Chinese Charities’ Long March
October 19, 2000 | Read Time: 10 minutes
Private nonprofit groups take root despite government ambivalence and huge obstacles to raising money
Tian Huiping took an unusual step when she found no school willing to enroll her son, who is autistic. She started her own.
The Xingxingyu Institute — the name “Star Star Rain” is taken from the U.S. movie “Rain Man” — is thought to be China’s only private institution dedicated to educating preschool children with autism.
Located in a low-rent, rural district that is a two-hour drive from the center of Beijing, the program enrolls families from as far away as Tibet. With a staff of 11, the school serves 15 youngsters at a time and has a long waiting list.
Ms. Tian spends 70 percent of her time raising funds to keep the school afloat. She has persuaded foreign embassies and diplomatic wives’ clubs to contribute used furniture and toys, and even received $19,000 from the Canadian Embassy for equipment. Like most independent nonprofit groups in China, the school doesn’t get a penny from the government.
Tian Huiping is one of a growing number of Chinese citizens who are building nonprofit organizations to take greater responsibility for providing social services and dealing with many other social issues as the role of government here has evolved over the past dozen years.
An estimated one million nonprofit organizations are now working to improve the quality of life for China’s citizens — though only some 200,000 of those groups have registered with the government.
The private groups are varied in their missions. Nonprofit organizations operate hotlines for victims of domestic abuse and AIDS, counsel the mentally ill and their families, offer educational opportunities for poor rural girls, produce television programs to educate viewers on how to protect China’s environment, organize volunteers from Beijing to plants trees in Inner Mongolia, and provide shelter to children of prison inmates.
Although the government has shown ambivalence about the development of such groups — largely out of concern that they could undermine its authority by operating outside of its control — some of China’s larger charities were created under government ministry auspices or by people well-connected to government. Genuine grassroots efforts like Tian Huiping’s are still relatively few, but growth among independent organizations has been swift and has continued to surge in response to skyrocketing demand from Chinese citizens looking for help.
Expecting Less
Most adults in China can remember the day when the government could and did provide for major necessities: lifelong jobs, housing, health insurance, and pensions.
Economic policies instituted 20 years ago changed that. While many people in China have prospered from the market economy, the restructuring of government enterprises has resulted in massive layoffs and growing poverty, crime, and other social problems, especially in cities. Urban unemployment is now estimated to be 15 percent to 20 percent, counting laid-off workers and rural migrants.
The Chinese populace is learning to expect less and less in the way of a safety net from government, and is looking instead to pioneering fast learners like Ms. Tian, who are figuring out ways to look out for their own interests and the interests of disenfranchised populations.
“I have no expectations that the government will assist me,” she says. “They have their hands full dealing with the millions of unemployed. Why, government can’t even deal with normal children who can’t afford to go to school.”
Ms. Tian says some high-level government officials in China have children with autism but don’t want it publicly known.
“Rather than speak out in favor of support services for their own children, let alone others,” she says, “they quietly send their kids abroad for therapy.”
A Hidden Condition
Ms. Tian did not know that her son, now 14, was autistic until he was a toddler. A teacher at an architecture school in central China’s Sichuan province, she returned from a two-year stint studying in Germany to learn that her parents, who had cared for her baby in her absence, were very worried about him. At age 2 ½ he had not yet begun to talk, so his grandparents knew something was wrong.
At the time, only three doctors in China could diagnose autism. A physician in her hometown of Chongqing labeled him autistic but offered no support or encouragement. “In China, no nursery schools or kindergartens are willing to accept autistic kids,” says Ms. Tian. “Even parents who are willing to pay a lot of money are up against a wall.”
Special-education schools, which exist only in China’s largest cities, may accept an autistic child, but typically turn such youngsters away after a time because instructors are unequipped to meet their needs. Eventually, says Ms. Tian, the schools tell parents they don’t want their money or their kids.
In 1992, alone and despondent, Ms. Tian packed a bag for herself and her son and hopped a train to Beijing, 900 miles from her home. There she hoped to find a different diagnosis for her son than the one she had received. The diagnosis was the same, but she did meet Yang Xiaoling, a physician who had started China’s first association for parents of autistic children.
“Professor Yang told me that medication couldn’t cure my son but that training could help,” Ms. Tian recalls. “I thought to myself, I’m a teacher.”
Resolved to put her educational training to work for the benefit of her son and others, Ms. Tian quickly moved to Beijing and began the arduous process of starting her own school.
On top of being a divorced mother with little family support, an outsider without a residence permit or contacts in the capital, and a mother frantic about her son’s future, Ms. Tian found herself up against a formidable array of social, political, and financial barriers.
In China’s get-rich-first climate, people question the selflessness of citizens like Tian Huiping and are rarely inclined to help.
“Chinese find it hard to believe that a Chinese person would use money for a charitable purpose and not for themselves,” observes An Jinshan, an independent Beijing documentary filmmaker who is using her own money to make a film about Ms. Tian’s school. “They think, ‘Who would be that foolish?’ ”
It’s not just such attitudes that make fund raising so difficult. Because autism is understood by only a handful of physicians and parents here, donations to her school from Chinese individuals and companies are scarce. Nor does China offer donors any tax incentives that might encourage private giving.
Working with the government to start an autism program might have buoyed Ms. Tian’s credibility and budget, but she refused to go that route.
“She saw what happened to someone else who tried to start a similar program under government auspices — the woman was thwarted at every turn and eventually prevented from doing anything — and said, ‘That’s not for me,’ ” says Ms. An.
Beyond Fund Raising
Ms. Tian faces many challenges that go beyond fund raising. Teacher turnover is high because Ms. Tian cannot afford to pay much and teaching autistic children is stressful. In today’s China, the young special-education teachers Ms. Tian manages to draw to her school could easily make more money elsewhere at jobs that also are likely to provide better fringe benefits.
Ms. Tian has other worries, too. China’s flagging economy could force some parents to withdraw their children from the school. Family members must take three months off from work to attend the school so they can learn how best to cope with an autistic child and gain face-to-face support from fellow parents. Taking so much time away from work is increasingly difficult for many Chinese parents in the country’s new economy.
Ms. Tian makes numerous personal sacrifices to run the school. Her tiny budget precludes medical insurance or a pension for herself, and she frequently is exhausted from working 16-hour days.
Yet she forges ahead. Like most passionate visionaries she is a recalcitrant optimist. Building on educational materials solicited through exchanges with colleagues abroad, she has strung together a combination of methods to train both teachers and parents to instruct autistic children.
Ms. Tian says that her preschool prepares autistic children for attending regular special-education schools.
“Schools are more likely to accept kids who’ve been through my program,” she notes.
What keeps her going is that every day she bears witness to her school’s ability to deliver to parents a small measure of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape. Autism is commonly considered a form of mental retardation in China. Most autistic children, especially those in rural areas, remain at home and receive no therapy.
“I could give up,” she says. “Closing a school of this kind would be the normal course in China. But without it there’d be no one to help autistic families in this way.”
‘Big Society’
Many people like Ms. Tian who have successfully broken out on their own to help others are not likely to lose their resolve to change society. Nor would Chinese leaders necessarily want to constrain the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that founders of nonprofit efforts like hers have unleashed.
Chinese officials, in fact, are publicly touting “small government, big society.”
Jiang Zemin, the president of China, has acknowledged that the state cannot go it alone and needs the help of nonprofit groups — and it seems clear that China’s Communist Party is counting on nonprofit leaders to help quell mass dissatisfaction with government’s inability to deliver the services and security of the past.
Even so, the Chinese government has demonstrated ambivalence about the new “third sector” that has arisen outside government or business.
On the one hand, Beijing officials hope to rein in nonprofit groups through newly revised laws regarding what they call “social organizations.” Those laws, announced in the fall of 1998, establish minimum financial and staffing requirements that could, if enforced, make it harder for new nonprofit groups to register with government.
On the other hand, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, whose Nonprofits Bureau oversees private organizations, has officially encouraged scholarly research and conferences aimed at nurturing charitable groups.
With the ministry’s approval, China’s prestigious Qinghua University set up an NGO Research Center at the same time the new laws were announced.
The center has sponsored one of several conferences held in China to bring together researchers and nonprofit leaders to learn from the experience of charities inside and outside the country.
The Qinghua-sponsored gathering took place not long after government began its crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement. A Qinghua scholar and conference organizer observed that by sending its staff members to the event the Ministry of Civil Affairs was sending a message to China’s nonprofit groups that, in contrast to Falun Gong, those groups that are providing services and doing other good works are officially sanctioned.
China’s Communist Party will increasingly rely on people like Tian Huiping to provide for citizens what the state cannot. The cumulative efforts of hundreds of Tian Huipings have produced the first real seeds of civil society in China.
To people outside the country, those seeds may not be as visible as the activities of underground political parties or elections that the government now permits in a small portion of China’s towns and villages. But it is here, at a modestly appointed school for autistic children off a dirt road near China’s capital, that nonprofit organizations are showing the powerful role that regular folks outside of government can play in brightening the prospects for China’s disenfranchised — and thus also for China — if only one child at a time.