Quality projects with local ownership are the most effective means of pursuing advocacy objectives in China argues Zhao Zhonghua (赵中华) of Save the Children, citing the experience of an education project that, he says, has had demonstrable impact on government policy and practice.

Chang Tianle (常天乐) reports on the growing role that religious leaders in Tibetan areas are playing, both in delivering social services and in protecting their environmental heritage.

As Beijing’s city planners continue to re-model the capital ahead of the 2008 Olympics, a cultural heritage protection NGO has set out to preserve not just the city’s traditional courtyards and hutongs but also the work of architect, Xu Zhong who designed two Ministry of Commerce buildings completed in 1954 and now slated for demolition.

Green River (绿色江河), an independent conservation NGO based in Sichuan, is recruiting volunteers to spend the summer travelling the new Qinghai-Tibet railway line educating passengers about the ecology of the Tibet plateau.

The veteran International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, also known as Gung Ho, is embarking on a three-year project to develop farmers’ cooperatives in three counties with different levels of economic development.

Publicly naming and shaming industrial polluters and scoring county governments for their environmental performance feature in the plans of a new NGO established in May by an internationally renowned Chinese activist.

China’s environmental NGOs are an “indispensable force” that is likely to grow by 10-15% annually (in terms of both the number of organisations and the number of staff working for them), with steadily greater collaboration and multi-sectoral working approaches, according to a report released by the All-China Environmental Federation (ACEF).

An independent non-profit organisation that provides community-based care for mentally handicapped youngsters is managing to raise enough funds in China to expand its services without increasing dependence on international donors—despite a restrictive legal framework that leaves the fundraising market dominated by a handful of large, state-backed players.

An increasingly heated dispute has broken out over local NGO representation on China’s “Country Coordinating Mechanism” for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has so far provided more than USD 190 million for AIDS prevention and care programmes in China.

As China’s first generation of NGOs look back on ten or more years of growth in a shifting, but invariably difficult, policy context, several of them are also wrestling with the equally challenging issue of leadership succession.