Thwarted at Home, Can China’s Feminists Rebuild a Movement Abroad?

By Shen Lu & Mengwen Cao on August 28, 2019

A small number of China’s feminist movement’s influential thinkers and organizers have relocated overseas, in search of an environment more hospitable to their activism. Today, though their numbers are relatively small, they have succeeded in cultivating a vibrant expatriate community of sympathizers and activists who are committed to raising awareness of assaults on Chinese women’s rights and fighting against them. Thanks in large part to the Internet, they are helping to rekindle and fuel the efforts of their friends back home, keeping alight ideas and campaigns that China’s government has sought to extinguish.

Can China’s Government Replace Hong Kong?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By David Schlesinger & Jerome A. Cohen on August 27, 2019

As the Hong Kong protests enter their fourth month with no end in sight, on August 18 Beijing announced that the nearby Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen would again become a new type of special economic zone. In a clear message to Hong Kong, the plan claimed Shenzhen would serve as “an example of law and order and civilization.” Hong Kong has long been China’s financial and trade gateway to the region and the world. But that status may be eroding. How much does Hong Kong matter to the economic health of mainland China, and how has that changed recently?

Kiki Tianqi Zhao

on August 27, 2019

Kiki Tianqi Zhao is a freelance writer based in China and the U.S. From 2012 to 2017, she was a journalist based in the Beijing bureaus of The Financial Times and then The New York Times. She holds an M.A. from Yale University Council of East Asian Studies, and a B.A. from the Communication University of China. She is currently affiliated with the Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies as an Associate in Research.

China’s Government Wants You to Think All Mainlanders View Hong Kong the Same Way. They Don’t.

By Kiki Tianqi Zhao on August 27, 2019

Mainland Chinese flood the Internet with messages calling protesters in Hong Kong “useless youth.” They send obscene messages and death threats to supporters of the Hong Kong demonstrations. But reports on episodes like this, while important, are dominating media coverage to the point of drowning out the quieter, less aggressive voices of other Chinese mainlanders, whose views on Hong Kong the government in Beijing is less interested in amplifying. Moreover, they risk giving anti-Hong Kong chauvinists a disproportionately large spotlight.

How China Regulates Foreign Non-Governmental Organizations

The many, many hoops that foreign groups have to jump through to operate in China—and why Beijing changed the laws in 2017.

By Siodhbhra Parkin on August 27, 2019

Nearly three years into implementation of the ONGO Law, it is difficult to make a strong case for this latter argument. According to data taken directly from the MPS, foreign NGOs’ efforts to register representative offices have slowed to a trickle. Further, the number and range of foreign NGOs that have been able to formally sponsor or organize a one-off activity or event, or to use the technical term, carry out a “temporary activity filing,” remain limited. To understand why, we’ll explain exactly how the ONGO Law works, the major obstacles it presents to a range of groups, and what this suggests about China’s preferred style of international exchange and cooperation.

United Front Work Department’s Austrian Chapter Registers as a Foreign NGO in China

on August 27, 2019

The Austria-China Peaceful Reunification Promotion Association (奥地利中国和平统一促进会) registered a representative office in China on May 29, 2019. This is particularly noteworthy not only because it is the first Austrian group to register an office under the auspices of the Foreign NGO Law, but also because it is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s (C.C.P.’s) United Front Work Department. The United Front is the C.C.P. agency responsible for managing relationships with elite Chinese individuals and organizations inside and outside of China.

Updated FAQ Section

on August 26, 2019

We’ve recently updated and re-organized our FAQ section based on user feedback. In particular, we’ve gathered key questions related to representative offices and temporary activities onto their own separate pages, to allow for easier browsing and searching

Darshana M. Baruah

on August 21, 2019

Darshana M. Baruah is a Visiting Fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Tokyo and a Nonresident Scholar with the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is currently working on a book about the significance of strategic islands in the Indian Ocean region. Her primary research focuses on maritime security in Asia and the role of the Indian Navy in a new security architecture. Her work also examines the strategic implications of China’s infrastructure and connectivity projects as well as trilateral partnerships in the Indo-Pacific.

Previously, Baruah was the Associate Director and a Senior Research Analyst at Carnegie India, where she led the center’s initiative on maritime security. As the Associate Director, Baruah’s institutional responsibilities included coordinating and overseeing the centre’s development, outreach, and institutional partnerships. While at Carnegie India, Baruah also coordinated and led various track 1.5 dialogues and seminars, such as the India-Australia-France trilateral dialogue, India-Japan-Sri Lanka trilateral dialogue, India-E.U. dialogue, and India-U.K. maritime dialogue, among others. Her research projects included work on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well as trilateral partnerships and strategic connectivity projects in the Indo-Pacific.

In 2018, Baruah was also a Visiting Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) Tokyo. Prior to this, Baruah was a 2016 national parliamentary fellow at the Australian parliament and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (Canberra) and the Lowy Institute (Sydney), where her research was centered on India-Australia maritime collaboration in the Indo-Pacific.

Baruah was awarded the programme d’invitations de personnalités d’avenir (broadly translating to “personalities of the future”) by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018 and was also named as the U.K.’s next generation foreign and security policy scholar for 2017.

Prior to Carnegie India, Baruah was with the maritime security initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, where she was the Associate Editor of the South China Sea Monitor.