Licence and attribution

RICF publishes data and documentation. Both are available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

This is not open data in the unrestricted sense. The licence permits research, teaching, and other non-commercial use, and it prohibits commercial use. If your use is commercial, this licence does not cover it.

What attribution requires

Cite the data paper, which is the citable record for this database:

Ma, J., Wang, Q., Dong, C., & Li, H. (2017). The research infrastructure of Chinese foundations, a database for Chinese civil society studies. Scientific Data, 4, 170094. doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.94

Also state which snapshot you used. Every figure on this site is derived from a dated snapshot, and counts change between snapshots as filings are collected and corrected. The snapshot date appears in the site header, and a foundation profile offers a copyable citation that already includes it.

What the licence covers

• The published tables, the browser indexes behind the search and the foundation profiles, and the consolidated codebook.
• This documentation.

The data originates from public filings and registry pages published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and its provincial counterparts. RICF’s contribution is the consolidation, identity matching, harmonization, and provenance recording described in the harmonization method and the provenance policy. Source values are preserved rather than overwritten, so a reader can always trace a published value back to the filing it came from.

Limits worth knowing before you rely on it

Coverage is incomplete and some decisions remain provisional. The known gaps page records what is missing, what is inferred rather than filed, and which publication decisions are still under review. Values carried from a neighbouring filing are labelled as such and are never presented as filed values.

Visiting this site

The pages load two third-party analytics scripts, one from sdk.51.la and one from googletagmanager.com (Google Analytics), each of which reports page views from your browser to that service. They are about visitors to the site, not about the organizations in the data, and they are stated here because a site that documents what it publishes about other people should say what it collects about you.

Personal data

This dataset names people. Foundations disclose their legal representative, their contact staff, and their board members to the Ministry of Civil Affairs because the law requires it, and the platform publishes those disclosures; this site republishes them. A board roster carries each member’s position, term, annual compensation, political status, and age in the filing year. Contact records carry office phone numbers and work email addresses.

One thing is withheld, and the provenance policy records exactly how: no date of birth is published. An age in whole years is published in its place.

Everything else the filings declare is here, including personal mobile numbers. Those were withheld until the maintainer reviewed the rule and judged that values the ministry already discloses cost research more withheld than published. You should know what that means before you rely on it: this dataset is a bulk, downloadable index of contact details for named individuals. It is published for research under CC BY-NC 4.0, and redistributing or re-using those contact routes remains subject to the personal-information law of the jurisdiction you operate in, which a licence from us does not displace.

CC BY-NC 4.0 is the licence, and it is the whole of the licence. What follows is what we expect of you rather than an additional term, but the expectation is plain:

• Use it to study organizations, governance, and the sector. That is what it is for, and it is why the personal data is here rather than withheld.
• Do not use it to contact, profile, market to, or build a dossier on the individuals it names. They appear because they hold or held an office, not because they opted in to a research dataset.
• Do not attempt to re-identify or reconstruct what is withheld, and do not join this data to another source in order to do so.
• If you redistribute any of it, carry these expectations with it.

If your work needs something withheld here, write to ma47@iu.edu rather than working around it. The known gaps page records what is missing and why. The same address takes data corrections, site problems, and studies to add to the citation list: the site is served from a private repository and has no public issue tracker.

Historical board-member records (2010–2016)

The first-generation RICF project compiled board-member identification records — name, gender, and date of birth — for 2010–2016 from public sources, and, together with a follow-up study, made them available to academic researchers rather than openly, because of privacy concerns. Access required a signed non-disclosure agreement; the original agreement form is preserved in the repository as legacy/nda.docx. The current publication follows the stricter rule above — no date of birth is published anywhere, and an age in whole years stands in its place — so the NDA route now applies only to the historical restricted records. Requests still go to ma47@iu.edu.