EVERY Sunday deaf children meet to learn sign language in a borrowed classroom in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Pham Cao Phuong Thao began organising the lessons after her own son was born with hearing difficulties; her students include street children whom disability has made hungry. But after years of effort Ms Thao has still not obtained the permits that would make her charity legal. She says the paperwork produced to support her applications forms a stack a metre high.

Ms Thao’s small organisation is among more than 300,000 charities, clubs and associations operating in Vietnam, a single-party state with an increasingly vibrant civic life. Yet the country’s Byzantine bureaucracy—and the ruling Communist Party’s paranoia—leaves these outfits in a bind. For years campaigners had dared to hope that a proposed law, which was supposed to pass on November 18th, would help cement citizens’ right to associate. Instead lawmakers talked of tightening restrictions on civil society before shelving the bill altogether.

In theory the needs of Vietnamese are met by a suite of state-approved professional clubs and community groups, which are sponsored and closely supervised by government agencies or by wings of the Communist Party. In practice many associations muddle along outside this structure. Groups promoting civil liberties, labour rights and other dangerous topics are resigned to operating informally. But some others—working in areas such as environmentalism, or in aiding the aged, addicted or orphaned—are locked out of the system by overcautious government gatekeepers who fear they might accidentally endorse troublemakers of some kind. Without proper paperwork, such groups battle to open bank accounts, hold events, rent venues or raise cash. The problem is particularly acute in the south, which the party still views as less ideologically sound—a legacy of the Vietnam war.

No one expected the draft law on associations, which was dusted off in 2015 after several years in storage, to bring dramatic change. The hope was that it would clarify rights that currently exist in a patchwork of decrees—and are often disregarded by local bureaucrats—creating a firm legal footing from which to advance. But during revisions legislators peppered the text with new prohibitions, including a clause which would have banned even duly registered foundations from receiving money from abroad. Campaigners and foreign donors who had cautiously welcomed the draft law were relieved when the national assembly put it back on ice.

Vietnam has good reason to ease up on civic-minded citizens. Government debt is reaching its legal limit of 65% of GDP—a reminder of the limits of what the state can afford. There is also a growing move to streamline government. The authorities are pressing ahead with the privatisation of bloated state-owned enterprises; by the same token, party bigwigs must surely question the utility of the big subsidies they pump into often sluggish state-sanctioned clubs and associations. Some cadres probably calculate that it would be easier to spot agitators if more groups were encouraged to operate openly rather than to organise clandestinely online.

But these considerations do not yet outweigh the fear of acting as a midwife to movements that might threaten its control. It probably did not help that the debate on the law coincided with broad outrage over mass fish deaths caused by a polluting steel mill which, among other impacts, has pushed environmentalists higher up the government’s watch-lists. The death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a planned American-led trade deal, has also dampened Vietnam’s appetite for reform. Delay in passing a law on associations makes it less likely that Vietnam will fulfil a bold promise to begin tolerating independent trade unions, which it made during negotiations for TPP and towards which the legislation was supposed to be a small step.

As for Ms Thao, she intends to keep badgering authorities to register her group. She wants to help create a dictionary of Vietnamese sign language, needed to unify divergent regional practices. That would be easier if she had the papers required to pester foreigners for donations. But they are still on hold—like the law.