In the past two decades, the number of grassroots NGOs in China has grown dramatically. Yet most scholarship on Chinese civil society has had little to say about the resources they rely on for survival. In this talk we present the first large-scale study to map the landscape of these groups. We compare 263 NGOs across issue areas (including HIV, education, environment, and labor rights) and regions (Beijing, Guangdong, and Yunnan). We find these groups are tapping into high levels of human resources – volunteers, boards of directors, and informal government ties – even in the absence of official government approval for their activities. We also detail their sources of funding, revealing a diverse support system with clear regional and issue-based biases. Taken together, our findings form a baseline for understanding China’s grassroots NGOs and point out new research questions that have yet to be addressed in the civil society literature.
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