Mark Sidel on China's Overseas NGO Law

Mark Sidel recently published "A Decade of China’s Overseas NGO Law: Where Are We Now?" in Alliance magazine. Nearly a decade after China's Overseas NGO Law took effect in 2017, foreign nonprofits continue to operate in China, but under increasingly restrictive conditions that have sharply narrowed the space for advocacy and civil society work. Sidel argues that China has steadily “securitized” oversight of overseas NGOs, placing them under close supervision by public security authorities and limiting activities considered politically sensitive. Foreign organizations can still support service-oriented projects such as education, health and poverty alleviation, but work related to legal reform, labor rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ advocacy, governance and broader civil society development has largely disappeared. The law also requires overseas groups to secure official Chinese sponsors and navigate burdensome registration and reporting systems. As restrictions have intensified, many international nonprofits have reduced their presence or left China entirely. The result, writes Sidel, is a more localized but tightly controlled nonprofit sector with little remaining room for independent advocacy or rights-based activism. Read the article.