If I had started by telling the Ch'anghsintien workers that they must overthrow the Peking government and set up a dictatorship of the workers, they would have been frightened away. It would have been impossible even to establish the school for workers' children.Footnote 1
Zhang Guotao 张国焘The long forgotten history of the first Chinese labour movement can yield many insights into contemporary China. In particular, as the quote at the beginning of this article attests, the memoirs of Zhang Guotao, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a labour agitator in the early 1920s, are a goldmine for those who wish to gain a better understanding of the challenges faced by Chinese labour activists today. As a young student coming from a wealthy family, Zhang knew all too well how hard it was to earn the trust of the workers and interest them in political struggle. For instance, in 1919, whilst leading a students' propaganda group, he visited Changxindian 长辛店 for the first time, then a major railway centre not far from Beijing. On that occasion, the workers had welcomed the students and invited them to take advantage of their meagre hospitality. Zhang eagerly ate everything, unfazed by the flies flying around the food, while his companions politely refused. As he recounted fifty years later:
I was the only one who gulped the food down noisily, like the workers, while talking patriotism with them. Perhaps because of my conduct the workers did not create a mental division between me as a student and themselves as workers. I was able to establish an intimate relationship with some of them as a result.Footnote 2
This simple anecdote not only provides some hints as to why the Chinese authorities today maintain a distrustful attitude towards these kinds of organizations – after all, the CCP itself at the beginning was not so different from today's labour NGOs – but also brings to our attention one of the fundamental challenges for labour activists today: how to gain the workers' trust.
Although the relevant literature sets out the limits and challenges faced by labour NGOs in the Chinese context, it systematically dismisses the issue of the relationship between these organizations and the workers. Furthermore, the available literature generally agrees with the idea that these grassroots organizations contribute to legal reform and give rise to social demands for legal justice.Footnote 3 In fact, the narrative about Chinese civil society organizations (CSOs) active in defending migrant workers' rights sees these groups as “increasingly powerful instruments through which Chinese people take part in public affairs, develop and articulate personal interests, and collectively form a more active and participatory citizenry.”Footnote 4 This is in line with the mainstream literature on NGOs, a field where, as Claire Mercer has pointed out, these organizations have become inextricably bound up with concepts like civil society, democracy, good governance and social capital, and where there is a tendency to take their positive role in democratization as axiomatic.Footnote 5
Although in the last few years various scholars in the field of development studies have begun to raise concerns about this Manichean view of NGOs, dissonant views about the role of labour NGOs in China are still rare. Among them, the most prominent is undoubtedly Ching Kwan Lee, who, in a paper co-authored with Yuan Shen, argues that Chinese NGOs are little short of an “anti-solidarity machine,” undermining the collective power of the workers.Footnote 6 Some critical insights can also be found in the work of Chloé Froissart, who, although being relatively positive in her assessment of these organizations, claims that,
[labour] NGOs are […] also working for the benefit of the Party-state, to which they adhere, minimising social conflict and orienting reforms in a direction that can help the Party to maintain its power. While an integral part of the social movement of migrant workers, these organizations also delimit this social movement in their own way. These limitations are why some migrants question these NGOs' legitimacy to represent them – which may be migrant workers' first step towards a more assertive and autonomous stand.Footnote 7
It is worth noticing that this is one of the few passages in the existing literature that mentions the lack of trust among those very workers who, according to the narrative, should look upon these organizations as their representatives.
While recognizing that it is not possible to generalize, this article challenges not only the idea of labour NGOs being a progressive force for political change, but also the belief, widely shared among the international labour movement, that these groups are the sprouts of independent unionism in China. In particular, I will argue that many of these NGOs are struggling as a consequence of a substantial lack of “social capital” owing to their weak relations with the workers, the state and between themselves. I will also argue that focusing on the relationship between these organizations and the state – as much of the existing literature does – is risky, because it means overlooking their relations with other important actors, such as workers and foreign donors.
This article is based on long periods of fieldwork and engagement with Chinese labour NGOs over a span of three years. During my fieldwork, which took place from January 2009 to December 2011, I observed on a daily basis the implementation of four international cooperation projects carried out by a European trade union NGO and three different Chinese labour NGOs.Footnote 8 For the first six months, I served as project manager in the first of the four projects; during the remaining fieldwork period, I worked as a part-time assistant to the resident project manager. Besides participating in various activities, attending meetings between partners and constantly monitoring the financial situation of the various projects, I also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with the leaders and personnel of 16 grassroots labour NGOs, mainly based in Shenzhen. Whenever possible, the interviews were conducted in the offices of the NGOs and materials produced by the organizations were collected. In order to avoid any bias in the results, I conducted these interviews as an independent researcher.
After an explanation of the theoretical framework and a short overview of the historical process which led to the birth of labour NGOs in China, this article will analyse the relations between these NGOs and four fundamental actors: the state, the workers, international donors and other organizations in the same sector. However, first a clarification about the sampling method adopted in this article is needed. As many scholars have already pointed out, the term “NGO” as used in the international literature is rather vague.Footnote 9 The “labour NGOs” to which I refer are organizations which fulfil three conditions: first, their mission has to be related to the protection of migrant workers' rights; second, they need to have an office or a physical base; finally, they need to have obtained some kind of official registration as a company or, possibly, as a non-profit organization. All of the groups involved in this research fit this description, except for one NGO which did not have any registration but which was physically based in an apartment rented by the founder, and another organization which had recently given up its office for economic reasons. Although I recognize the fact that migrant workers' informal organizations could be classified as “labour NGOs,” I have excluded them from the focus of this paper.
Which Social Capital?
The concept of social capital emerged in the late 1980s in the works of James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu. From the start, it has been characterized by fundamental ambiguities. According to Coleman's definition, “social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors – whether persons or corporate actors – within the structure.”Footnote 10 Pierre Bourdieu, however, defines social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”Footnote 11 More specifically, while Coleman finds social capital useful to describe how individual attainment is affected by family or other aspects of the micro-social environment, Bourdieu describes it as one of a number of capitals, including cultural, symbolic and economic, and emphasizes its context-specific nature as well as the questions it raises about class, power and conflict.Footnote 12
In the early 1990s, the term social capital was applied to politics and the state, and assumed a completely different meaning. This was mainly down to the publication of Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work.Footnote 13 Analysing the nature and intensity of interaction in civil society in different parts of Italy, Putnam argues that the “networks of civic engagement” are the principal actors in determining the performance of regional government. In his view, a strong civil society would guarantee a strong government, while a weak civil society would greatly impair the government's performance. According to Putnam, social capital arises from civic engagement and it is to be understood as the “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.”Footnote 14 With this new connotation, social capital ended up becoming one of the buzzwords of the development lexicon, adopted enthusiastically not only by scholars, but also by international organizations, governments and NGOs. In the late 1990s, the World Bank went so far as to herald it as the “missing link” in development.Footnote 15
Yet, over the past 20 years, social scientists have repeatedly highlighted the theoretical ambiguities of the term, denouncing the intrinsic determinism of Putnam's view.Footnote 16 In 2002, Adler and Kwon counted no less than 20 different definitions of social capital in the existing literature, distinguishing between “bridging views,” which focus primarily on social capital as a resource that inheres in the social network tying of a focal actor or other actors; “bonding views,” which focus on collective actors' internal characteristics; and a third group worded so as to be neutral in this internal/external definition.Footnote 17 According to Putzel, “social capital has become the latest elixir within discussions about development, becoming ‘all things to all people’ in a fashion not dissimilar to the fate of ‘human development’ and ‘sustainable development’ in recent years.”Footnote 18 Knorringa and Van Staveren have underlined the necessity of a critical approach that is able to stress, among other things, “the role of power in the creation of social capital, and in the inequalities of social capital, as well as processes of inclusion and exclusion in social relations and, hence, social capital.”Footnote 19 Going even further, Ben Fine has criticized the “McDonaldisation” of social capital and the ensuing degradation of social sciences, advocating a thorough rejection of the concept.Footnote 20
As the literature on social capital has continued to grow, some authors have dismissed Putnam's theorization of social capital and retained the hypothetical value of the earlier theorizations by Coleman and Bourdieu.Footnote 21 This article will follow the same path, and refers to Bourdieu's definition of social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.” From this point of view, social capital proves to be an important device, allowing the researcher to address the role of individuals and organizations within the complex and multi-layered context of their social interactions, taking into account the shifting power relations between the various subjects involved.
In this article, social capital will be used as a framework to analyse not only the relationship between the Chinese labour NGOs and the state, as the existing literature prevalently does, but also their position vis-à-vis the workers, international donors and other grassroots organizations. Rejecting the determinism of much of the literature on social capital, such a multi-layered analysis will embrace the context-specific nature of social capital, highlighting the fact that the role played by organized groups in civil societies depends crucially on the larger political setting and on the complex, and sometimes contradictory, interactions with other actors, and not on some supposed general rule which equates NGOs with democratization or good governance.Footnote 22 Moreover, such an approach will grant a more accurate perspective on the dynamics which inform Chinese society, balancing the attention to “vertical links” between state and grassroots actors with a new emphasis on those “horizontal links” within society, which the relevant literature has so often neglected.Footnote 23
Setting the Scene
Much has been written about civil society in China and many labels have been put forward in order to adapt this concept to fit the Chinese reality. Nevertheless, there seems to be no disagreement on the fact that Chinese civil society has gone through at least four different phases of development: 1) from the late 1970s to spring 1989, when commercial, financial and professional organizations, taking advantage of a relaxed political and legal framework, experienced an extraordinary growth; 2), between the repression of 1989 and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, when the political spaces available for these organizations shrank and there was a visible stoppage in the growth of Chinese CSOs; 3) from 1995 to 2008, when, despite the rigid legal framework, CSOs experienced a new boom; and 4) from 2008 to today, when, in the wake of the Wenchuan 汶川 earthquake, welfare-oriented NGOs rapidly started networking and partnering up with the state, while more rights-oriented organizations encountered an increasingly repressive political environment.Footnote 24
Labour NGOs appeared relatively late on the Chinese scene, during the third phase of development. Unlike more welfare-oriented organizations, for reasons of political sensitivity they have been forced to operate informally from the outset, within the sphere of what Mary Gallagher has termed “informal civil society.”Footnote 25 Their only choice has been either to register themselves as companies or not register at all. The first labour NGOs appeared in the mid-1990s, following the Fourth World Conference on Women. The pioneering organizations were the Beijing Migrant Women's Club (Beijing dagongmei zhi jia 北京打工妹之家), set up by the organizers of the publication Rural Women Knowing All, and the Beijing Action for the Community Sisters (Beijing shequ jiemei xing 北京社区姐妹行). Both registered as companies in 1996. Roughly at the same time, a group of activists in Shenzhen founded the Chinese Working Women's Network (Nügong guanhuai 女工关怀).Footnote 26
It is not surprising that the first labour organizations in China had a strong focus on gender issues. After the chill in the relations between state and society following the events of spring 1989, the World Conference on Women sparked the rebirth of Chinese civil society, with women's rights organizations at the fore. The first labour NGOs without a gender bias appeared only in the late 1990s, with the Little Bird Mutual-Aid Hotline (Beijing xiaoxiaoniao huzhu rexian 北京小小鸟互助热线), founded in Beijing in 1999, and the Migrant Workers' Document Handling Service (Dagongzu wenshu chuli fuwubu 打工族文书处理服务部), set up in Guangzhou in 1998. Since then, labour NGOs have sprung up at such a rate that some Chinese commentators have gone so far as to describe them as the beginning of a “Chinese labour self-salvation movement” (laogong zijiu yundong 劳工自救运动).Footnote 27
A new phase of growth of labour NGOs was registered in the early years of the new century following a shift in the public discourse on migrant labour in the wake of Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 and Wen Jiabao's 温家宝 rise to power.Footnote 28 Once again, it is not surprising that among the 30 labour NGOs listed in an unpublished survey conducted by Zhang Zhiru 张治儒, the founder and leader of the Shenzhen-based Chunfeng Labour Disputes Service Centre (Chunfeng laodong zhengyi fuwubu 春风劳动争议服务部), only eight registered as companies between 1996 and 2001, as opposed to 21 which obtained their registrations between 2002 and 2010.Footnote 29
According to the available evidence, there are just a few dozen or so labour NGOs in mainland China. Unfortunately, the only data are based on the personal estimates of people who work in the sector. For example, in 2007, Liu Kaiming 刘开明, founder and director of the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation (Dangdai shehui guancha yanjiusuo 当代社会观察研究所), told the Chinese press that there were, in total, about 50 labour NGOs involving more than 200 people in the Zhujiang 珠江 (Pearl River) Delta.Footnote 30 Roughly at the same time, Huang Yan 黄岩 from the South China Normal University told another reporter that there were about 30 organizations, each employing two or three activists, in the same region.Footnote 31 Zhang Zhiru lists just 30 organizations for the whole country, with addresses and some basic information about their legal status and activities.
The geographic distribution of the organizations on Zhang Zhiru's list is uneven, with 12 in Shenzhen, seven in Beijing, three in Guangzhou, two in Dongguan 东莞 and only one each in Zhuhai 珠海, Huizhou 惠州, Qingdao 青岛, Chongqing 重庆, Yongkang 永康 and Xiamen 厦门. That the majority of Chinese labour NGOs operate in just two cities – Beijing and Shenzhen – could be down to the fact that both localities have attracted a huge rural migrant workforce, with all the ensuing social problems, but also because these areas have a competitive advantage when it comes to accessing foreign funds. This is facilitated in Beijing by the presence of international embassies and institutions, as well as a large international business community, and in Shenzhen by its proximity to Hong Kong. It could also be argued that the attitude of local authorities has played a role in determining this distribution as well, as some local governments are considered hostile to CSOs, while others, for example in Shenzhen, are seen as far more “open.” The fact that these organizations rely so heavily on the availability of international donors and the attitude of the authorities – and not so much on the presence and support of migrant workers – is a crucial point when attempting to explain the dynamics that inform these organizations' existence and survival.
Labour NGOs and the State
There is a wide array of literature about state–society relations in China, with theoretical positions ranging from “corporatism” to “civil society,” plus a series of intermediate concepts such as “socialist corporatism,” “agency corporatism,” “semi-civil society” and “state-led civil society.”Footnote 32 And yet, as Shawn Shieh has pointed out, “state–NGO relations in China are becoming too complex and dynamic to be captured by one of these frameworks. […] [They] do not fit into any single pattern; they assume different forms and dynamics across sectors and regions.”Footnote 33 In particular, Shieh distinguishes between three different interaction modes which overlap but are not mutually exclusive: regulation, negotiation and societalization.
The concept of “negotiation” is particularly relevant in the realm of labour NGOs. Since it is impossible for these organizations to gain any kind of official recognition unless they register as companies, their very existence is bound to their ability to negotiate with the authorities. Generally, the first negotiation takes place during the initial phase of an organization's existence, at the point of registration. It is a precondition for all CSOs wishing to register with the local civil affairs bureaus to find a “mother-in-law” (popo 婆婆) willing to act as their supervisor. Labour NGOs usually begin by approaching the local branches of the official union or the Disabled Persons' Federation.Footnote 34 All of the NGO leaders I interviewed stated that they had repeatedly tried to find a state agency or an institution willing to grant them an affiliation, but that all their efforts had been in vain. It is therefore usually the case that labour NGO requests to register are not accepted and so they have no choice other than to register as a company, or else not register at all. For example, in 2004, one NGO leader, a former migrant worker, tried to register an organization. Local cadres sent him from one office to another, before referring him to the local branch of the trade union:
When we were trying to set up the Shenzhen migrant workers' association, I went to all the departments of Shenzhen's government: the office for the management of rented rooms, the labour bureau, the civil affairs bureau, the commercial bureau and every other government bureau. I looked everywhere for a unit willing to grant us an affiliation, I went to any department with even a minimal connection with labour issues or with migrants, and I was bounced from one place to the other just like a ball. […] Since I could not find a unit and I could not legally register the organization in any possible way, I wrote a letter to the Shenzhen city government and to the mayor. The letter was forwarded to the civil affairs bureau, which told me to go to the trade union. And what did the union say? This thing that you are setting up, isn't it a replacement for the union? Our government's department has already got a union, companies have unions, what are you setting up this thing for? [...] Isn't it an independent union? Of course it is not possible!Footnote 35
And yet, despite the impossibility of obtaining any kind of official registration, many officials were privately sympathetic towards this man's mission:
[Many officials] looking at our registration form and at our constitution said that we were really good. They also said: “I can't give you my approval, because the person who approves then has to take responsibility for it. How can I know if you are doing good things or bad things?” Many officials gave us a lot of support, saying that a young person like me was really not bad, but giving us their approval was out of the question.Footnote 36
However, some of my interviewees explicitly emphasized the fact that their organizations would not be able to operate without the tacit approval and support of the authorities:
If I said that we never received any support from the authorities, then I would be lying. If we hadn't received any support from the authorities, not a single one of our activities could have been carried out. Nevertheless, we have been conducting our activities for so many years now and the government has never said anything about supporting us. Many times they have just been tacitly agreeing and then you knew that you could do some things.Footnote 37
The tacit agreement that results from this negotiation implies that NGOs not only agree not to carry out any kind of “sensitive” activity – like representing workers in strikes or collective disputes – but also a commitment to promote the legal discourse sanctioned by the state.Footnote 38 For example, according to one of my interviewees, during the so-called “wave of labour unrest” in spring 2010, some of the striking workers approached his organization seeking legal assistance, but he turned them away for fear of stirring up trouble with the public security bureau. Only a few labour NGOs today are willing to deal with these kinds of sensitive situations. In most cases, in order to survive, these organizations focus their activities on more innocuous matters, such as providing information about labour laws and offering legal counselling aimed at addressing ex post cases of unpaid salaries and other individual rights' violations; in so doing, they become instrumental to the paramount goals of the authorities by maintaining social stability.
Negotiations often involve harassment by the authorities. Many of the NGO leaders I interviewed described how public security officials would invite them to “have tea” (he cha 喝茶). While these meetings generally do not involve any physical violence, and indeed some NGO leaders even described their relationship with their “handling officers” in friendly terms, there were occasions when public security officials went so far as to get their colleagues in other provinces to put pressure on the families of certain NGO leaders. These pressures led to more than one employee quitting his job:
There was a time when some national security officials used to go to our home villages in order to investigate our family situation. Public security over there went to my mom and asked: your daughter is already so old, let us have a look at your family planning. In 2008, national security often looked for me in order to “have some tea.” They said: do you have time? Let's have some tea, talk for a while, be friends. Faced with this, some of our employees were scared, but most of them left after one or two years.Footnote 39
However, even with these tacit agreements and negotiations, the survival of these organizations cannot be guaranteed. One recent example of state repression took place in the early months of 2012, when various Shenzhen labour NGOs became the targets of a wave of threats by the authorities, and at least seven of them were temporarily shut down.Footnote 40 Curiously enough, this happened in conjunction with the establishment of a new federation under the aegis of the provincial union, the Federation of Social Service Organizations for Guangdong Workers (Guangdongsheng zhigong fuwulei shehuizuzhi lianhehui 广东省职工服务类社会组织联合会). According to its constitution, this body is tasked with:
The reinforcement of the overall planning and the coordination with the various key positions; to assist, unite, support and make contact with labour social service organizations, bodies and specialized individuals, in order to provide public interest activities and services aimed at the workers, to protect workers' legal rights and interests, to stimulate harmonious labour relations and to push forward the realization of social justice and equity.Footnote 41
Labour NGOs were invited to attend the meeting which led to the establishment of the federation, and some of them eventually even joined as “members on probation” (bei'an tuanti huiyuan 备案团体会员). Since the same dynamics were simultaneously replicated in other sectors of Guangdong civil society, for example under the leadership of the Women's Federation, these new developments could be the premise for an attempt at remoulding some sectors of civil society in a corporatist fashion, with the state not resiling from the use of threats and force to achieve its aims.Footnote 42 If this proves to be true, the ability of labour NGOs to negotiate with the state will become more important than ever. In any case, these interactions suggest that Chinese labour NGOs lack what has been defined as “linking social capital” – that is to say, the kind of social capital which comes from connections between those with differing levels of power or social status, for example links between the political elite and the general public or between individuals from different social classes.Footnote 43
Labour NGOs and the Workers
While much has been written about the relationship between the state and labour NGOs, considerably less attention has been paid to the bond between these organizations and the workers. During my fieldwork, I discovered that, exactly as Zhang Guotao had described decades earlier, many labour NGO leaders and employees found it difficult to approach migrant workers and gain their trust. The reasons for this are multiple. First of all, labour NGOs have to deal with the migrants' high mobility. This prevents them from developing not only the “social capital” necessary to take root in the territory, but also an adequate “human capital” of volunteers and activists. According to a young NGO employee, the fact that the people they approached and built a relationship with often switched jobs and left after just a few months was the main difficulty her organization had to face, a problem even more serious than political troubles.Footnote 44 Second, the staff of some of these organizations is mainly made up of young university graduates without any experience or common cultural background with the workers, thus it is hard for them to build a relationship with the people they are supposed to help.
Yet, ascribing the difficulties these organizations encounter in relating to migrant workers to the issues of mobility, qualifications and social backgrounds of employees is reductive. Even those activists with worker backgrounds and years of experience in factories complained about the troubles they encounter when trying to connect with the migrants they wish to help. The fact that communication problems go beyond social class barriers is particularly evident in the following interview with two migrant workers employed by a labour NGO:
A: When the workers (gongyou 工友) come to us and don't get to the point, I feel...
B: Some workers go on and on repeating uninterruptedly the same thing, they simply don't make sense. We can't help them and at the same time we don't want to discourage them. We want to help them, but sometimes it is really annoying.Footnote 45
Another issue is that migrant workers rarely believe that someone outside the state is willing to provide them with free assistance. A young male migrant employed by a NGO which focused on work accidents and occupational diseases told me: “I wish that workers would come to us to seek help, it would all be so easy then! The hardest part of my job is finding the workers and convincing them to accept our help.”Footnote 46 One of his main responsibilities was to visit local hospitals looking for injured workers. When he found someone, he had to try to convince them of the goodness of his organization and of the free nature of the services they provided. According to him, he often had to compete with professional lawyers and “citizen representatives” (gongmin daili 公民代理) offering the same services for fees:
According to a traditional saying we have here in China, in the world there is no such thing as a free meal. When we talk to the workers, we do that as a non-profit organization and we do not take anything from them, not materially, not spiritually, absolutely nothing at all. And yet, because of this Chinese tradition of “there are no free meals,” everybody asks us: why do you want to help us? They cannot understand this point, that's all, but I am confident that some day in the future they will understand.Footnote 47
Despite the reassurances and explanations to the contrary, many migrant workers believe that anybody who offers voluntarily to help them must have an ulterior motive (bieyou yongxin 别有用心). They are not worried about any possible “political” consequences, but they are wary of falling victim to scams, and in particular, pyramid schemes (chuanxiao 传销). As one of my interviewees, an NGO labour activist, informed me:
What can I say? I believe that every person has a good heart, but they [the workers] are smart, they can see if you are one of them. For example, we never raise the issue of money, we are very clear on this. For this reason they think: could it be that you are doing chuanxiao or some promotional activity? Could it be that after all you'll ask for money? Situations like these naturally happen. When we face injured workers it is easier: we are injured workers too and there is a feeling of mutual empathy.Footnote 48
During my fieldwork, I witnessed many manifestations of this distrust. For example, in January 2011, I took part in a training activity organized in a restaurant in a suburb of Shenzhen. The training, the first of a series, was aimed at giving migrant workers some basic ideas on how to use the internet to protect their rights. The first class involved about 20 workers, recruited through the human resource manager of a company nearby, a woman who was on good terms with the NGO leader. While the trainer was inviting the workers to share their experiences, several diners in the restaurant were commenting: “Look at them, they are doing chuanxiao.” On that occasion, I tried to persuade the trainer to get a private room upstairs, but he refused, arguing that if we did so the workers would think that it was some kind of scam and would have left instantly. Much of the complimentary food and drink provided by the NGO was left untouched on the table: despite every reassurance, the participants were still afraid that they would be asked to pay for them.
This lack of trust and credibility should be read in the context of the Chinese public's general distrust of NGOs, foundations and other non-profit entities.Footnote 49 Many scandals involving charities have been reported on by the press in recent years, creating a huge impact on the public's perceptions. Furthermore, in recent surveys on the public's trust of legal institutions, it was found that, surprisingly, Chinese citizens are more trusting of those institutions that are closely associated with the state than with non-bureaucratic actors.Footnote 50 If these findings are applied to the relationship between NGOs and migrant workers, it could be argued that the distance between the state and the NGOs provides another factor that undermines the credibility of the NGOs in workers' eyes. This has been confirmed in some of my interviews:
The government didn't grant us any official recognition, therefore we are in an awkward position because, you know, people come and ask us... “Precisely what do you do?” We say that we try to explain some laws and regulations or tell them how to protect their rights and so on... So they say: “Do you have any certificate from the government? And the answer is no, we don't have any. As a consequence they prefer not to accept our help.Footnote 51
All the testimonies quoted in this section come from activists working on the front line in organizations based in workers' communities. It is not my intention to generalize or to suggest that labour NGOs are thought of as useless in the minds of Chinese workers; however, I do wish to highlight one of the major challenges faced by labour activists in China today – gaining the trust of migrant workers. As I discovered, in many cases, personal relations are the key to recruiting participants to training sessions and activities. Furthermore, small allowances, free meals and reimbursement of travel costs are provided as necessary incentives to take part in the activities. It could be argued that, on the one hand, this lack of trust is unavoidable in a reality in which the activities have to be carried out in a semi-clandestine way, without the involvement of the media or publicity. However, on the other hand, it is also clearly a symptom of a bigger and more worrying issue – that these organizations lack appeal and credibility among migrant workers. Since trust is one of the main features of “social capital,” this situation suggests once again that there is a lack of trust in the labour NGOs.
Labour NGOs and International Donors
Given their ambiguous relations with the state and the workers, the labour NGOs' main source of “social capital” resides with foreign donors who supply them with most of the funds for their activities. In the context of an internal donations market which is still immature and monopolized by foundations with connections to the state, this kind of dependence triggers at least three structural problems: first, since international funding is generally tied to projects which generally last from a few months to a couple of years, labour NGOs cannot formulate any long-term plans; second, in order to survive, labour NGOs feel bound to accept conditions set by the donors that are hardly feasible in China, for example those concerning accounting regulations; finally, the struggle for scarce funds sparks competition of sorts among labour organizations.
In line with findings by Jude Howell and Anthony Spires, I noticed during the fieldwork that international institutions active in supporting Chinese NGOs do indeed emphasize the issue of “capacity building,” using cooperation as an educative tool aimed at improving technical skills and organizational capability among local grassroots groups.Footnote 52 Yet, such emphasis should not be overrated. During fieldwork, I was actively involved in the drafting of various project proposals for international donors and I observed that, in practice, this emphasis is little more than a formality, with “capacity building” being employed more as a keyword for obtaining a higher evaluation (exactly as other politically charged terms such as “human rights,” “participation” or “democracy” might be used), than as a real guideline for proposing meaningful activities.
This is even more evident in the case of Chinese labour NGOs. Given the scarcity of “social capital” when it comes to authorities and migrant workers, these organizations need to gain the trust of international donors. In order to do this, they have no choice but to adopt the rhetorical devices that emerge from the international discourse on democracy and human rights. Furthermore, they also need to translate these concepts into a practice which is both “saleable” to international donors and acceptable to Chinese authorities by emphasizing the participative approach of their projects, as well as the capacity-building component.
Unfortunately, migrant workers' needs – and even their availability to participate – do not feature prominently in these proposals. Projects which look great on paper often in reality turn out to be a fiasco because of the lack of interest from migrant workers. For example, a project to empower workers through the use of social media or to inform them about their legal rights looks good in theory, but can be difficult to implement if the migrant workers are reluctant to get involved in the first place. Another example of a project I observed was a new hotline set up for workers to report grievances. This kind of enterprise appeals to donors as an important tool to enhance migrant workers' access to justice. However, a few months after implementation, it turned out that the labour NGO, which had obtained substantial funding to run the hotline, received on average 18 telephone calls a month. Even if some organizations report hundreds of calls and visits to their office a month, these claims are very hard to verify and in some cases are questioned even by the people who have worked for them in the past.
In the middle of this plurality of discourses, languages and practices, handling the relations between a local labour NGO, an international NGO and the donors can become a very complicated affair. Relations between the various actors are often straddled by underground tensions. A survey on the assessment of international donors by Chinese NGOs carried out in June 2010 pointed out that the main perception among Chinese NGO leaders was that “the relationship between donors and NGOs still follows a traditional top-down model, wherein the donor provides funding and the NGO must accept the conditions and terms set by the donor.”Footnote 53 According to this survey, Chinese NGO leaders think that the relationship between themselves and the donors is fundamentally unbalanced, with funding recipients being responsible for detailing how grants were spent and the results they achieved, and donors themselves having little or no accountability.
Even if there was little trace of this critical attitude among my interviewees, the practices used by the projects I observed tell a completely different story. The NGOs involved in these projects complained about the rigidity of the accounting rules set by the international donors, the excessive burden of the paperwork and the inconsistencies between the administrative requirements and national and local tax regulations. When faced with a reprimand from the foreign project manager about the chaotic situation of the project's accounts, one NGO employee retorted: “I am far more interested in the activities of the project than in the trivial things related to its financial administration. This is the reason why when you talk with me about some rules, I just memorize some general principles and then I work according to these principles.”Footnote 54
Such dynamics create misunderstandings and distortions, which in turn lead to “strategies of resistance” against international donors in the form of fake invoices, non-existent or pro-forma activities, or the recycling of previously produced materials. Contrary to common belief, in spite of retaining final control over the cash flow, the foreign project manager is utterly powerless to deal with this kind of behaviour from the local partner. Of course, he can refuse to authorize the expenditures, and yet he will not come to this decision lightly. Expatriate employees of international NGOs working in China on sensitive projects need to operate in semi-clandestine conditions, a situation that makes them dependent on the local partners. In extreme cases, the local partner can take advantage of this weakness, making the most of his ambiguous connections with the local state and the public security bodies. In the projects I observed, expatriate staff had been threatened at least twice: the first time, the threat came from a labour NGO leader who, when faced with the refusal to reimburse an expenditure, hinted that he would say something rather unpleasant in his next meeting with the public security bureau; the second time, an employee of the same organization who had been fired by the NGO leader decided to seek compensation from the expatriate manager, threatening “to talk with his friends in Shenzhen public security” if he did not get what he wanted.
The above accounts bring to light another limitation of the Chinese labour NGOs with regard to their relationship with international donors: their lack of transparency. In another case, an expatriate project manager found out that the local partner was paying the local employees lower salaries than was agreed in their contracts and obtained confirmation of the fact that many of the invoices and documents provided were fakes. This paradoxical situation – labour NGOs violating their own employees' rights – is not exceptional. In April 2009, a scandal rocked On Action (Zai xingdong 在行动), a labour organization founded in Beijing in 2006. According to the testimonies of former employees quoted in the Chinese media, On Action repeatedly enrolled the same workers for their training programmes – workers who also happened to be the personal acquaintances of the founder of the organization. In addition, the founder refused to sign the staff's labour contracts, paid miserable salaries and was unwilling to pay any social security.Footnote 55
Relations between Different NGOs
One last relationship should be taken into account, the one between the labour NGOs themselves. In my interviews, I found an attitude of mutual distrust among the leaders of these organizations, with many of them pointing out each other's deficiencies and problems. When questioned about problems of transparency, many interviewees agreed that the whole sector was flawed – I frequently heard the exclamation that “this industry of ours is too black!” (women zhe ge hangye tai heile 我们这个行业太黑了) – and that other organizations could not be trusted. Many interviewees were keen to share gossip about the corruption of other organizations, especially the internal difficulties of one NGO whose founders were busy fighting each other through legal channels, and the story of a NGO employee who absconded with a car and funds received from foreign donors. Whether these stories are true or not is irrelevant (some of them were); the fact is they exemplify the prevalent attitude in the sector of mutual distrust and a reluctance to cooperate.
There are examples of NGOs signing open letters together or sending people to take part in each other's activities, but these actions should not be seen as a sign of a rising esprit de corps. Even if the dominant discourse implies that Chinese authorities, both at the central and the local level, are very wary of any kind of network forming among grassroots organizations and that scarcity in funding leads to competition among these groups, there could be other, more personal, reasons for the absence of such a network among Chinese labour NGOs. For instance, in one of the projects that I observed, the expatriate project manager tried to get two organizations to cooperate on a series of small activities. However, one of the organizations tried to take the leading role by contracting out the job to the other instead of jointly working together to bring about the training programme and materials. In the end, the expatriate manager was forced to act as a mediator between the two in order to ensure that the project was implemented. This evidence suggests that Chinese labour NGOs today, taken as an industry, do not possess any substantial “bonding social capital.”
Conclusions
An analysis of Chinese labour NGOs which takes into account their interactions with the state, the workers and the donors highlights the fact that these organizations suffer from a serious lack of “social capital.” Since these organizations' survival depends on the support of foreign donors and their ability to negotiate with the state, the idea that they constitute a “self-salvation movement” among Chinese workers is highly questionable, not only with regard to the concept of there being a “movement” (yundong 运动), but also the idea of “self” (zi自) salvation. Chinese labour NGOs are scattered and lack any coordination, so they can hardly be defined as a “movement.” Moreover, their bond with the workers, their supposed “constituency,” is controversial to say the least. Given their uneven relationship with the authorities, their capacity to exert a significant influence on local and central policies is limited at best. At the same time, owing to their precarious legal status, they are unable to represent workers in sensitive situations such as strikes and labour stoppages.
Chinese labour NGOs are so fragmented and disconnected from their supposed constituency that it would be an overstatement to depict them as an important force contributing to legal reform and raising social demands for legal justice. Yet, as noted above, it is not possible to generalize. Each organization has its own features and some of them are doing excellent work guaranteeing migrant workers' access to justice and bringing the plight of Chinese workers to the attention of the media. In such a context, it is important for media operators, scholars and donors to reassess how they approach this sector of Chinese civil society, to gain a better understanding of each prospective partner organization before launching new projects and initiatives, and to resist jumping to conclusions after only a summary knowledge of an organization's history, management style and activities. As the many strikes and labour stoppages in China today indicate, there are reasons to believe that migrant workers will “save” themselves. However, what role these organizations will play in this “self-salvation” is still uncertain.
