As the political center of China, Beijing has established a comprehensive Party-building mechanism within NGOs, known as social organizations in China, which aims to strengthen the oversight of these organizations.
It is difficult to balance the autonomy and supervision of NGOs. To ensure that the Party building work is decoupled from Party work but not deregulated, in December 2016, the Beijing Municipal Committee approved the establishment of Beijing Municipal Association of Federations and Chambers of Commerce (hereinafter referred to as the Comprehensive Party Committee), which leads the Party building work of NGOs.
Facing the Party-building work of nearly 3,000 NGOs, the Comprehensive Party Committee cannot grasp the management and supervision at the grassroots level directly. Therefore, a three-level organizational system of the Comprehensive Party Committee, joint Party committees, and the Party committees of NGOs have been established, with the Joint Party Committee at the center.
Joint Party committees are the link between the Party committees of a specific NGO and the city-level comprehensive Party committee and are built based on the classification of organizations. In Beijing, there are currently 52 joint Party committees each covering around 50 organizations according to their specific industry, category, and field.
The Beijing government has also been good at strengthening the management of NGOs right from the start. The registration management function of the municipal civil affairs department is also used to establish a collaborative system for Party building within NGOs. Organizations must pledge commitment to Party building to be able to register. Failure to conduct regular and solid Party-building activities will lead to NGOs not getting high grades during annual evaluations or even being labeled as badly-run organizations.
The last thing to fully implement Party building in NGOs is incorporating Party building into organizations’ operations. The integration of Party building and organizational operation is at the core for NGO Party committees to survive and develop. The Comprehensive Party Committee in Beijing has rolled out a few measures to implement this, from joint decision-making between NGOs and their Party committees to joint management.
