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China is waking up to the key role civic society can play in helping improve people's lives
People in China’s mountainous Sichuan province are still rebuilding their lives almost three years after a devastating earthquake killed more than 68,000 people and left millions homeless.
But despite its horrors, the quake and its aftermath contributed to a deeper awareness in China that civic society has a central role to play in helping improve people’s lives, experts told a debate on the growth of civil society in China.
“It spurred a ‘more willing to give’ society,” said Robin Zangh, founder of Venture Avenue, a Shanghai-based company that advises philanthropists, entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the Chinese government on setting up businesses.
This is not to say that China does not have a tradition of giving and sharing with those in need, but what has been changing is that there is a greater openness towards non-state organisations and enterprise working on social issues, Zangh told the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford.
A big step in that direction was to create a “more encouraging environment” for setting up private foundations, he said, with the result that this year the number of private foundations for the first time exceeded public foundations.
That, said Zangh, showed an increased engagement of wealthy players in civil society in China. He expects the social sector to expand in the future, adding that it seemed the government was finally realising that the support of civil society in addressing the country’s many challenges was not only helpful, but needed.
LONG JOURNEY
China has some 450,000 registered NGOs but it is estimated that 2-3 million have registered themselves as companies, working in a legal grey area because according to the law, all officially registered NGOs have to cooperate with a public authority or state agency, which helps the government retain a degree of control.
China’s bureaucratic legal system can make running a non-governmental organisation or social enterprise difficult.
Jenny Bowen, who founded Half the Sky with a mission to improve the lives of disadvantaged and orphaned children in China, knows this all too well. After launching its first pilot programmes in 2000 the foundation was finally officially registered in 2008.
“Let the government know you are OK, that you have no other motive than to fulfil your mission,” is Bowen’s advice for social organisations and entrepreneurs wanting to get involved in China, a strategy that has worked well for Half the Sky.
In 2010 the government proposed that Half the Sky’s programmes should become the national standard of care for orphaned and disadvantaged children, and it is now working in partnership with the government to help train child welfare workers across the country.
When the Sichuan earthquake struck in May 2008, the government even called Half the Sky for support, after it had proved its mettle and commitment in working with the army to help orphanages cut off from supplies by snow storms earlier that year, Bowen said.
“That meant a lot. We clearly were not a disaster relief agency but we quickly learned to be one. We worked with the army to get food to children trapped in the mountains by helicopter. They (the government) really understood that we were in it for the long-term.”
OPENING UP
Yvonne Li, a former investment banker who founded Advantage Ventures to help provide finance for social entrepreneurs, said that since 2008 China had been opening up more to the idea of social entrepreneurship, not least because some 650 million Chinese in rural areas are still poor despite government efforts to improve their situation.
She said many investors are focusing on clean technology enterprises in China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but there are other areas for social enterprises to get their teeth into.
“The Chinese are fairly open-minded to collaborating, to looking for new ideas from overseas in areas such as investment in education, energy, rural development, special needs education and care for the elderly,” said Li.
Marie So, chief executive of Shokay, is a social entrepreneur who has successfully negotiated China’s legendary bureaucratic hurdles to set up a company that works with herders in the Himalayans to produce items made of yak fibre.
There are a lot of motivated people in China wanting to get involved in social enterprise and the funding landscape is slowing changing too, said So.
Her advice: “Don’t yak, just do it!”
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