This paper starts from three premises. Firstly, that the Chinese Communist Party and government have relatively little interest in or commitment to 'human rights' per se, as this is still regarded sceptically as a 'Western' concept. Secondly, that the Party and government's central concerns are stability, nation building and economic development. Thirdly, that Party and government view 'civil society' - or, at any rate, 'social forces' - not as an intrinsic good but as a possible mechanism for achieving social and economic goals in areas from which the state is withdrawing; and that this results in an inherent tension between the policy objectives of on the one hand encouraging 'social forces' and on the other hand strictly controlling them These premises are discussed briefly in order to establish a context for the three short 'case snapshots' that follow.

This does not pretend to be an empirical piece of research that examines 'representative' organisations and draws conclusions about their human rights role on the basis of that observation. On the contrary, the three cases were chosen specifically because the organisations and clusters of activists concerned appear to be significant 'rights advocates' and because they illustrate different issues that, in my view, deserve attention.

A closing discussion concludes that there exists in China something real, interesting and important that deserves to be called 'civil society', but that it has distinct Chinese characteristics; and that these should be taken seriously rather than simply dismissed as amounting to some-thing that is not authentically civil.

Human Rights in the Chinese Context

Although China is now a signatory to several international rights covenants and conventions, its political leadership remains generally sceptical of the notion of human rights. The last decade or so has, certainly, seen greater willingness to engage in rights discourse, which was previously dismissed altogether as 'bourgeois.' As well as reporting on inter-national conventions, the government engages in a regular human rights dialogue with the European Union. A number of academic centres have been established to research human rights, and courses in international human rights law have now been incorporated into pre-service legal education for law students. Some in the international community see these steps as steady progress and a validation of 'constructive engagement,' while others see them as mainly 'for show,' and a means by which China can deflect international criticism. The Chinese leadership, meanwhile, has quite consistently emphasised on the one hand the collective 'right to development' and, on the other, the significance of 'Asian values' - with the implication that Western conceptions of human rights cannot be applied without modification in China. I believe these claims should be taken more seriously than China's harshest critics will allow, if only because they show the depth of the change that would be necessary for the country's leadership to 'convert' to a rights based approach to government.

On the 'right to development' side, it is certainly true that, despite growing inequalities associated with economic liberalisation, the country has over the last 20 years made impressive progress in poverty reduction and extension of basic education, water and sanitation. The record is less impressive in public health, where declining access to services is threatening to undermine achievements in other sectors. Yet by most criteria and on most views, China is doing rather well at managing social and economic transition from communism, especially when compared to the former Soviet Union.

China is proud of this social and economic progress, and the leadership may well feel aggrieved at what it sees as lack of international recognition for its achievements. The 'right to development' is, moreover, a right that can be asserted against, or demanded of, the international community: thus, the leadership has frequently emphasised that China is 'still a developing country', and as such has the right to special consideration. In this context, some Chinese feel that 'human rights' is a weapon that foreigners deliberately select to berate and undermine them. A good example is the middle ranking official who recently complained to a Chinese news magazine that social science research funded by international foundations could become a 'human rights bullet' to be shot back at China. ¹

For reasons of internal politics it is also not surprising that the leadership should emphasise its relative success in meeting 'development rights'. For, in twenty years of market-oriented reforms, the Communist Party has abandoned nearly all recognisably communist eco-nomic and social policy. Since it has no electoral mandate for this volte-face, the Party's political legitimacy largely rests on its capacity to deliver greater prosperity to a broad mass of the population while at the same time reducing the adverse impacts of the reforms on those who are net 'reform losers', and alleviating the worst excesses of poverty. The Party undoubtedly believes that it is the only force capable of delivering these goods while maintaining social stability, and that the alternative to its rule is chaos. On this logic, individual rights are sacrificed to the greater public good of securing stability and prosperity.

The clearest and most notorious example of the 'right to development' being asserted over and above the rights of the individual is China's family planning policy. An estimated 200-300 million births have been 'avoided' as a result of this policy. Almost certainly, most Chinese people would consider this a good thing. Whether it is the result of personal reflection or a testament to the efficacy of government propaganda, in my experience nearly all Chinese people see population growth as a major and unsustainable drag on development, and accept the need for tough policies to control it - even if in most cases they personally would like to 'free ride' and have more children themselves. Yet the policy has of course severely curtailed individual rights - although, over the last five years some progress has been made towards more benevolent implementation of the policy.

It is easy enough for Western observers to make sense of this 'trade off' between collective and individual rights, even if we don't agree with it, in terms of moral and political utilitarianism. Beyond this, however, lies the complex and difficult question of 'Chinese values' - and the extent to which the attitudes to rights prevailing in China may in some sense be 'cultural'. We should exercise great care when venturing into this terrain, mindful of the long history of Western misunder-standing of China. It was, for example, once common for European philologists to pronounce that the Chinese language 'had no grammar.' This tells us more about the arrogance and myopia of the observer than about the thing observed. We should remember this before rushing to the conclusion that the Chinese are culturally prone to ignore rights.

Wang Gungwu has noted that classical Chinese had no word to express the abstract concept of 'rights'.² Around the end of the Qing dynasty, a century ago, 'quanli' began to be used to capture the notion although in previous centuries this term 'was often used in contrast to the Confucian ideal of jen-yi, meaning benevolence and righteousness.'³ Trad-itional China, Wang suggests, lacked not only a vocabulary to articulate the idea of rights, but also any significant underlying idea that individuals were invested with them. Duties, by contrast, pre-eminently those of loyalty to the ruler and filial piety, received great emphasis:

Through legal codes and handbooks of family instructions, through education and indoctrination, the need to be loyal and filial . . . [was] . . . Drummed into every child's head. And backing the injunctions were threats of severe punishments, in the name of the emperors and by the hand of the fathers themselves. Because the duties were expressed in such absolute terms there seems to have been no room to discuss what might have been the rights of the subject and of the son.

Thus, Wang concludes, in so far as traditional China had any conception of rights at all, these would be largely understood in terms of the 'right' of emperors to loyalty, and of parents to filial respect. Hierarchy was the sovereign concept, eclipsing other kinds of moral claim with 'the idea of above-below relations', which Wang first identifies as enshrined even in the religion of the early Shang dynasty, nearly four thousand years ago. Reciprocity of a kind could exist in such a moral universe, but it was a reciprocity founded on social relationships, rather than the reciprocity of fraternity or universality. Ruler and father had a sense of what was due to the subject and son, as well as a sense of what was due from them; but these were duties that arose from their respective roles in the hierarchy, rather than from any intrinsic moral claims. These themes are echoed by legal scholars such as Stanley Lubman, who writes:

Western thought makes the individual the bearer of rights and bases rights on the fundamental dignity and equality of every being. There were no such concepts in Chinese thought . . . In China, rights and duties are contextual, depending on the relationship of individuals to each other, and each conflict must be addressed in terms of the alternative consequences with a view to finding a basis for cooperation and harmony. ⁴

The Chinese Communist Party of course set out to overturn the 'feudal ideology' of traditional China. Although it saw this task mainly in terms of class war, the Party also made use of the new language of rights, as coined in the term quanli. Leninist 'organisations of the masses' such as the Women's Federation, Youth League, etc, were formally committed to protecting the 'rights and interests' of their constituencies, and in the more recent reform period the 'protection of rights and interests' has become a fairly standard phrase in the preamble of Chinese statutes. Arguably, Party policy in the early years of the communist era, did indeed extend the 'rights' of, eg, peasants, women, and ethnic minorities, although this was through empowering them in relation to other social groups (landlords, husbands, parents, ethnic majorities), rather than asserting or protecting inalienable rights.

As the Party has retreated from recog-nisably communist policies over the last two decades, it has also been more inclined than in the Maoist heyday to emphasise the continuity and distinct-iveness of 'Chinese characteristics'. The Cultural Revolution's smashing of 'the Four Olds' ⁵ has been followed by a rapprochement with the past and renewed pride in Chinese culture and history. Temples have re-opened, Confucius has been rehabilitated, historical operas and dramas are all over the television, 'traditional' motifs have reappeared in architecture, and traditional, complex characters have reappeared in advertising.

There are, however, many aspects of traditional culture that the Party still firmly repudiates. Officials still quite routinely describe ethnic minority groups as 'feudal,' 'backward' and 'superstitious;' and the national leadership has also sometimes displayed concern at the renaissance of traditional practices and beliefs among rural Han communities. The leadership repeatedly declares the virtues of 'advanced science and technology' and 'modern scientific management systems', which are promoted as the key to economic competitiveness.

Thus, the Party leadership appears to be balancing, or torn, between tradition and modernity, appealing in one breath to established Chinese values, and in the next demanding 'modern' management. At the same time, economic neoliberalism also seems increasingly to influence policy in many spheres - yet government remains strongly interventionist, trying to control and to soften the social impacts of the 'socialist market'. Negotiating a course between these different gravitational forces, the Party's guiding political vision appears to be national unity, stability, prosperity and strength - within the context of continued Party rule, which is seen as a necessary condition from which the others may follow. Policy options must therefore be evaluated according to how likely they are to deliver these outcomes. This emphasis on outcomes, as opposed to ideology or class war, was most clearly captured in Deng Xiaoping's celebrated aphorism 'It doesn't matter if it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice.'

Where does this leave awareness of rights in popular consciousness? Certainly, there are many people in China who are willing to use the increased political space available to them to advocate for particular constituencies: women, disabled people, rural migrants, laid-off workers, children etc. But it is seldom clear whether such activity is grounded in 'rights consciousness', or driven simply by compassion, or mainly concerned with redressing acute imbalances that detract from social harmony.

The cultural and epistemological differences at play here are difficult to capture but may be profound. Some illustration of this provided by a discussion of sexual harassment at work that recently took place in a 'salon' hosted by the Human Sexuality Research Institute of the People's University in Beijing. ⁶ This is, by Chinese standards, a politically liberal institute whose researchers have made important advocacy efforts on behalf of commercial sex workers.⁷ The event itself can reasonably be regarded as a manifestation of China's emerging civil society. The participants were Chinese intellectuals and activists who demonstrably care about socially disadvantaged groups and who, as much as anyone in China, are inclined to take rights seriously.

A large part of the discussion was devoted to establishing and agreeing that 'sexual harassment' is a 'Western concept that doesn't apply in China.' The participants were not claiming that sexual harassment does not happen in China, or that it is unimportant. Rather, they were saying that sexual harassment in China has special Chinese characteristics that are not captured in the Western concept. Why not? They reasoned that Chinese sexual harassment does not typically takes place between co-workers who are equals but, rather, is perpetrated by bosses using their power and status to elicit sexual favours from employees who 'have no choice but to accept or to leave the job'. This cannot therefore be properly regarded as 'sexual harassment.'

Foreigners with little experience of China would be nonplussed by this logic. Surely, they would say, the factory boss demanding sex in return for jobs on the shop floor, or the lascivious middle manager trapping the office junior behind a filing cabinet, are paradigm cases of sexual harassment. It may indeed be that the participants in the discussion did not have a particularly clear idea of sexual harassment in the West - but that is beside the point of the example, which is to illustrate firstly, the reflex rejection of the 'Western concept' as inappropriate and, more importantly, the tendency, as highlighted by Lubman, to discuss issues such as this in terms of social relationships, rather than in terms of the rights and duties of the people involved. If this is a big leap for socially aware intellectuals to make, with much greater than average exposure to international ideas, it is an even more momentous one for ordinary bosses and workers.

Civil Society in the Chinese Context

In China the concept of 'civil society' is recognised and used only by a small circle of intellectuals. Internationally, and among the aid donor community, interest in the idea of civil society has been explicitly linked on the one hand to identifying agents of social change in developing countries and, on the other, to political reform in countries 'in transition' from socialism. The civil movements that swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s - seeming to have Chinese counterparts in the less happily fated Democracy Wall movement and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests - were a powerful stimulus to international interest in the idea of civil society. With such an intellectual pedigree, this is clearly not a discourse for which the Chinese Communist Party can be expected to feel any natural affinity.

The Party is, however, much more willing to think in terms of and accord greater space to what it calls 'social forces' (社会力量shehui liliang). This is a generalised concept that amalgamates the private commercial and non-profit sectors. It reflects a number of overlapping concerns and objectives:

Growing openness to wider consultation seems again to be driven more by a perception of its usefulness in securing outcomes (national growth, social stability and cohesion under Party leadership) rather than by any belief in the right to representation. This is mirrored in the village (and, now, urban neighbourhood) committee election process which appears to have more to do with bolstering state and local government authority than with conversion to the virtues of democratic governance. Similarly, the trend towards more 'participatory' approaches in poverty alleviation projects appears to be driven by the view that 'participation' might work better than top-down directives, rather than by any concern with the right of the rural poor to 'participate' in their development. Roughly, one might say that in the mind of Chinese officials the notion of 'participation', so earnestly commended by international agencies, is evolving from the practice of 'mass mobilisation' that dominated the Maoist years towards a (still utilitarian) conception of due 'stakeholder consultation'; but there is as yet little sign of a further progression to a rights based approach.

Non-state intermediary organisations currently enjoy only a very short rein. The government is extremely interested in trade associations, chambers of commerce, etc, which may make an important contribution to economic vitality and competitiveness; yet these remain under the control of government agencies. The development of farmers' associations and economic organisations, which could play a critical role in helping China's rural economy adapt to the pressures that WTO membership will bring, is hampered by a highly restrictive policy environment that seems primarily designed to prevent the emergence of peasant political movements. Urban based, professional associations seem to be developing with fewer impediments, and will likely have an important, future role in strengthening professional skills and helping to set industry standards (for example, a dental surgeons' association already endorses toothpaste brands).

Non-economic interest groups are hampered by highly restrictive regulations. All membership 'social organisations' (shehui tuanti) and 'civil non-enterprise units' (minban feiqiye danwei) must be endorsed by a government or Party agency that agrees to supervise them (and, implicitly, to share blame for any misdeeds) but has no statutory obligation to accept applicants. Legal registration is thus effectively limited to organisations that enjoy the explicit blessing of government or Party agencies. Only one organisation of each 'type' is allowed to register at each administrative level, and organisations are not supposed to operate outside of the administrative area in which they are registered (ie, an organisation registered in one county may not undertake activities in a neighbouring county). Social organ-isations must have at least fifty members, and must, when applying to register, also have fixed premises and start-up funds of CNY 30,000 (USD 3,600) in the case of county or urban district level organisations (more for city-wide or provincial level organisations); yet they are not allowed to raise funds until their application is accepted. In practice, therefore, it is only possible for citizens to register organ-isations if they are endowed with significant personal resources and either have good personal connections with a government department and/or are pursuing objectives that further the interests of the supervising government agency.

Clearly, this is not a legal environment that recognises the right of individuals to organise and associate as they choose; and it presents huge barriers to groups of individuals with low incomes and/or few connections with the government bureau-cracy. This is thus a major constraint on the development of a non profit sector, and especially on community-based and 'grass roots' initiatives.

Without doubt, the Party and govern-ment's main concern is to prevent the emergence of the 'wrong' kind of organisation: pre-eminently, any that would challenge the authority of the Party or state, threaten social cohesion or stability. For social conservatives in the Party, the antics over the last few years of the quasi-Buddhist Falung Gong sect must have served to underline the dangers of allowing too much freedom of association. The crack down on Falun Gong had a paralysing effect on local Civil Affairs bureaus, whose officials in many areas ceased social organisation registration processes altogether rather than allowing the wrong sort of group to slip through.

Party and government are thus pulled in two directions. They want to control undesirable elements -- whether quasi-religious, or pro-democracy activists, or ethnic minority secessionists, or independent labour organisers -- that threaten Party control, social cohesion or economic development. Yet they also want to 'strengthen society' and encourage 'social forces' to pick up the baton of social service delivery. This latter, however, does not necessarily imply much regard for independent, community based groups; the leadership almost certainly has extremely limited knowledge and understanding of the kinds of independent organisations that are beginning to emerge, and have the potential to emerge, in China.

For, as the following case studies show, at least some independent actors have managed to find space in which to advocate on behalf of particular constituencies. (Conspicuously absent here, but also worthy of note, is China's growing, increasingly adventurous and independent environmental movement). Party and government are highly unlikely to liberalise the policy and legal environment for such actors out of regard for human rights or freedom of association. They will do so if and only if they see these civic cats caching the right kind of mice: if, that is, the new kinds of social activism are deemed to contribute to, rather than threaten, social cohesion, economic dynamism, and political stability under continued Party rule.

Snapshot One: Prisoners' Children

In 1995 Ms. Zhang Shuqin (张淑琴) was working as a 'prison journalist' in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. She became concerned with the fate of children whose parents were executed or sentenced to life imprisonment. There were two main types of case where this happened: either the father had murdered the mother, and then been executed; or the mother had killed the father, and then been imprisoned for life. These tragedies had, seemingly, all occurred in rural families. Ms. Zhang explained that rural people had fewer mechanisms for dispute mediation and 'less legal knowledge'. She had met several men awaiting execution and women serving life sentences who were extremely distressed about their children, and she decided to go and look for them.

She enlisted the support of a wealthy, local entrepreneur, Guo Jianhua (郭建华). He had himself been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution because, as a technical enthusiast, he was 'always fiddling with radios' and was suspected of spying. During the Dengist reform period, he started in his home village an agro-processing company that became highly successful. By the mid 90s, he employed the community's entire labour force in several factories, had re-built the village in rather grand style - every house had two storeys and a garden - and had also built a large community hall, most of which was standing empty.

The pair travelled for several weeks around Shaanxi Province, looking for the prisoners' children. They collected up around twenty children, and installed them in a residential facility that they opened in the community hall, calling it a 'children's village.'

This was done under the nominal auspices of a Shaanxi social organisation the Shaanxi Social Reintegration Society (also sometimes known, in English, as the 'New Life' society), registered under the Shaanxi Justice Bureau. The members were prison and Justice Bureau personnel. As far as I could tell, it had no source of funding other than Mr. Guo, and few other projects of note. (An effort to provide employment for ex-prisoners through a coal retailing venture seemed to be in financial difficulties.)

The children had suffered extreme neglect. According to Ms. Zhang and her associates, neighbours and relatives in the children's communities of origin considered them to be tainted with 'bad blood,' felt that they brought shame to the whole community (especially relatives), and treated them as culprits rather than innocent victims. Some were kept as unpaid servants. One six year old boy had lived for two years in a goat shed. Others had wandered off by themselves to cities and become street children.

I visited the 'village' in 1997. Given the circumstances, the children seemed remarkably well and happy. The boy from the goat shed, affectionately known as Hei Dou (黑豆Black Bean') was seldom off Mr. Guo's lap. The facilities were clean, well-kept and comfortable but not ostentatious. Several of the children were attending the local school. Ms. Zhang was at pains to provide a level of material care that was decent but 'realistic,' and appeared fully aware of the need to prepare the children, some of whom were young teenagers, for independence.

As well as providing for the children, Ms. Zhang had been remarkably successful in alerting the wider public to their plight. Numerous local and national news-papers had written feature stories about the 'children's village'. Shaanxi TV made a six part documentary about it. This publicity enabled Ms. Zhang and Mr. Guo to diversify their funding base slightly: local companies had provided some support in kind (through, eg, the provision of clothing and furniture), although the operation remained basically bankrolled by Mr. Guo.

Another striking result of the publicity was that it precipitated a flood of letters from prisoners all over the country who had heard of the project and were appealing for their children to be taken into its care. I was shown a sample of the letters, and told that 'hundreds' of prisoners had written. Ms. Zhang and Mr. Guo were exploring ways to scale up their project.

In the late 1990s, some kind of dispute appears to have arisen between Ms. Zhang and Mr. Guo. Ms. Zhang established a separate facility in Xi'an (which now has around 50 children), appointed local staff to run it, and moved to Beijing to pursue her vision of an expanded service. Mr. Guo remained in Shaanxi, and continued to look after the original 'prison orphans' in his care.

In Beijing, Ms. Zhang managed to interest the China Charities Federation (CCF) in her concerns. This is a large government initiated organisation, regist-ered under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. At the time it was headed by Mr. Yan Mingfu (阎明复), an energetic former Vice Minister of Civil Affairs. The CCF gave Ms. Zhang office space and carte blanche to develop her work and raise funds under their auspices.

She did so with characteristic vigour, secured land in a village an hour's drive from downtown Beijing and set up a new facility. This now accommodates 53 children, aged 2-16, from Shaanxi, Beijing, Hebei and Ningxia, most of whom attend the local school. (The two year old is fostered with a local family). Ms. Zhang, with the CCF brand behind her, has become an able fundraiser, and has drawn on a wide range of sources to expand the amenities in the new facility. These include an outside play and exercise area (with equipment donated by the national Sports Lottery), a computer training room (with equipment donated by the Australian Embassy in Beijing), a piano donated by a local company, and a stage for perform-ances donated by a local wooden flooring company. The rent on the premises is at present covered by a Malaysian Chinese entrepreneur. Other corporate supporters include Nestlé, who donate part of the proceeds from sales of drinking chocolate at an international school in Beijing, and GE, whose employees have donated funds and time as volunteers. Save the Children UK contributed to the costs of establishing a library, paid for Ms. Zhang to attend trainings in child rights, and funded the publication of a newsletter reporting on the project's progress.

Following Beijing Youth Daily coverage of Ms. Zhang's renewed efforts in Beijing, a number of volunteers came forward to provide counselling/befriending support and private tutoring to the children in the new facility. This group of individuals has since established a China Childcare Volun-teers Association that mobilises helpers not only for Ms. Zhangs 'children's village' but also for other child welfare undertakings, such as orphanages, day care centres for disabled children etc.

The Beijing facility also has a small area of farmland that the children help to cultivate. The produce will be used to supplement the children's diet and to sell for cash income. In addition, there is a carpentry workshop, and a tailoring work-shop where the children can learn vocational skills. They also help with cleaning and cooking. According to Ms. Zhang, other activities include 'legal and moral education' and 'psychological train-ing' to help the children 'walk out of their parents' shadow'.

The Xi'an facility continues, but is less well endowed and, according to Ms. Zhang, is struggling to make ends meet. It has received temporary funding support from ActionAid but Ms. Zhang acknow-ledges that she is hard put to find time and resources to devote to both operations at once.

This case brings into relief a number of typical features of autonomous non-profit activity in China. Firstly, the initiators of this project are, evidently, unusually determined and resourceful people. Such qualities are necessary, if not sufficient, to establish any kind of new venture in a legal and policy environment that is far from enabling.

Secondly, this project has highlighted and addressed a social problem that previously received no official attention, and where no appropriate services were previously available. This points to the potential for NGOs in China not just to inherit service delivery responsibilities from government, but also to identify new needs and create new kinds of service. Many other non government social welfare organisations are playing a similarly innovative role. The terrain is indeed broad, as there were already many gaps in government services and, in an increasingly complicated society where individual aspirations are changing fast, there is considerable demand for new kinds of service.

Thirdly - although not typically - it is interesting that the project managed to obtain the support and shelter of so large and official an organisation as the China Charities Federation. It would be a significant, and in my view healthy, development for China's non profit sector as a whole if large organisations close to government began to engage construc-tively with smaller, more 'grass roots' and autonomous groups. The CCF has done this once before, offering institutional shelter to a privately initiated 'Candlelight Project' that supports rural schoolteachers. However, it is too early to describe this as a 'trend' in 'GONGO' (government organised NGO)-NGO relations in China. My own guess is that these two cases were mainly the result of the personal initiative and vision of the CCF's Yan Mingfu, who is a strong 'third sector' advocate, but who has since retired from the presidency of the Federation. Nevertheless, the recent formation of the Childcare Volunteers Association is perhaps indicative of a 'multiplier effect' in NGO service provision: NGOs beget NGOs, and in areas such as care for disadvantaged children China is likely to see rapid growth in the number of non-state providers. Several independent groups working to develop services for children with learning difficulties are now beginning to expand their horizons from local initiatives to national networks,⁸ and I recently heard that a private individual in Liaoning Province has now established a facility very similar to Ms. Zhang's, quite possibly following her example.

Fourthly, this project has attracted a large amount of publicity. This is also fairly typical of Chinese NGO activity, which receives a significant amount of Chinese media attention: in some cases, an amount that is disproportionate to the modest achievements of the organisations themselves.⁹ The novelty of the Zhang Shuqin's cause and the harrowing nature of the prisoners' children story has made good copy for editors, and the story has been written up dozens of times. It is probably no exaggeration to say that tens of millions of people have read or heard about her work. At first sight this is an extraordinary, public advocacy achieve-ment. This, indeed, is perhaps the project's major claim to the attention of human rights specialists: the fact that it may have been instrumental in spreading awareness of a constituency whose rights (by the standards, for example, of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) have been grossly abused.

Yet, for all this advocacy effort, there is no evidence that the government of China has reviewed its policy in respect to the children whose situation the project addresses. This raises an important question about the project when considered from a rights viewpoint. The state is obviously implicated in creating this gruesome situation for the children concerned; and where the state has, for whatever motives, effectively 'orphaned' a child through its own actions, does it not have a clear duty to provide for that child - if not necessarily by directly providing care and support then at least by covering the costs of appropriate non-state provision and by setting and monitoring appropriate standards?

When I asked Ms. Zhang this question in 1997, and again in 2002, she seemed to consider it na?ve. In theory, she said, the elected village committees in the children's communities of origin should look after them, and in some cases they did indeed allocate a small sum to cover food provided by 'foster families;' but as the children were being kept in sheds this was hardly adequate. In cases where children have no family protection they are also formally the responsibility of the Ministry of Civil Affairs (although it is in fact not clear how responsibilities are divided between Civil Affairs and local comm.-unities). When I asked if she had attempted to discuss the children's cases with Civil Affairs officials, Ms. Zhang said that she had, but that Civil Affairs resources were already over-stretched in dealing with other groups for whom they were responsible, and they showed no interest in this particular constituency. Ms. Zhang gives the clear impression that she thinks this too fruitless an avenue to pursue.

Display boards outside the Beijing home for prisoners' children, charting the history of the project and acknowledging its supporters, note that the work serves to 'protect the right of children to life and to education.' This probably reflects the influence of Save the Children UK, whose contribution to the project has focused more on encouraging a child rights perspective than on providing material support.

Ms. Zhang herself presents as a person who is primarily motivated by compassion, and essentially interested in practical, 'can-do' responses rather than in policy or rights advocacy. This is an entirely intelligible, as well as humane, approach. Yet a sustainable, society-wide solution to this social problem would have to involve government. Moreover, from any rights-based perspective, the state should not take the life of a child's parent and simply wash its hands of the consequences for the child. This case therefore brings into sharp relief the question whether the mobilisation of 'social forces' in social service provision may in some ways encourage the government to evade, rather than fulfil, its duties in the protection of fundamental rights.

Snapshot Two: AIDS activism

HIV/AIDS prevention and care presents some thorny issues for the Chinese government, and international opinion has become increasingly critical of the government's sluggish response. Yet over the last few years several Chinese organisations with varying degrees of closeness to government have become operational in this field.

The China AIDS Network was established in 1994 under the Beijing Union Medical College, providing a platform for research and pilot intervention efforts by health pro-fessionals. It was, for example, able to experiment in providing health education programmes for sex workers. This is a constituency that the public health authorities find it hard to reach because prostitution, although widespread, remains illegal: the subject indeed, of recurrent 'strike hard' campaigns.

A China Foundation for the Pre-vention of STDs/AIDS was established in 1998 under the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, and has also undertaken research and pilot intervention projects.

A much larger, government initiated organisation, the China Family Planning Association (a member of Planned Parenthood International), has meanwhile conducted a number of AIDS awareness projects that target rural communities and migrants labourers working away from home. It is also developing programmes to provide reproductive health and family planning information and counselling services to unmarried young people, a constituency overlooked by the State Family Planning Commission. Despite its largely parastatal character, the Association (like other organisations with which it works closely, such as the China Population Welfare Fund) is widely seen as being at least at one remove from government, and enjoying proportionately more flexibility. International donors have considered it credible enough to merit funding support.¹⁰

In some parts of the country local branches of the China Red Cross have also become involved in public education and prevention programmes, often in partnership with international organ-isations. University based prevention programmes conducted through campus Red Cross branches in Beijing led, in 2001, to the formation of a Students Network for Reproductive Health Education, which now delivers peer education trainings at colleges throughout the capital.

The 1990s also saw the launch of several non-government initiatives to provide safer sex messages to the gay community. In Beijing, a researcher at the Ministry of Health's National Health Education Institute, Wan Yanhai (万延海), began in 1992 to hold a series of discussion groups for gay men and to coordinate outreach educational activities in gay meeting places. These activities received considerable press attention, and Wan himself began to write newspaper articles calling for more tolerant attitudes towards same-sex love. (Same-sex acts are not illegal per se in China, but are often penalised by the police as constituting 'hooliganism'). But in 1993 Wan was demoted within the Health Institute and ordered to stop his work with the gay community. Rather than desisting, however, he took the brave - and, at that time in China, almost wholly unprecedented - step of forming an independent NGO, the Aizhi (爱知 'Love Knowledge') Action Group, to continue providing HIV/AIDS information. With funding support from international donors,¹¹ Aizhi went on to establish a website and email list-serve. Among other activities it led a lively campaign through these for a against an international organisation linked to the Unification Church that was promoting sexual abstinence as a response to AIDS in China. After the New York Times picked up the story, the group was required to leave China.

In 1997, several early associates of Aizhi independently set up a telephone information and counselling 'hotline', Beijing Tongzhi (同志 'Comrades'). This gives information on HIV/AIDS, among other topics, and has also received international support.¹² It is currently in the process of fostering a network of similar 'hotlines' in half a dozen other major cities.

In 1998, Professor Zhang Beichuan 张北川?) of the Sexual Health Centre at Qingdao University Hospital began to publish a journal, Friends, (朋友Pengyou), that discusses various aspects of global and historical gay culture and also provides information on HIV transmission and prevention. International donors have also supported this initiative.¹³

In 2002, a young HIV positive man, Xiao Li (小李), who had previously worked with UNAIDS in China, formed the Mangrove Support Group for people living with HIV/AIDS. The international donor community enthusiastically encouraged this, as it had been extremely keen to promote 'anti-stigma' advocacy around the theme of discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. Xiao Li became something of a celebrity, in frequent demand for interviews, meetings and workshops, and with no shortage of funding offers. Indeed, in their keenness to find a Chinese, HIV positive person to carry the anti-stigma banner, the inter-national donor community may have encouraged Xiao Li to exertions that are injurious to his personal health and well-being.

In the vastness that is China, the scale of all these activities should not be exaggerated. Yet it is noteworthy that the whole spectrum of Chinese NGO types - from the clearly parastatal, through the specialist-dominated and academic-based, to those most autonomous, citizen-initiated groups rooted in stakeholder communities - are involved in China's HIV/AIDS response. Although it is hard to assess the impact of these inter-ventions in terms of saving or improving lives, they are evidently not merely ancillary to government efforts - the NGOs chipping in loyally to do their small bit - as often seems the case in China in, say, poverty alleviation or disaster relief efforts. Rather, the NGOs are acting in arenas where government appears reluctant or unable to act. This may in part be because truthfulness is an essential condition for preventing AIDS, and government finds truthfulness especially difficult in this sector.

Government complicity in spreading AIDS through commercial blood plasma collection stations, licensed and in any cases operated by public health auth-orities, was almost certainly a significant factor in the government's sluggish reaction to the epidemic. This was too uncomfortable a mess to be confronted openly, and the response of many officials was to sweep it under the carpet. Evidence of the blood sale epidemic emerged at least as early as 1995, and damage limitation steps were eventually taken, including measures to close down the blood stations, formalised in a Blood Donation Law passed in 1998. However, no provision was made at this stage to compensate or care for those who had contracted HIV through selling blood.

China's fledgling civil society, by contrast, has been remarkably active and outspoken on this issue. In Henan - the province most widely associated with blood selling, but by no means the only one - a retired, 70 year old paediatrician, Gao Yaojie (高耀洁), was called in 1996 to consult on a case that turned out to be a patient with AIDS (contracted, according to Dr. Gao, from a blood transfusion).¹⁴ After this first encounter with the disease, Dr. Gao began to research it and soon embarked on a personal HIV prevention campaign, writing and publishing leaflets at her own expense - 300,000 of them over the years, initially distributed with the help of friends and associates around bus stations and aboard trains. She also advertised the availability of the materials through local newspapers, and visited nightclubs to spread the word to sex workers. As her reputation as an AIDS prevention activist grew, she was contacted by people in rural communities where blood sellers were now suffering symptoms, and beginning to die, of AIDS. She visited the villages, distributing her materials and making gifts of money, clothes and medicines to people suffering from the disease and to a growing number of AIDS orphans.

Word of Dr. Gao's activism soon spread both to local governments (provincial and county level) and to AIDS activists in Beijing. Local authorities, which Dr. Gao describes as anxious to avoid publicity that might deter foreign investment, employed a variety of strategies to silence her.¹⁵ Beijing activists began to further publicise her work and the situation in Henan, notably through the Aizhi website and by contacting sympathetic journalists in the mainstream media. This led to a series of national and international press reports. Continued efforts to cover up the story could not have been worse calculated, for they served only to heighten interest. From 2000 onwards, reporters were competing to get into the Henan villages for first hand accounts of the tragedy, and the fact that they were often obstructed by officials and followed by the police only added spice - and a sense that they were on to something really important - to the quest. Dr. Gao, meanwhile, was awarded the Global Health Council's 2001 Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.

Along with the reporters, activists from Beijing started to visit Henan to see the situation for themselves, to take small gifts of clothing, medicine and money for distribution through Dr. Gao's networks, and to develop their own schemes for helping the AIDS victims.¹⁶ By early 2002, Beijing based activists had also started to bring small groups of HIV+ people from Henan to the capital, in order to lobby government and international agencies for support. A group of students made a 2-hour video documentary in Henan, in which AIDS sufferers told their stories amidst harrowing scenes of sickness, poverty and despair, and distributed copies of the film to international agencies in Beijing.

In July, 2002 the Aizhi group's registration (under the health education department of a private college) was revoked. On August 24 its leader, Wan Yanhai, was arrested by the State Security Bureau and detained in Beijing for 27 days. His detention was widely reported in the international press and denounced by human rights organisations. While still in detention, he was awarded a Prize for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Net-work and Human Rights Watch.

Wan's arrest was reportedly related to the fact that, earlier in August, he had circulated by email 'internal' documents compiled by the Henan Health Bureau. These contained very little that the world did not already know, given the intensive press scrutiny of the subject over the previous two years, but they did show that the health authorities were well aware of the Henan epidemic from the mid 1990s.

In a statement made upon his release, Wan said that he had confessed his 'error' and written a formal expression of regret and appeal for leniency. As such, his offence was the relatively minor mis-demeanour of having 'violated an order but expressed regret'. Mr. Wan said he had been well treated and thanked the international community for their support for his work, the Ministry of Public Health for having visited the State Security Bureau on his behalf, and the State Security Bureau for their leniency. He offered no further public comment on the matter, making it clear that he does not mean to disclose what discussions he had while in detention, yet affirming his intention to continue his HIV/AIDS pre-vention efforts. He told me that his main future priority was to make Aizhi's work 'more professional'. A means for doing so legally was opened in October, 2002, when the group registered with the Bureau of Industry and Commerce, with no bureaucractic resistance, as a private Public Health Research Institute. ¹⁷

There is little point in speculating on what might have gone on during Wan's detention, whether a 'bargain' was made between him and the State Security Bureau, and what, if any, impact, international pressure may have had upon the 'leniency' shown. It is, however, worth pointing out that, with the face-saving Blood Donation Law on the books, it is now possible for the Henan situation to be discussed relatively openly, with government apparently exculpated - for the blood collection stations can now be described as 'illegal' and distanced from government. This was, for example, the approach taken in an article published on October 3, 2002, in China's most official newspaper, the Communist Party's own People's Daily. The extraordinarily frank report, headlined 'Drug Taking, Blood Collection Spread AIDS in China', questioned the accuracy of government AIDS statistics, quoting an official report from Chongqing as admitting: 'Because of concerns about the impact on economic development and social stability, we didn't make active efforts to promote AIDS knowledge and report actual problems, and we even hide HIV cases or postpone report of the epidemic.' This is a striking change of tone in official reporting on the epidemic.

It may thus perhaps be that the 'meaning' of Wan Yanhai's arrest - the message to the activist community - was that the state is now ready to 'pay more attention' and take their concerns seriously, but that it will do so on its own terms: specifically, it is not willing to be the butt of their attacks, or accept culpability.

In sum, there are reasonable grounds for saying that civil society has been a significant protagonist in the story of HIV/AIDS in China. On the most enthusiastic interpretation, not only semi-official organisations but autonomous groups and private citizens acting independently and networking together have played a leading role in telling and broadcasting the truth, in articulating and addressing people's right to know how to protect themselves, and in defending the rights of people with HIV. On such an interpretation, civil society may also be given some credit for awakening govern-ment to the need to acknowledge and address some of the problems - for the last two years have certainly seen some significant shifts in policy, including commitment of more resources for prevention efforts, a plan of action that endorses condom use and clean needles for high risk groups (opening the way, at least in principle, for pilot needle exchange programmes and more widespread social marketing of condoms), upward revision of the estimates of people affected, and licensing of local production of anti retroviral drugs.

But the situation is complicated by the keen interest and close attention of the international media, diplomatic comm.-unity and aid donor community. It is likely that this has at least to some extent influenced the response of the Chinese government, both to China's AIDS problem itself and to the AIDS activists; especially given that, during 2002, China was applying for substantial funding from the Global Fund to Fight Malaria, TB and AIDS, while also negotiating the substantial scaling up of a British government funded HIV/AIDS pro-gramme, and expecting new support in this field from the governments of Australia and the United States. These would all be good reasons to show a little more tolerance for AIDS activism than might otherwise be expected.

A more conservative, preliminary conclusion might therefore be that China's civil society actors in this field were certainly a long way ahead of government in highlighting problems that needed urgent attention; but while it was possible to push some way ahead of government opinion, it was not possible to push too far or too aggressively without risking an authoritarian reaction. It may well be that if the aim is primarily to influence government or demand government action, the door must be left open for a consensual, face-saving approach. This may in the future prove to be a defining characteristic of Chinese civil society advocacy, as opposed to the more adversarial characteristics of Western advocacy organisations.

Snapshot Three: Domestic Violence

The Communist Party was always formally committed to gender equality. In the 1950s, it incorporated women's rights into the legal codes of the 'New China', outlawed the worst forms of abuse, initiated political education campaigns to 'raise awareness' of the masses and incorporated women into the labour force - tending, from its Marxist perspective, to see women's oppression in terms of class struggle, and women's emancipation in terms of greater participation in socialised production. But while urban women were given new status as proletarians (and theoretical co-owners of the means of production), change in rural China was less far-reaching. There, the traditional 'three obediences' continued to resonate ; and in both town and country there remained 'a persistently strong patriarchal basis to family and social life.' If family was always central to Chinese culture, it was pre-eminently the male line that mattered, that determined the sense of what 'family' was, that commanded 'ancestor worship' and that formed the basis of lineage and clan solidarities.

Twenty years of economic reform have created new opportunities for some women, but have also brought new pressures to bear. These include loss of employment security and a trend towards low paid and low status service sector jobs for women; uncertain access to and quality of health and education services, and the resurgence of prostitution, abduction and trafficking of women. A steady rise in divorce rates is also widely regarded by Chinese women as a social malaise of which they are the prime victims: divorce is commonly understood not in terms of an opportunity for women to escape connubial misery, but in terms of men abandoning family responsibilities, leaving worn-out wives for younger companions. This perception recently led to calls, during public discussion of revisions to the Marriage Law, for a clause to crim-inalise marital infidelity.

The All-China Women's Federation has struggled to adapt to the shifting social and political environment. Established in 1949 as a Leninist 'mass organisation', it initially served mainly to transmit the democratic centralist Party line through a cadre network that mirrored other state organs, with branches at every admin-istrative level. Women's interests were either subsumed under or subordinated to those of 'the masses' in general. Over the last dozen or so years, however, many Federation branches have experimented - mainly on a 'project' basis, and often with international funding and/or technical assistance - with new forms of service provision. Activities have included support for education of girl children, the establishment of 'early child development centres', women's literacy, vocational edu-cation, reproductive health, microfinance and legal rights programmes, and efforts to prevent trafficking of women and children. Many cadres, particularly at central level, are increasingly inclined to present the Federation as an NGO; and some international donors, keen to show that they are engaging with non-govern-ment actors, also describe it as an NGO in their official documents. This is clearly a misnomer. The Federation remains an integral part of the Party/state apparatus; but it is now a more heterogeneous body than before, encompassing a diverse range of attitudes, opinions and levels of activism.

The 1995 World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, is widely credited with stimulating reflection and change within the Federation, and also with catalysing the appearance of more indep-endent women's organisations. A small community of such groups has now emerged.

Their relationship to the Women's Federation is complex and in some respects ambiguous. Many were started by Federation cadres, and in some cases they remain nested within the Federation, although having an at least partially distinct identity. Remaining close to the Federation has a number of advantages: it provides a mechanism for legal reg-istration and a distribution network for disseminating ideas, experiences and publications. It enables the new groups to leverage state resources (both in terms of subsidised office space, salaries, etc and in terms of encouraging the Federation to engage in new kinds of activity); and it keeps open channels of communication with policymakers, improving the prospects of influencing them. This last is an extremely important issue for China's growing NGO community, as it is widely believed that complete independence from government implies isolation from and loss of any real influence over policy.

However, several of the new women's groups have established themselves completely outside the formal ambit of the Women's Federation. In certain cases they had little choice, as some depart-ments and branches of the Federation have taken a proprietorial attitude to women's issues, and were unwilling to cooperate with more independent initia-iatives. Indeed, outright hostility on the Federation's part has led to the closure of some independent ventures aimed at providing various kinds of service for women, and has quite probably prevented numerous others from seeing the light of day.

Among those formally independent of the Federation are a number of centres established within academic research and teaching institutions. These include several relatively recently established Women's Studies centres that, in addition to developing gender studies as an academic, discipline, provide a natural platform for social activism.

Across much of this now quite diverse institutional terrain, domestic violence has emerged over the last decade as an issue of common concern for many of the new groups and for many individual activists both within and outside of the Women's Federation. Since 2000, a great deal of activity in this field has taken place under the umbrella of a 'Domestic Violence Research, Intervention and Prevention' project that has received funding support from the Ford Foundation, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Netherlands Organisation for Inter-national Development (NOVIB), and the Norwegian Institute for Human Rights.

The project holder and coordinator is the Institute for Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; but this is essentially a networking initiative, with numerous 'sub-project' components implemented by a broad range of agencies and individuals across several provinces and cities, and in both urban and rural areas. This networking approach is itself highly distinctive in a country that, in many fields, suffers from fragmentation of and institutional competition between agencies with overlapping interests.

Equally distinctive, and novel, is the theme of domestic violence as the subject of cooperative governmental and non-governmental advocacy and action. This diverges sharply from a Marxist or class analysis of gender issues. The focus on relations within the family, as the fund-amental social institution, can be seen as a more direct challenge to patriarchal culture. It also strongly implies universality. Those engaged in the project insist that violence against women is a matter that equally affects the families of successful entrepreneurs, professionals, urban work-ers and peasants - indeed, this is an important message of the public 'aware-ness raising' activities that form one of the project's components.

Another key message, that for many activists encapsulates the whole meaning and purpose of the project, is that violence in the home is not a purely 'private matter', but one which should also concern external agencies including, notably, the police and the courts. In some ways, this is a potentially sensitive point to argue in China, where the state has long intruded into family affairs - most notoriously in the case of fertility control, but also in controlling employment, residence, mobility etc - and where the relative withdrawal of the state from the private realm over recent years has been warmly welcomed. But rather than asserting the need for the state to intervene on behalf of the collective interest, the message of this campaign certainly seems to be that individuals have a right, which is not over-ridden by family relationships, to freedom from violence, and that the wider community has a corresponding duty to protect that right. This does appear to be a distinctively rights based approach that is quite new in China, although in so broad a project, involving so many people, it is likely that key perspectives will differ to some extent between individuals.

A major focus of the project is gender training - notably for judges, prosecutors, and police, as well as for doctors who may be called upon to treat abused women, and for Women's Federation cadres and community leaders such as members of street and neighbourhood committees. Trainings are intended to sensitise them to the wider issues of gender inequality and encourage them to take a more pro-active role in preventing, recognising and intervening in situations where violence against women occurs.

Building on these trainings, several city districts have set out to become 'zero domestic violence zones'. The ground is prepared through a mix of public outreach and education activities, from billboard advertising to programmes in schools and televised ceremonies where families sign up to charters pledging 'five goods'. This is complemented by emergency response facilities where the police establish a telephone 'hotline' with a pledge to respond to calls (in the past, they were generally reluctant to get involved); by centres that document cases of domestic violence with photographic records of physical abuse; by legal representation and counselling support for victims and 'rehabilitation training' for abusive men, and by community based 'violence prevention networks' that involve volunteers and community leaders in 'neighbourhood watch' style monitoring and intervention. 'Violence prevention stations' have also been established in several rural areas. In some areas, local courts have established 'jurors' panels' or 'women and children's protection committees' to advise on cases.

In some of these activities, particularly on the intervention side, there is an evident emphasis on dispute mediation, involving volunteers from the community and the local Women's Federation. Undoubtedly, many project participants attach high value to avoiding family break-up and restoring 'harmony'. Some of the 'success stories', however, reported in newsletters, of families reconciled and of abusive men who saw the error of their ways after attending training and coun-selling sessions, seem improbable. West-ern experience of repeated patterns of male violence suggests that it can't be quite that easy.

In Zhuzhou City, Hunan, the police link work on domestic violence to anti-vice efforts in general since, in their view, 'gambling and obscene activities [pro-stitution] have been direct causes of domestic violence . . . [and] . . . Domestic violence has a tendency to associate with and coexist with the crime of kidnapping women and children.' ²¹ This suggests that they do not see the issue primarily, or exclusively, in terms of defending the rights of victims, but in terms of broader social objectives. In the handling of specific cases, the police follow a three-tier intervention strategy: 'First, for ordinary family quarrels and incidents with light domestic violence they usually carry on mediation to prevent those from intens-ifying; secondly, for actions that violate provisions on domestic violence they take combined measures of education and punishment to organise law education programmes and give offenders severe criticism or disciplinary warnings; third, for domestic violence crimes they . . . support the victims and punish the offenders without mercy.'

Attention to conflict resolution, mediation and 'rehabilitation', and the linking of anti-violence efforts to broader social objectives such as 'building civilised communities' may dilute the project's focus on rights. This, however, is defended by project coordinator, Professor Chen Mingxia (陈明侠), who argues that 'domestic violence is a multi-faceted problem, with legal, social and cultural dimensions, and so it calls for multi-faceted solutions'.

Yet a central, and to some extent defining theme of the project has been to advocate and develop specific regulations and laws designed to provide victims of domestic violence with legal remedies and protections. Local People's Congresses in several cities and provinces have now enacted regulations of this kind for the areas under their jurisdiction, and numerous local government bodies have issued 'decisions' and 'resolutions' that have quasi-legal force. Having conducted comparative research into legislation elsewhere, the project is now drafting its own proposed national Law on Domestic Violence, which it plans to circulate widely for public discussion and comment, and then to submit, through the Women's Federation, for consideration by the National People's Congress.

Given the notorious problem of implementing legislation in China, this intense effort to create new law may seem misplaced. But, in addition to providing a focus for present advocacy efforts, Chen Mingxia sees legal instruments as an indispensable means of both enshrining rights and providing a framework for future action to protect them.

At this stage, any assessment of the project's impact on rights awareness and protection would be premature, but it can certainly be said to have had a significant impact in putting the issues of domestic violence in the public arena - and that itself was one of the main aims.

It is worth underlining that this policy agenda was not set by the Communist Party, or even by the Women's Federation: it was set by individual women activists (many but not all of whom would doubtless consider themselves good Communists) both within and outside of the Women's Federation. In this sense embrace of the issue perhaps resembles - although in other respects it stands in marked contrast to - the struggle of women in Western countries to secure the right to abortion.

It is probably reasonable to describe the networks and linkages on which the project has drawn and built as an authentic 'movement' of Chinese women; and it is certainly a movement that has coalesced and grown during the life of the project, as women activists outside of the start-up areas have heard about and joined forces with the project, such that it now has at least some activities in more than half of China's provinces. This is almost certainly the first time in the history of the PRC that a women's movement, as opposed to a Party-led body for women, has played such a prominent role in shaping public debate and policy. Yet it is of course an important fact about that movement that it is well connected with, rather than oppositional to, the political establishment. But this may well be a more effective form of civil society advocacy in China, than the isolated efforts of a sprinkling of atomised NGOs.

Concluding discussion

Many people outside China still believe that the country has no civil society worth speaking of. This paper has not attempted to discuss what may be taken to constitute 'civil society', but the case snapshots presented here, especially those of the clusters of activism around the themes of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence, suffice to show that there is at least some level of non-government activism that deserves attention.

It is true that much of this is driven by unusual individuals, with a great deal of personal strength and dedication, strong feelings of compassion and/or a strong commitment to social justice, and, in some cases, good connections with government authorities. To some extent these are all necessary conditions for activism in China. It would be surprising if a population of 1.3 billion did not naturally produce at least some people who meet these conditions, just as it produces some extremely tall basketball players out of a population that is, on the whole, not noted for its height. Isolated examples of individual activism should not therefore in themselves be overstated as indicators of civil society.

The possibility for civil society, on almost any understanding of the term, must also depend upon the existence of political space for it to occupy. Personal space and freedom have clearly increased substantially in the 'reform' period, making individual activism a possibility, but space for political organisation remains more limited. There is, however, some informal space 'in the cracks' between formal limitations on associational freedom that the state lacks the capacity, and in some cases perhaps the will, to apply systematically or universally. This informal space has, increasingly, allowed the emergence not just of individual activism but of organisations that either provide services to, or advocate on behalf of particular constituencies. But this is not clear, openly defined space. Thus, organisations must feel their way forward, and explore the boundaries. Sometimes, as in the case of Aizhi, they may overstep the boundaries of what government is currently prepared to tolerate.

I have argued that Communist Party and government tolerance, and willingness to open up space for more autonomous organisation, depend critically on their perception of the outcomes in terms of the contributions those organisations may make to economic and social development objectives, without challenging state authority. There is some danger here of the state merely offloading 'social burdens', for which it should continue to take some responsibility, to an overworked and under-resourced non-profit sector. The prisoners' children project is one case in point (although this is hardly 'offloading' since this is a constituency for which the state has never showed any interest). Permitting or encouraging 'social forces' should not be taken to absolve the state of responsibilities in this area or, indeed, in areas such as health care, which affect the whole population. It is governments, not social forces, which sign up to international rights conventions. Even a cursory look at the increasingly uneven distribution of access to health services in China strongly suggests that the emergence of commercial and non-profit service providers is in no way sufficient to protect the right of all children to adequate care. It cannot, therefore, merely be assumed that the spread of service provider NGOs in China will automatically increase the protection of rights.

At present, emerging service provider organisations can nonetheless be seen as important 'rights advocates' (even if they are in fact motivated mainly by compassion) to the extent that they are asserting the moral importance of hitherto socially excluded groups such as prisoners' children, children with autism or cerebral palsy. Such children, their actions imply, should not be locked away in goat sheds, but have a right to care and to dignity and to play a full role in society.

But if these organisations are to have a longer term impact on rights protection, rather than simply carrying the care burden for government, it will be important for them not merely to develop in isolation from the state but actively to engage with government agencies, to influence policy and practice, and to solicit government support, including financial support, for their own public benefit work (as in the Hong Kong model of service provision.) At this early stage, however, this is a very great deal to expect of organisations that, in many cases, are still struggling to assert their own right to exist and to provide any kind of service at all to neglected constituencies.

Just how hard it can be to engage constructively with government may be seen from the experience of the AIDS activists. But this is perhaps not so gloomy as it looked at first sight. The different streams of AIDS activism that I have described all started with spreading knowledge among vulnerable communities - sex workers, men who have sex with men, migrant workers, and the rural poor in Henan. In some cases this developed into more explicit advocacy on behalf of these groups, and the attempt to expose the real extent of a problem that was aggravated by serious policy failures. Given the strong interest that some government officials, especially in Henan, had in covering up the problem, the response to the activists was not in fact as repressive as China's harshest critics might have expected. It did not, for example, come anywhere close to the level of repression reserved for the Falun Gong; and in most cases the activists have been able to carry on their work - in a more 'professional' way. This would appear to show that in at least some fields it is in fact increasingly possible to 'advocate' in China, but not in too adversarial or confrontational a way. It is possible to criticise but not to denounce. The critic must not make the authorities look bad, or close the door on future cooperation. This, one might say, suggests a civil society with Chinese characteristics.

Such characteristics are amply displayed in the domestic violence snapshot. In at least two ways this is an easy topic on which to advocate. Firstly it implies no financial costs to the state. Secondly, it is not merely or even primarily the state that is the target of the advocacy, but the whole of society; and this does accord with the Communist Party's long-standing project of destroying 'feudalism' and making China more 'civilised' (which in turn chimes with Marx's idea of the historically necessary 'annihilation of old Asiatic society').22 Nonetheless, as I have argued, this is a topic that has been put into China's public realm by activists within society, rather than by the Party; and that is no small feat.

If civil society is a concept worth serious attention, it must surely imply more than a scattered constellation of individuals, or individual organisations. Counting up NGOs, worrying about whether or not they are 'real' NGOs, and then wondering whether there are enough of them to constitute civil society may be to miss the point entirely. In China's domestic violence movement (and, indeed, among the AIDS activists) we can indeed discern more than a constellation of individuals and organisations. The move-ment encompasses researchers, individual activists - including many within govern-ment agencies - community workers, ind-ependent NGOs and quasi-government organisations. The fact that this move-ment has close access to and is in many ways interwoven with government agencies is a strength, not a weakness; nor does it diminish its legitimacy. It is precisely this set of interconnections that may enable the movement to foster change through a consensus-building coalition in which nobody looks bad - to the extent that even abusive men are treated (in my view, optimistically) as redeemable. This has almost nothing in common with the social movements that toppled governments in Brazil, Czechoslovakia or the Philippines. But it is a movement that may well catch mice for the government of China, help to encourage a gradual extension of associational space and, by no means least, make a real difference to the lives of many women.

This analysis raises several questions. Are the Chinese civil society activists and organisations who serve or advocate for particular constituencies 'real' human rights advocates who share a Western understanding of the universal and 'intrinsic' nature of rights; or do they essentially represent a more consensual, 'Asiatic society' that is not yet quite annihilated? Does 'real' civil society have to be adversarial, defined against government rather than complementary to it? When international organisations 'partner' with Chinese groups, is it generally a case, really, of 'sharing a bed but dreaming different dreams' (同床异梦) as the Chinese saying has it?²³

I am not sure if these are sensible questions, and am unsure how to answer them, so will conclude with just a few, possibly incoherent, remarks.

The quest for authenticity - anxiety as to whether apparent manifestations of 'civil society' or 'rights consciousness' etc are 'real' - is perhaps an inevitable result of the gradual globalisation of discourse. Across the world, we all increasingly appear to be using a common language, but are we all talking about the same thing? Everyone in the world agrees that a red traffic light means 'stop'; but there are huge differences in understanding of words like 'rights' and 'justice'. I would personally feel uncomfortable in arguing that rights are the intellectual property of European culture and must be understood on Western terms, because I am not convinced (as, arguably, Marx was) that the homogenisation of global culture is in some sense a necessary condition for human emancipation.

We all need a staple diet, but it does not necessarily have to be bread. Rice, maize, potatoes, noodles and yams have served other cultures well. Globalisation theoretically offers the possibility of a more varied diet for all of us. Westerners should not insist that bread is the only nourishing food; nor should they insist that their particular vision of rights offers the only possibility for achieving a humane and decent global community. Respect and tolerance for a diversity of perspectives is essential for achieving any such community; and we would do well to look for commonalities in values and conceptions of justice rooted in non-Western traditions. In other words, instead of only asking if China has a concept of rights, we would do well to also ask if Europe has a concept of jen-yi.

This also begs the question of what is the proper relationship between inter-national donors and China's emerging civil society. This is an important, practical question, which is only beginning to be critically examined. Almost every one of the Chinese organisations and individuals I have mentioned has received some level of international funding support; and, through their exposure to international organisations, these groups and individuals almost certainly have as good an understanding of the Western concept of rights as anyone in China. Does this amount to undue interference?

Despite what I have already argued, I believe that most international grant-making to Chinese organisations (inc-luding the funding support described here) has so far been fairly responsible and con-structive. Some people, again worrying about authenticity, are inclined to argue that civil society is only 'real' if it is entirely 'local', and that international support diverts organisations and undermines their legitimacy. I too have frequently under-lined these dangers. ²⁴ But it is not right to be too absolutist about this. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party did itself, after all, receive international start-up funding support (which doubtless helps explain the Party's sensitivity to foreign foundations with 'political agendas'). On the other, post-reform China has seen a huge influx of Western technology and 'influence' across an extremely broad range of activities - from the fashion industry to sewage treatment; this, indeed, was partly the point of the 'open door' policy. Why should Chinese civil society organisations be excluded from this flow of funds and ideas? And the most important point, in fact, is that Chinese people are very far from stupid; it is for them to take what is available, literally or metaphorically, from the international community, and to use it in the way they see fit.

There are, however, real dangers here. China has not yet experienced anything like the scale of internationally funded human rights or 'civil society capacity building' programmes common in other parts of the world. (In no small part because donors doubt whether there is a civil society in China.) But there has been some funding in this field and even with this limited amount I have myself, over the last two years, several times received telephone calls from donors saying things like 'We've just realised there's a $20,000 underspend on our human rights budget line, do you know of a good NGO project to support - we need the money out of the door by Friday?' This is deeply disturbing. Donors spend a small fortune on strategising processes; it is deplorable that they should behave like people who draw up a Christmas shopping list in September but are still frantically rushing round the stores at dusk on Christmas Eve. And when donors start to simply dump money on NGOs because they 'need to get the money out of the door', or because they need to look good to their home populations - 'supporting human rights' provides an excellent justification for larger aid programmes that promote diplomatic and commercial interests - then real damage can be done to local civil societies. Actors and organisations that have the potential to develop strong roots in their communities simply end up jostling for places in the queue outside the embassy gates.²⁵

I have argued that China is seeing the emergence of a civil society that seeks to build consensus and exploit opportunities for alliances with government - and that these 'Chinese characteristics' deserve to be taken seriously, rather than regarded as some kind of handicap or disqualification. If I am right, a final question is whether there may in the future develop some form of civil society that more closely fits with Western imaginations. The answer, I believe, is that there is already great diversity in China's civil society, more than these few snapshots do justice to, and that diversity will itself certainly grow, in ways that remain to be seen.

This article is excerpted from a somewhat longer paper that was written for the Danish Centre for Human Rights.

¹Li Yong who, appositely, works for the Ministry of Civil Affairs NGO Management Department; quoted in Xinwen Zhoukan 10/6/02
²Wang Gungwu, Power, Rights and Duties, first published in Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 3, January 1980; reprinted in The Chineseness of China OUP, Hong Kong, 1991. The passages quoted appear on pp 167-169 of that edition.
³The character 权 quan means, roughly, power; 利li means, roughly, benefit. Quanli, as a rendering of 'rights', thus connotes power, and is suggestive, crudely, that 'the benefits deriving from power'.
⁴1999 Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao (Stanford University Press), p. 19.
⁵'Old thinking, old culture, old customs, old habits'.
⁶This meeting took place on October 18 2002. I did not attend, but am relying on the account of a Chinese colleague, whose judgment I entirely trust.
⁷This includes publication of an electronic newsletter, Xiao Jie ('Miss'), that highlights working conditions and harassment of sex workers.
⁸'Huiling', which provides residential care for mentally handicapped teenagers in Guangzhou and Beijing, is establishing similar operations in several other cities. The Guangzhou Special Children Parents' Club, which offers diagnostic, advisory, therapeutic, training and mutual aid services to families of children with disabilities, is also developing a national network of affiliated organisations that are beginning to establish similar services in their own areas.
⁹See Good Works Make Good Copy in China Development Brief, Vol. V No 2, Autumn 2002.
¹⁰As well as receiving project funding from the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Association is an implementing partner of several UNFPA projects, and has also received grant support from the Ford Foundation.
¹¹Aizhi received start up support form the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, and later received support from the Ford Foundation.
¹²Tongzhi has received grant support from the Elton John AIDS Prevention Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Barry and Martin's Trust.
¹³Funding has, again, come from the Ford Foundation and Barry & Martin's Trust.
¹⁴My AIDS Prevention Journey, Gao Yaojie, in China Rights Forum Summer 2001. This is a translation of an account by Dr. Gao that was originally published on the Aizhi website.
¹⁵As related in the account above (note 14), these included confiscation of materials and instructions never to talk to journalists or give lectures.
¹⁶See, eg, A New Breed of Activist Is Emerging Amid China's Broadening AIDS Crisis in Wall Street Journal 02/04/0
¹⁷Registration with the Bureau of Industry and Commerce - as a business, research institute or research centre, is one means of side-stepping the official registration procedure for social organisations and non profit groups. It gives organisations some legal status and entitles them to open a bank account - but it has the singular disadvantage of also making them liable to pay tax.
¹⁸See Croll, E (1983) Chinese Women Since Mao Zed Books, London.
¹⁹Wolf M (1985) Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China Stanford University Press, p. 2: 'In traditional society, even illiterate farmers knew about the Three Obediences by which women were to be governed: as an unmarried girl a woman must obey her father and her brothers; as a married woman she must obey her husband; and as a widow she must obey her adult sons. During the three stages of a woman's life . . . she was the property of different groups of men who were responsible for her care but who could, as with any property, dispose of her as they saw fit.'
²⁰Stacey J (1983) Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China University of California Press p. 4
²¹Report on work undertaken by the He Tang Public Security Bureau branch in Zhuzhou City, Hunan, in Domestic Violence in China - Research, Intervention and Prevention Newsletter No.13, August 2002
²²Marx K (1853) Future Results of British Rule in India in New York Daily Tribune, August 8th, 1853
²³This analogy of foreign partnership was suggested , in a slightly different context, in 1997 by Phylis Chang, then Ford Foundation China Program Officer for Law and Rights, at a 'law and governance donor roundtable' that the Foundation hosted in Beijing.
²⁴See, eg, the introduction to China Development Brief (2001) 250 Chinese NGOs: Civil Society in the Making
²⁵As far as I know, the most focussed study on this subject is Howell J and Pearce J (2001) Civil Society and Development: A Critical Exploration Lynne Reider, Boulder. Although by no means a frontal assault on the international aid industry, the book does include many examples of cases where donor civil society programmes have played a rather ignominious role.