Failure Of China's Non-profit Organization Legal Regulation

Many scholars highly valued those non-profit organizations (NPOs) because of the movements of the 'social organization revolution' which occurred in the late-20th century. Professor Salamon from Hopkins University thinks that the significance of the rising of NPOs is no less important than of the emerging of nation-states in the late-19th century. People expect NPOs could gain enough power to form a 'government-enterprises-civil society' triangle structure in order to achieve better administration of the society. However, NPOs are not a perfect existence; 'NPOs failure' has been concerned. This thesis intends to summarize and analyze this phenomenon in China, and then gives some suggestion from legal perspective. This text is, about 40,000 words, containing four parts.Part 1: Introduction of NPOs. This part firstly introduces the background and the reasons of NPOs' global prosperity, and then discusses the definition and the essential nature of NPOs. Secondly, this part also makes a brief review on NPOs' history in China since 1949, and then classifies the present NPOs.Part 2: NPOs failure. NPOs functions in many areas. They boost economy, provide jobs, promote democracy, and so on. But their fundamental function is providing public products. Weisbrod's 'government failure theory', Henry B. Hansmann's 'contract failure theory' and Salamon's 'the third-party administration theory' have explained that in different way. In that case, the main meaning of 'NPOs failure' is NPOs' inefficiency in providing public products. Basing on several scholars' theories, this part summarizes four aspects on 'NPOs failure': Profitable tendency, Bureaucratization, Insider control, Inefficiency.Part 3: NPOs failure in China and analysis for it. After analyzing three typical cases, the article summarizes four reasons which cause the NPOs failure. First are the NPOs' internal defects, including spontaneity defect, voluntary defect and profitable tendency. The second reason is that the development of our civil society still stays at a lower stage. The third reason is the restriction of government administration. The 'dual-administration-system' seriously restricts and fetters the operation of NPOs. The last reason is the lacking of necessary operating rules, including internal governance, external supervision, financial operation, performance evaluation, and so on.Part 4: Legal regulation on NPOs failure. It's absolutely necessary and urgent to remedy the Chinese NPOs' failure. We should not identify NPOs as the government's 'foes' or 'employees', but 'cooperators', and it's reasonable to solve this problem by special legislation. We should follow three directions: making grass-root NPOs licit, making government-runned NPOs independent, setting up reasonable uniform NPOs' operating rules. Concretely speaking, this work could start from the following four aspects: Firstly, relaxing the qualification limit; secondly, improving NPOs' internal governance structure and operating rules; thirdly, reforming government supervision system and constructing NPOs performance evaluation system; finally, reforming tax policy and expanding the tax preference.