The Trump administration has frozen nearly all foreign funding under the State Department, a move that Australia Strategic Policy Institute's China investigations and analysis head Bethany Allen says is already impacting the work of NGOs and nonprofits in China. Without the information these organizations provide, the U.S. and other countries have few means to counter Beijing's assertions that its autocratic political system is better than democracy.
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00:00The Trump administration has frozen nearly all foreign funding as it seeks to drastically reduce federal spending.
00:08How has this move impacted NGOs doing work in China?
00:12There are many, many programs and organizations that have received grants from the State Department for all different kinds of work.
00:23And there's a, I would call it an entire ecosystem of nonprofits that work on China from outside of China that are quite dependent on those grants from the State Department.
00:36And since those have been frozen, dozens of organizations are in crisis.
00:43They're needing, having to lay off staff, they're facing imminent closure, and their work, even if they aren't at this time facing imminent closure, is already being damaged, and in some cases irreparably.
00:56These kinds of organizations play a crucial role in our information space about what we know about China.
01:03They tally local protests in China, they document human rights abuses, they document the Uyghur genocide, they track Chinese media censorship.
01:12And they do things on a really granular level that really no one else does.
01:16How is it that these groups have become so reliant on funding from the U.S.?
01:21There's a number of reasons that we've gotten to this place.
01:25One of them is that foreign NGOs used to be able to operate in China, but the 2017 foreign NGO law in China essentially made their work illegal and they had to leave China.
01:38A second reason is that they are quite dependent on government funding because the Chinese government, as we all know, uses the power of access to its economy to control what businesses do and say, and what rich people do and say.
01:57So why aren't other democratic governments more involved?
02:02That's a complicated answer.
02:05Other democratic governments, for example, in the European Union have scaled back their own funding for pro-democracy work over the past 10 years as well.
02:13I think there was a sense that the U.S. was very reliable and would continue to fund this, and so it didn't really matter.
02:21But what we've seen is that in one fell swoop, because of one government's actions, this entire system of vital work is really in danger of dying and there will be nothing left in its place.
02:37What is the impact to the U.S. and other Western countries of losing the visibility into China that these organizations provide?
02:46The reason that this information is so valuable, and certainly it's valuable on its own merits, it's incredibly important to understand what's happening in China, how people are suffering, what the government there is actually doing, because of course the Chinese government maintains one of the world's most sophisticated censorship regimes to prevent information from leaving China or from being collected in the first place.
03:13But why does that matter for us, for people who don't inherently care about China?
03:17And it matters because the point of China's censorship regime, the point of it trying to prevent negative information about China from leaving China, is because it wants to present its system as the best system in the world.
03:31It's a one-party authoritarian state, and Beijing's big pitch to the world is that this system is at least an equal alternative to democracies and is probably superior.
03:43And it's really hard to prove that that is false, that Beijing is lying and using deception to make its case, if we don't have access to facts.
03:52And if we can't prove that Beijing is wrong, we can't prove that its system actually is deeply flawed, then what is the whole point of fighting for democracies or even having democracies ourselves?