The relationship between NGOs and think tanks with the government in China

China’s state-society relationship has been the focus of attention of the international community in recent years. In the period of the planned economy, through the establishment and implementation of a highly centralized planned economy system, the state implemented a holistic monopoly on and control over social resources in China and made the society an isomorphism of the state. After the reform and opening up, with the gradual establishment of a market economy, citizens began to have increasingly more discretionary time and private wealth, and the reliance of citizens and families on the state has continued to decline. Simultaneously, various non-state organizational forms emerged in the society, including various types of private enterprises and civil society organizations. Great changes in the state-society relationship have occurred, and these changes have been analyzed in depth by a host of scholars on the basis of various theories. For example, some have applied Western civil society theory (White, 1993; He, 2003), some have adopted corporation theory (Unger and Chan, 1995; Fan and Cheng, 2005), and others have analyzed China’s state-society relationship based on governance theory (Wang, 2009; Jia, 2008). Although the existing studies have been of great help for understanding China’s state-society relationship, the leading Western categories and conceptual frameworks used to describe such relationships have often failed to fully grasp the complex dynamics at play within the state-society interaction in contemporary China. Given the distinctive features of the current political and social environment, in addition to the complexity of a sector that presents itself as multilayered and with numerous, often different actors involved (i.e., government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs), grassroots NGOs, governmental and semi-official think tanks, and academic research institutes), this chapter intends to offer a general overview of the relationship between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and think tanks with the Chinese government. The aim is to enhance the understanding of a process that, both at the domestic and at the international levels, often relies on dynamics that are based on synergies and cooperation rather than competition and conflicts, despite the PRC’s numerous institutional constraints.