Research On The Role And Function Of China’s Non-governmental Organizations In Social Assistance

Since the reform and opening up, China’s rural social assistance, as the bottomline ofdefense in social security system, has been constantly updating and expanding in its content, butaslso getting more and more diversified in its suppliers. With the development of the thirdsector, NGO，belonging to the third sector, is nongovernmental, voluntary and pulic welfare incharacter. The public service provided by NGO has penetrated into many aspects in rural socialassistance such as poverty alleviation, teaching education, healthy care, disaster relief and soon,as an important social mechanism, which not only complements the government aid,but alsooptimizes the allocation of resources and improves the efficiency of social assistance. Therefore,NGOs offset government and market failure, and play a complementary role in rurua socialassistance system. But there is still a larege room. There are still many problems which restrictthe NGO’s funtion in rural assistance. The paper, based on the current analysis, finds that mainproblems are as following: the confusion of the government and community, lack ofindependence and coopertaion with the government, limited resources, lack of capacity andpublic trust as well as the imperfect relevent laws and regulations. For these reasons, from thesupplier of rural social assistance, this paper suggests that the two main suppliers-governmentand non-governmental organizations should strengthen the cooperation with each other andbulid the equal and cooperation relationship. At the same time, their roles and areas ofresponsibility shoud be celarly defined so as to actively participate and play its imprtant role inrual social assistance.