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China's Self-Discipline System of Accountability

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China's Self-Discipline System of Accountability - Suppose you could set up any "accountability system" you wanted for the nonprofits you care about. Suppose there were no 990, no Wise Giving Alliance, no charitable solicitations registrations, no Guidestar. How would your accountability system work to strengthen the connections between people[radical]s generosity, community values, and the activities of organizations that present themselves as "nonprofit"?

Half of my brain was occupied with questions like those as I prepared to depart for Beijing in September 2002. I was invited to participate in a meeting organized by the China NPO Network on the topic of nonprofit accountability. The background materials made clear that the familiar mechanisms of accountability, those routine features of the operating environment for American nonprofits, simply do not exist in China. At present there are no systems that regulators, philanthropists, volunteers and communities can count on as sources of information and for protections against abuse.

The other half of my brain recognized, of course, that the activities and aspirations of Chinese nonprofits are embedded in the everyday life of a huge, complex and rapidly changing nation whose long traditions and enormous challenges have no ready counterparts in my experience. To think that just because there is no developed accountability system in China today, the Chinese can have any system they want tomorrow -- much less any accountability system I might carry with me on the plane -- would simply be foolish.

Gathering some sketchy sense of the context for this Chinese effort turned out to be easier than I expected. Michael O'Neill (of the University of San Francisco) generously sent the proceedings of the International Conference on the Non-Profit Sector convened by Tsinghua University in 1999. It includes observations by scholars and officials from China and many other countries. The September 2002 issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (which arrived just before the trip began) contains Qiusha Ma's article on "The Governance of NGOs in China Since 1978" and observations on "Foreign NGOs in China" by Renee Yuen-Jan Hsia and Lynn T. White III. These sources made clear that confident generalizations applicable throughout China await the regularization of data-collection and reporting systems. On the other hand, enough is known to allow recognition of some great accomplishments by newly emerging organizations working within the incompletely articulated and inconsistently applied regulatory scheme.

Two sharply etched conclusions emerged from these valuable accounts. The first was a strong sense of double vision. Chinese nonprofits have board-staff conflicts, they struggle to raise enough money to address their goals, and they must cope with free riding as a constant factor in their endeavors. Yet these similarities are surely misleading. The challenges faced by both the emerging organizers and the would-be systematizers have little in common with the everyday experience in the US. The difficulties of translation -- both of words and of concepts -- are masked in the present case by the adoption into Chinese of a vocabulary where the words themselves are often the same while the meanings end up having little in common.

For example, enpeeoh and engeeoh are both used as ordinary nouns by Chinese speakers when referring to organizations in China and other countries -- a usage that obscures the pervasive differences between, to pick two, minwan fei qiye danwei and 501(c)(6)s, "nongovernmental noncommercial enterprises" and "business leagues" respectively. (Incidentally, the Chinese word fei ambiguously covers the concepts we express in English by both the prefixes "non" and "anti," leading to an understandable anxiety about misunderstandings when speaking about fei-governmental-organizations.)

The second conclusion I reached before getting on the plane was that the absence of legal standards for community-benefit work does not mean that a clear path lies ahead for the efforts to create an accountability system. Many barriers, some deeply rooted in recent Chinese history, some inherent in the challenge of institutionalizing altruism, will have to be overcome.

In Beijing, the China NPO Network ( http://www.npo.com.cn/EINDEX.HTM ) convened two days of thorough, thoughtful and frank discussions. Paul Nelson, the other American resource-person at the meetings, drew on his experience as President of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability ( http://www.ecfa.org ) to present a detailed outline of the way a well-established self-regulatory scheme works among the members of that organization. I offered a wider context, outlined the approaches taken by the Wise Giving Alliance, the Minnesota Charities Review Council, the state nonprofit associations who are implementing standards of excellence programs, the Association of Fundraising Professionals and others.

After addressing tough questions to both of us, and discussing the ideas among themselves in a careful way, the group decided to work toward a voluntary "self-discipline system" that incorporates published standards for behavior and public pledges by participating organizations to meet or exceed the standards. To my outsider's eyes, this approach elegantly sidesteps the disadvantages of focusing efforts on trying to secure clear government policies and regulations. When implemented, it will contribute to critical confidence among donors and community leaders in the work of Chinese NPOs. It defines standards that can be incorporated into the regulatory scheme as it evolves. In the meantime, though, forthright organizations will, by example, encourage candor from counterparts throughout the country and protect themselves, and the work of NPOs more generally, from the sort of corrosive abuse that flourishes in obscurity.

Here is the preliminary list of standards for the Chinese "self-discipline system" as formulated by Prof. Shang Yusheng, President of the China NPO Network:

  1. To observe the National Constitution and other laws and regulations; and abide by their own organizational constitutions;
  2. To uphold public-good mission to promote progress and justice of the society;
  3. To stick to organization's not- for-profit principle, not to pursue interest for any individual or family;
  4. To insist on financial transparency and to expose annual report to the public;
  5. To insist on information exchange, resources sharing and mutual cooperation;
  6. To insist on self -autonomy and independence and to build regular board of directors;
  7. To follow fair and reasonable sponsorship and evaluation, not to abuse written rules and process with any excuse;
  8. To provide high quality service, based on high professional capability.

Make allowance for a slightly unfamiliar vocabulary. How do these principles for NPO self-discipline match your ideas of what would be good for nonprofits and for the climate within which nonprofits operate?

Do you think US nonprofits would be better off if we borrowed something from China's self-discipline system"?

I do.

 

Posted at the Intenet Nonprofit Center in September 2002.  © 2002, The Evergreen State Society