China Labour Bulletin is quoted in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
By JOSH CHIN
March 6, 2015
BEIJING—For three years, Tim Millar worked with Chinese researchers and local nonprofits to improve legal protections for China’s disabled.
Then, the police came to his apartment one night in January, asking to see his passport, and the British citizen’s China career soon came to an end.
China is ratcheting up pressure on foreign nonprofit groups working to build up civil society, treating them as a security risk.
Mr. Millar was caught on a technicality. His work visa didn’t match his job. The reason: Current regulations make it impossible for foreign civic groups to register as nonprofits and legally employ people in the country.
Beyond visa checks, China is considering a proposed law that would give police authority to manage such foreign groups. A spokeswoman for the legislature, the National People’s Congress, said Wednesday that the law would benefit the groups and bolster national security.
For foreign and Chinese groups, the combined effect has been chilling, signaling that the government’s tolerance for activism is sharply narrowing. An explosion in the number of Chinese civic groups has accompanied the economic boom, drawing in foreigners who want to help. Chinese leaders have made it clear, in speeches and state media, that it views the outsiders as potential purveyors of subversion.
“For civil society in general, this is not a good time,” said Shawn Shieh, an expert in Chinese civil society at Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. “Everyone is taking shelter and laying low for the moment.”
Police gave Mr. Millar three days to change his visa—an impractically short deadline—or 10 days to leave the country. The 34-year-old decided to leave, flying out of Beijing on Feb. 1.
“We hope you can come back when China is a developed country,” one of the public security officers told Mr. Millar, according to people familiar with the situation.
Another foreigner was ousted too. Jérémie Béja, a French citizen who worked on human-rights issues at the French Embassy in Beijing for two years until late 2013. He then worked for China Development Brief, a registered Chinese nonprofit information service that tracks civil society, until police checked on foreigners working there, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Béja, who is married to a Chinese national and has a 1-year-old child, was on a spousal visa that didn’t allow him to work, said a person close to the family. Police called him in and then interrogated and detained him for 10 days before putting him on a plane along with his family, the person said.
Beijing police didn’t respond to requests to comment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it wasn’t aware of the cases. Messrs. Béja and Millar declined to comment.
The British Embassy in Beijing said Mr. Millar hadn’t contacted consular officers. The French Embassy in Beijing said it was following Mr. Beja’s case in accordance with consular protections.
With the expanding Chinese economy creating more opportunities, more Chinese have become involved in health, the environment and other issues that were once the preserve of the government. Foreigners have poured in too, providing expertise and funding.
China has more than 500,000 registered local nonprofits, according to government statistics. State media estimate around 1,000 foreign nonprofits are active in China, with thousands more running occasional programs.
Existing regulations, however, don’t permit foreign nonprofits, causing some to register as for-profit businesses to gain access to visas and driving others underground.
The help foreign organizations provide to China’s fledgling civil society groups “is hugely important,” said Lu Jun, founder of the Yirenping Center, a legal-aid group that focuses on health and disability issues. The center worked with the Rights Practice, the U.K.-based group that employed Mr. Millar. Treating foreign nonprofits as the enemy “is turning back the wheel of history,” said Mr. Lu.
The Communist Party has seen the knowledge and services that these groups provide as useful.
But its wariness has built over the past decade as it watched activist nonprofits, often funded by foreign organizations, play a role in unseating authoritarian governments from Kyrgyzstan to Ukraine.
Under President Xi Jinping , the leadership has waged a broad campaign to blunt Western influence on society, issuing warnings about destabilizing “foreign forces.” The Chinese territory of Hong Kong has been cast as a new front line with state media accusing agents of the West as instigating the pro-democracy “Occupy Central” movement, which took over parts of the city last fall.
A gathering source of concern for foreign civil-society groups is the proposed new law to manage them. The draft law hasn’t been publicly released. Those who have seen it or been briefed on its contents said it is restrictive.
The proposal gives the Ministry of Public Security, the nation’s police, authority to register foreign groups and monitor their activities, said Anthony Spires of Chinese University of Hong Kong, who reviewed a draft. Mr. Spires said foreign groups must find a sponsoring government agency—a difficult task for groups working on human rights, legal reform and other political issues. Groups would have to submit annual budgets to their sponsors for approval before disbursing funds, he said.
“It raises the possibility for a lot of groups that they could be kicked out,” Mr. Spires said. For those that do get registered, he said, “it adds several layers of control that they do not have to deal with right now.”
Authorities in Beijing have said the law will benefit foreign groups by giving them a path to legal status. But the law is also intended to “better preserve national security and social stability,” Fu Ying, the National People’s Congress spokeswoman, said at a news conference.
Up to now, the uncertain legal status of foreign nonprofits has allowed them to work in sensitive areas that might otherwise be off-limits, even as it exposes them to retaliation from authorities.
Mr. Millar, the Briton, started working as a project manager for Rights Practice in 2011, concentrating on disability rights. He was the first foreign employee in China for the British group, which runs a range of rule-of-law programs, including one on prison monitoring involving officials with the Ministry of Justice. Since the Rights Practice is unregistered, Mr. Millar turned to a visa agent to acquire one, the organization said. The visa was attached to a business set up by a friend of Mr. Millar’s, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Nicola Macbean, the Rights Practice’s executive director, said the group was treating Mr. Millar’s departure as a visa issue. “Whether it indicates something else is not clear,” she said.
Write to Josh Chin at josh.chin@wsj.com