The Charity Times reported yesterday on some interesting data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs concerning China’s charity sector in 2018. The data comes from the “National Civil Affairs Work Video Conference”, held in Beijing on the 3rd January, and other data recently released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. We summarize the most interesting points below.
Social organizations
Registration management: up to now, the civil affairs departments at all levels have registered 810,000 social organizations and 5289 charitable organizations (1454 of which had public fundraising qualifications).
Illegal social organizations rectification: In 2018, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the public security organs launched a special campaign for a period of nine months. The campaign created smoother channels for reporting complaints and exposed more than 300 suspected illegal social organizations. In total, 5,845 illegal social organizations were investigated and dissolved.
Industry/business associations: an experimental reform regarding disconnection between industry/business associations (which are also regarded as social organizations under Chinese law) and the government has been completed, and 422 related associations have rescinded their connection to the government. The fees imposed on the members of such associations were also regulated. Eight associations, including the China Advertising Association, received sanctions, and illegal income of 12.25 million Yuan was confiscated; 25 associations were required to return irregularly charged fees of 6.15 million Yuan to their members.
Financial support: a project was implemented to provide social organizations participating in social services with financial support from the central government, with funding for 178 million Yuan. This encouraged the fiscal and taxation departments to revise preferential policies for non-profits and companies who donated to charity regarding tax exemption qualifications and pre-tax deductions.
Social work and volunteer services
Over the course of the year 440,000 social workers received their professional certificates nationally, and the number of certified volunteer service organizations reached 12,000. According to data derived from the National Volunteer Service Information System, there were over 100 million registered volunteers and the recorded time of volunteer services exceeded 1.2 billion hours.
Left-behind children
In 2018 the state set up 44,600 childcare supervisors in small towns and 615,300 “children directors” in villages, and it basically achieved full coverage and real-name management for the relevant staff; it also completed a “dynamic monitoring mechanism”, under which it will regularly update the database of information on rural left-behind children, and register the information of children in hardship. There are currently 6.97 million rural left-behind children in China.
