ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 1, this book was originally planned as a study of the performance of social welfare NGOs in China. However, after starting the field work, I quickly realized that not just social welfare NGOs, but the Chinese NGO sector as a whole, were still at such an early stage of development that the majority were unlikely to measure up to even minimal performance standards. However, the emergence of even the worst-performing NGOs often represents progress, as they are providing services where none existed before. Therefore, rather than describing how badly youthful Chinese NGOs are performing, a more interesting and meaningful task for researchers is to find out what factors may have contributed to their poor performance. In this chapter I attempt to answer this question. Whereas one can easily identify a large number of factors which directly and indirectly affect the performance of Chinese NGOs, I focus here on four of the most salient factors.
