China Investigates Nonprofit Groups

The Chinese government has started aggressively investigating nonprofit groups that receive money from Western sources out of fears that such organizations could mobilize the Chinese public against the government’s environmental and human-rights policies, The Boston Globe reports.

Yu Xiaogang, director of Green Watershed, an environmental group in China that receives money from the Ford Foundation and other U.S. donors that oppose China’s construction of large-scale dams, said government authorities halted the group’s operations for several months by refusing to renew the group’s official operating license. Some people connected to China’s nonprofit world say the government worries that the West is using Chinese nonprofit organizations to push democracy, and the newspaper reported that activists claim thousands of Chinese groups that receive money from foreign donors have been investigated or audited by the government in the past year.

Chinese officials did not comment in the article.