In China’s highly controlled system, the independent involvement of true civil society organisations on key policy issues is impossible. As Xi Jinping has said, echoing Mao Zedong: “Party, government, army, society and education — east and west, south and north, the Party leads all.” Recognizing the importance of civil society organisations in foreign countries and in the international system, however, the Chinese Communist Party has created a system of proxy organisations through which it can foster what it calls “people-to-people exchange” and seek influence in foreign countries, within the Chinese diaspora, and within the UN system. In this context, “non-governmental” (非政府) functions as a deceptive label that enables Party-state infiltration of genuine civil society spaces while cloaking CCP activities as independent advocacy.
Organisations that describe themselves as non-governmental, such as the China Society for Human Rights Studies or the All-China Journalists Association, are directly operated by CCP departments including the Central Propaganda Department and International Liaison Department, yet leverage this false civil society status to gain UN consultative positions and international legitimacy. In domestic contexts, the qualifier can serve to validate Party-state organisations as examples of China’s thriving independent sector. In international settings, it functions to systematically undermine genuine civil society participation in organisations like the UN, where fake NGOs promote CCP narratives while claiming to represent independent Chinese voices and deflecting criticism through coordinated attack operations against Western human rights records.
