Mark Sidel on China's Oversight of Foreign NGOs: Eight Years of the Overseas NGO Law

Dec 17, 2025

Mark Sidel, a law professor and leading authority on Chinese NGOs, discusses the dramatic changes in foreign NGO operations in China since the 2016 legislation. He delves into how the political landscape shifted due to global events, leading to stricter oversight and requiring NGOs to navigate complex bureaucratic channels. Sidel categorizes the various responses of NGOs—survivors, hibernators, and more—and explains how the Chinese state channels foreign organizations toward non-advocacy service work, reshaping the domestic nonprofit ecosystem.

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INSIGHT

Comprehensive Oversight Replaced Fragmentation

China created a comprehensive, vertically integrated oversight system for overseas NGOs after the 2016 law to both securitize and channel their work.
The system blends political control with selective accommodation for service and technical cooperation.

INSIGHT

Centralization Aimed At Visibility

The party centralized control after 2012 to prevent overseas groups from doing policy or advocacy work in China.
The goal was full visibility and unified regulation under public security rather than fragmented ministries.

INSIGHT

Two Legal Channels Dominate Engagement

The law created two main channels: representative offices with broader powers and one-year temporary activity permits.
Those two channels now account for nearly all lawful overseas NGO engagement in China.

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This week on Sinica, I speak with Mark Sidel, the Doyle Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the International Center for Not for Profit Law.

Mark has written extensively on law and philanthropy in China and across Asia, including widely cited analyses of how the Chinese security state came to play a central role in managing foreign civil society organizations. Since the Law on the Management of Domestic Activities of Overseas NGOs took effect on January 1, 2017, China has introduced a remarkably comprehensive, vertically integrated system of oversight for foreign NGOs, foundations, and nonprofits.

We discuss how this system combines securitization and political risk management with selective accommodation of service provision and technical expertise, Mark’s typology of organizational responses (survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers), the requirement that foreign NGOs secure professional supervisory units, the impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem, and what this tells us about the party-state’s long-term vision for controlled engagement with the outside world.

4:43 – The landscape of non-state organizations before the 2016 law

7:06 – What changed: color revolutions, Arab Spring, and domestic anxieties

9:08 – Public security intellectuals and their influence on the law

11:51 – How registration and temporary activity filing systems work in practice

13:48 – Why the Ministry of Public Security, not Civil Affairs, was put in charge

19:31 – The professional supervisory unit requirement and dependency relationships

22:48 – How the state shifted foreign NGO work away from advocacy without banning it

26:17 – Mark’s typology: survivors, hibernators, regionalizers, work-arounders, and leavers

35:19 – What correlates with success for those who have survived

40:41 – Impact on China’s domestic nonprofit ecosystem and professional intermediaries

45:54 – What makes China’s system distinctive compared to India, Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam

50:19 – The Article 53 problem and university partnerships

55:32 – Advice for mid-sized foundations or NGOs considering work in China today

Paying it Forward: Neysun Mahboubi and the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations

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