A Review of Chinese Foundation’s Development Characteristics and Its Interaction with Grassroots NGOs

Abstract

This paper presents the overall development characteristics of Chinese foundation at different stages, with a focus on its emergency, past historic development and present growth pattern from 1949 to 2017. Results show that the development of Chinese foundation is not only greatly affected by current policies and regulations, but also largely unable to deviate from the original development track of foundations with government-background. The study shows that foundation has grown rapidly since 2004 and started its interactions with grassroots NGOs have started since 2008. However, the interactions with grassroots NGOs have not changedtransformatively due to the influence of current policies and earlier foundations. The finding reveals that government-affiliated foundations formulated their own approaches to fundraising and their own operating model, and Chinese foundations excluded grassroots NGOs in their operating mechanism since the very beginning.