ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has promoted a strategy of ‘small government, big society’ (xiao zhengfu, da shehui). With increasingly inadequate ways and means of providing public funding, the government is dependent to an ever greater degree on cooperation with social organizations and NGOs. This means that the state only attends to matters that society cannot or does not want to take on, such as the administration of justice, the police and civil services. Society is left to assume responsibility for all other matters and the population must find its own solutions for social problems. The core of this strategy involves an expansion of the third sector (NGOs) if societal resources are to be mobilized to solve social problems.
