Chinese Grass-roots Ngo Development, Lack Of Social Capital

With the deepening of China's reform and opening-up and the prosperous development of marketing economy, sustainable development has been achieved by the NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), which are playing vitally important roles in society. The commonweal NGOs are intermediate forces, which contribute the various resources gathered from the society to social commonweal careers, particularly to the fields that cannot be reached by the governments and markets. Based on the special social background of China, the Chinese government has adopted the policy of both encouragement and restriction on the NGOs. Under the strict "double management" registration system, many civil organizations are defined as illegal NGOs. It's very difficult for these illegal grass root NGOs to establish stable relationships with all circles of society, so that the gathering of resources is difficult, and the existence and development of these organizations are faced with austere test. Many grass root NGOs are exerting their functions to maintain the social harmony with their volunteer spirit. However, they usually fail to attract the attentions from all circles of the society and the special study on them from scholars are not much.In China, although the NGOs have been equipped with the necessary conditions for development, however all of them are faced with thedifficulties of capital, human power and legal environment, and so on. Without a legal position, the difficulties faced by the grass root NGOs are more serious. By means of analyses performed by scholars on the difficulties existed in the NGOs, the author considers that the difficulties suffered by the NGOs are closely related to the social capital inventory of their own. Therefore, the paper takes the grass root NGOs as the study object and takes the social capital as the study clue.By means of site investigation on Z-hotline, the author discovers that the social capital decisive to the existence and development of the grass root NGOs is the internal volunteer resource and the social status of the organizations themselves, and the external relationship network with the government, enterprise, citizen and media. The amount of the capital inventory of grass root NGO is determined by its capacity of rewarding the other party. At present, the social influence of grass root NGOs is very weak in most parts of China, therefore, the current capital status of "strong dependent and weak relationship". This paper further demonstrates the scarcity of social capital is the fundamental reason of causing the dilemma of the NGOs by means of analysis on the difficulties existed in the development of Z-hotline.This paper consists of five chapters: chapter 1 is introduction, which mainly introduces the background, meaning and concept of the subject and the relevant study summary and study methods. The summary ismade on the basis of generalizing and analyzing relevant study achievements. The paper mainly adopts the literature method, observation method and interview method for study. Chapter 2 generalizes the system environment and social environment related to the NGOs. Chapter 3 discusses the establishment and development of Z-hotline. The internal social capital status of the organizations is displayed by means of the description of the existence status of Z-hotline, the relationship between volunteers and the relationship between the volunteers and the organizations. Chapter 4 is the systematic analysis performed on the external social capital of Z-hotline, which respectively discusses the relationship network between the government, enterprise, citizen and media and exhibits the strong dependence of Z-hotline on these organizations and the weak relationship network. Chapter 5 elaborates the momentum on the development of Z-hotline and the main difficulties existed in development. Chapter 6 is the conclusion and reflections of the paper. This chapter discusses the social capital status currently faced by the Chinese grass root NGOs and the influencing means of social capital on the grass root NGOs based on the studies demonstrated by the other chapters.