Introduction

When I first embarked on this study, my plan was to conduct an assessment of the performance of social welfare NGOs (sometimes also called ‘third sector organizations’) that had emerged in China since the 1990s. This was to be compared with the performance of both public and private sector social welfare organizations. I hypothesized that NGOs were able to develop because they displayed some comparative advantages vis-à-vis organizations in the other two sectors. After starting the field work, however, I quickly realized that such a research project was unlikely to yield interesting results, as the following case helps to illustrate.