The Wounded Dragon

American NGOS at Work in China

by Ethan Cramer-Flood and photographs by Laura Madden, April 27, 2009

Open a newspaper or news magazine any day of the week, and China will likely feature in any number of stories. Staggering economic expansion, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, record poverty reduction, poisonous exports, human-rights violations, and the great-power political maneuvering between Beijing and Washington all receive daily coverage in some form or another. China’s transformation into an international power, both economically and politically, has been nothing short of remarkable in its speed and breadth. The Middle Kingdom is sometimes presented as a land of unmatched power, wealth, and business acumen, with unlimited potential for global domination.

The truth, of course, is much more complicated, and China is in no way as powerful or accomplished as many believe. Although the US is economically reliant on China’s purchases of Treasury bills to fund US debt—and it’s true that neither country could survive without the other—in many ways China remains a dangerously unfinished product. This danger manifests itself most visibly through China’s inability to control the pollution caused by its runaway industrial development, and its failure (or unwillingness) to curb its greenhouse gas emissions.

China also exhibits flaws through its inability to provide for the health and education of half of its own people. “[There is a] gap left between the days of Communism when work units took care of even poor families’ basic expenses, and the new freewheeling Chinese cash economy, with its blatant divisions between rich urban dwellers and the poor still left in the countryside,” writes Brecken Chinn Swartz, a visiting professor of communication at the University of Maryland, in a 2008 article for the campus faculty magazine. Swartz found her day job because of her PhD in international mass communication, but her true passion lies with Handreach, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) she co-founded in 2002.

Handreach began as a provider of microgrants to resource-poor rural schools in China, and later expanded into a healthcare-oriented project focused on helping catastrophically disfigured young burn victims across the country. It began morphing into its current form after Swartz—a fluent speaker of Mandarin—had a chance encounter with 12-year-old burn victim, Zhou Lin, begging with her family on the streets of Beijing in 2004. A faulty propane tank had exploded and horribly disfigured Zhou Lin from the waist down leaving her unable to walk on her own. Expenses associated with the accident had impoverished the family to the point where the parents could no longer afford school fees for their children. And so they had traveled to Beijing in a futile attempt to seek justice against the corrupt propane company and redress for Zhou Lin’s burn injuries.