore says his organization is tracking more than 40 countries considering new laws that would place additional restrictions on NGOs. “The fear is that now we are on the cusp of a new wave” of measures to curtail NGOs, he worries.
Advocates, however, try to remain positive. Civicus’s Tiwana believes the troubles facing NGOs are part of a political cycle that will eventually correct itself. “I’m optimistic,” he says. “It might get worse before it gets better. But it’s going to get better. In the long run, people will rally for social cohesion and universal human rights.”
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Growing Number of Countries Are Clamping Down on Civil Society Groups originally appeared on usnews.com
