Research On Trade Associations' Governance In Transitional China

China is in transitional period both in its economy and society. The history of Trade Association (TA) is not long and many issues related to TA governance are to be solved. This paper employs the concept of Domain and divides the TA governance into two parts:institutional governance (ISG) in institutional domain and industrial governance(IDG) in social exchange domain.ISG deals with the interest coordination between its members and association-members, includes the setting of organization structure and power diversion, and builds the mechanism of democratic decision-making, with clear right and obligation, mutual cooperation and restriction to each other. This paper analyzes the ISG from organization structure and mechanism establishing, concludes the weak-governance characteristics, analyzes the Social Capital (SC)'s impact on ISG, abstracts the factors which affect TA's SC, and conducts empirical test basing on questionnaire. The result shows that SC positively influences TA governance performance. Then governance failure may occur in ISG domain, such as TA's being controlled by big member companies or insiders, excessively depending on elite. The paper also analyzes the Dilemma of collective action and tries to give some solution to the dilemma by hiring the linked games.IDG means the building up and execution of market order and code of conduct, referring to coordination and influence between TA and nonmembers, consumers and governments in the social domain, with the aim of maximization of industry interest. The requirement and feature of IDG is self-governance and self-regulation, that is, no intervention from outside especially government. The paper sets up the theoretic basis of TA self-governance, conducts the quantitative analysis basing on survey data, analyzes various factors which affect the performance. However, during the process of IDG, TA is inclined to crossing its own power boundary, harming the outside interests, or playing up to politics. Then the problems, such as Government's controlling TA, TA excessive pursuing for profit, rent-seeking and inputting unreasonable interest during standard-making, conducting price alliance, occur. So the heteronomy mechanism is required. The paper discusses the content of heteronomy and relation between self-regulation and heteronomy.Moreover, the two parts of TA governance are not isolated. IDG is TA's basic objective and main function. ISG is the basis and guarantee of TA governance. These two parts are related to and conditioned with each other. IDG is more basic from the view of TA emergence and development. From the above, we can see TA governance is a kind of self-governance basing on weak characteristics, keeping the co-governance. At last, the suggestion is given.