China Herald: civil society

Showing posts with label civil society. Show all posts

Monday, October 16, 2023

China should improve position of single mothers – Zhang Lijia

While fixing the dropping birth rate in China might be challenging, improving the current position of single mothers should be a no-brainer, says author Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. Some provinces have started to deal with the Sishengzi, or “secretly born child”, as a growing number of women do not want to marry, but still want to have a child, she writes.

Zhang Lijia:

Sishengzi, or “secretly born child”, is a derogatory term to describe children born out of wedlock. For a woman to raise such a child in China used to be as difficult as climbing up the sky. To start with, without a marriage certificate, this child would not be able to get registered, which meant they could not go to a state school, take a flight or get vaccinated.
However, there are signs that suggest the Chinese government has begun to loosen control to a certain degree. In recent years, provinces such as Sichuan, Guangdong, Anhui and Shaanxi have issued new regulations that allow unmarried mothers to register their children. More governments are likely to follow suit.
In July, the authorities in Xian announced that single mothers could now apply for child subsidies and insurance. These developments are encouraging, but in my view, the central government needs to go much further.
The new regulations were developed amid increasing concerns of a plummeting birth rate. China allowed couples to have two children in 2016, with the limit going up to three children five years later, but not enough couples have taken up the offer. China’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.09 last year. The enormous cost of raising a child and changing values have also contributed to this alarming trend.

Monday, December 31, 2018

Religious crackdown: part of controlling civil society by the state - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

The crackdown on two of five churches has not so much to do with religion, but is part of the government to control civil society, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, including NGO's and others outside government control, at CNN.

CNN:

Analysts and civil rights advocates say Beijing is intensifying its campaign against worshipers seen as an ideological threat to the party's monopoly on power.

"We are now entering a new era of repression toward two of China's five religions, which is different than what we've seen over the past 40 years," said Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao."... Experts say restrictions on worship help those in power mold religious institutions to their liking, or co-opt them altogether.

Christianity and Islam, Johnson said, are seen as particularly threatening because the party views them as having "strong foreign ties." "(That's) even though both religions have long roots in China and are very much localized," he added...

While other communist regimes have also been hostile to religion, Johnson said the crackdown on Christianity and Islam was less about the faiths' practices and beliefs and more about the China's ability to control them.

"Under President Xi, the government has further tightened control over Christianity in its broad efforts to 'Sinicize' religion or 'adopt Chinese characteristics' -- in other words, to ensure that religious groups support the government and the Communist Party," Human Rights Watch said in a statement calling for the release of Wang Yi, the Chengdu pastor, and his fellow believers...

It remains unclear how the Vatican deal will affect Protestant churches like Early Rain, but critics believe it comes from the same playbook as the arrests in Chengdu -- it's all about control.

"This goes back to a broader effort by the government to crack down on anything that can be construed as civil society -- in other words, groups like religious organizations, or NGOs, that are outside government control," Johnson said.

More at CNN.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form?

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Engagement with China is the only way forward - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China veteran Kaiser Kuo looks back at the ups and down in the relationship between China and the US. Engagement is the only way forward, he says. Despite turns in the wrong direction, "not all the gains (of the past) have by any means been erased, he says at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo:

Writing about this now, in the year 2018, and just a week or so after the state constitution was amended to remove term limits, it’s hard perhaps to remember what things looked like in the mid-2000s, before the decidedly illiberal turn that most China-watchers would date to roughly 2009. But at that time, a fair-minded assessment of political liberalization in China (again, by a standard that didn’t look at full democratization as the sine qua non of “political reform”) would have concluded that engagement had indeed moved China in the desired direction.

China had become substantially more deliberative and participatory. Civil society (if we use NGOs as a proxy for its health) was looking quite robust. The public sphere, which had simply never existed in China prior to the advent of the internet, was doing well. Internet censorship, especially compared with the years after 2013, was not nearly as severe. Many new media outlets — sure, ultimately state-controlled but operated mainly on market principles, and featuring quite aggressive investigative reporting — were flourishing. Rule of law, especially in the commercial sphere and in such areas as intellectual property protection, made significant gains in this period. Experiments in village-level democratic elections were under way in many provinces.

Engagement with the U.S. was certainly not the only factor in this, but drawing China into global trade regimes, permitting and encouraging more exchange at all levels (in business, in state-to-state, mil-to-mil, people-to-people, etc.) most assuredly did facilitate this progress. Still, credit is due to the Chinese leaders who encouraged this (Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao) and, of course, to the ultimately irrepressible internal dynamic.

In the years since, we’ve tended to focus on how much of this has eroded, how much backsliding we’ve seen. That there has been movement in the “wrong” direction (I happen to think, anyway, that it’s the wrong direction) is not really deniable. But not all the gains have by any means been erased.

It worries me that right now we’re so quick to condemn proponents of engagement, and to draw the conclusion that China under the CCP is simply doomed to increasingly rigid authoritarianism. There have been chills and tightenings in the past; there’s no reason to assume that this will be substantially different. It may last longer, and it may be more forceful, but how we (the U.S. and other Western powers) react to it will most certainly be one factor in how long it lasts and how deep it goes.

Engagement remains our wisest general policy predisposition when it comes to China. The alternative is, to me, a reckless and shortsighted path. It may not yield everything we want, but it will move the ball down the field. And it may not feel as good, as Barack Obama once said. Speaking in Oslo after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (whatever you may think of the wisdom of that award!), he defended engagement, saying, “I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.”

More in SubChina. Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategy experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

China's rising online civil society - Howard French

Howard French by Fantake via Flickr

China has changed profoundly, since its first high-profile internet case, the police killing Sun Zhigang in 2003, till today's opinion blogger Han Han, writes former New York Times correspondent Howard French in the Columbia Journalism Review. But not only its over 400 million online citizens have changed, also the government adapted.
Take the recent Japan-China spat, and Han Han's take on it:

Given the size of China’s online audience, which is roughly 400 million and still rising fast, Han Han could also be the world’s most popular blogger—his 425 million cumulative hits place him at the top of Sina.com’s rankings....

Beijing has played a complicated hand in the matter, ardently fanning the embers of nationalism in the state-controlled press, while carefully censoring Internet discussion of the issue with an eye toward preventing big demonstrations in the streets and other mass mobilization, which the state fears could get out of control.

With the crisis with Japan deepening, Han Han mercilessly probed the contradictions in the government’s position while warning his followers of the dangers of manipulation by the state. “In my opinion, if everyone and everything is doing well, life is as one wishes, the wife, kids, home, car, work, leisure, health, all are okay, one can, under the guise of national sentiment, go and make a fuss about protecting the Diaoyu Islands. But if you have something of your own that you haven’t protected, first protect that and then we can talk. Don’t worry about something so far off.”

To those who decide to protest anyway, he continued: “Don’t be surprised when after the battle, you, mortally injured, see the leaders and the invaders [the Japanese] cheerfully discussing a big business deal.”

Howard French quotes many other observers, whose opinions on the direction China is taking vary a lot. But he ends with a fairly positive note:

Democracy may be too big a short- or even medium-term expectation for China, even with its burgeoning Internet culture. But from my perspective as a longtime observer of this country, if China’s civil society is the key factor in the country’s evolution toward a future in which the Communist Party must accept greater limits to its power, the Internet is this evolution’s beating heart.

Much more in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Commercial
Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.