Why China cracked down on my nonprofit

China should embrace, not antagonize, its able and caring NGO community.

By Nick Young

from the December 4, 2007 edition

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London - "You can be the government of China's friend or our enemy; there is no other way."

This chilling message – and it is a direct quote – was delivered to me in Beijing this summer by an apparently high-ranking Chinese security official who would tell me only his surname: Song. He was, he said, "in charge of watching terrorism and NGOs," and he was offering me a real, not theoretical, choice. I could become an elite propagandist for China, or I would have to leave the country, where I had lived continuously for 12 years, and would never be allowed back.

On Sept. 26, after spending several weeks in Europe, I returned to Beijing and found that Mr. Song had spoken in earnest. Immigration authorities barred my entry, put me back on the plane to Helsinki, Finland, and canceled my multientry visa.

A worthy cause

My years in China were spent creating and growing a nonprofit newsletter, China Development Brief, which was subscribed to by a specialist readership of international aid agencies and China-watchers. We reported on efforts to achieve fair and sustainable development, sometimes taking international media and human rights organizations to task for facile and self-righteous China-bashing. In 2002, we added a Chinese-language edition, owned and run by a small team of Chinese writers who covered similar ground from their perspective for a readership of some 5,000 Chinese nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, and government staff.

Neither newsletter complied with China's highly restrictive publishing laws, which entail political controls that prevent the kind of objective and independent reporting that we offered. But we seemed to have found a lacuna of tolerance that, I believed, might presage the gradual advance of free expression.

Our work in Chinese was sometimes cited and even reprinted (without permission) by state-authorized media. I appeared as a guest expert on Chinese TV programs covering such topics as poverty reduction and public health. On several occasions, central-government officials sought my opinion on issues such as the development of a legal framework for China's nonprofit sector.

Tolerance evaporates

The tolerance evaporated this summer. In the past two years, prompted by concerns about "color revolutions" elsewhere, security agents had been keeping a close watch on China's civil society. It seems that a sweep of potential troublemakers was deemed overdue.

On July 4, our office was visited by a dozen officials, police, and security agents, who ordered us to stop publishing. They came wielding video cameras, which they directed at us while rifling through papers and questioning us. Ominously, one of the group boasted to my colleagues that his team was "fluent in foreign languages, including Arabic and Uighur" – the language of the Muslim majority in Xinjiang, China's northwest frontier province.

I was made to sign a statement admitting to "conducting unauthorized surveys" in contravention of laws that give the Chinese state a monopoly on information gathering. Colleagues on our Chinese edition were charged with distributing an unlicensed publication and subsequently fined 12,000 yuan (about $1,500).

The charges could have been more serious and the penalty much harsher, so it seems the idea was to apply the minimum force needed to close this small window of free speech. I had been preparing to move on and transition the organization to new management, and the action against us seemed timed to prevent this.

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