As reported by ChinaFile, five overseas NGOs have de-registered their representative offices in China over the last few months. The NGOs that de-registered are the Europe-China Culture and Economy Commission (Belgium), the World Future Council (Germany), the KYOTO Industrial Support Organization 21 (Japan), the Confederação Nacional do Transporte (CNT) (Brazil), and the Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies (USA).
Over the first two years of the Overseas NGO Law’s implementation, in 2017-2018, only two overseas NGOs had chosen to de-register their offices. The reasons for the recent de-registrations are unclear. The China NGO Project of ChinaFile reports that they attempted to contact all five of the NGOs to learn about the reasons for their decision to pull out of China, but they only heard back from the World Future Council, which explained that it “had to deregister as [it] could not meet the Chinese requirement of finding and securing funds from a German donor to send funds from our head office in Hamburg to the China office.” While rather cryptic, this remark would seem to suggest either bureaucratic problems linked with sending funds from Germany to China, or the impossibility of securing funds back home now that it is no longer possible to fundraise within China.
