ABSTRACT

In the taxonomy of social welfare proposed by Croll (1999) and elaborated on in Chapter 1, health services, including health education, fall into the category of social services. Public funding for China’s health services, however, has been hard hit by the economic reforms of the past few decades, and serious gaps and inequities now exist, along with weak ability to respond to new challenges. In this chapter, I will explore this volume’s dual themes of crisis and non-crisis drivers of civil society development in China. I shall examine how on the one hand new challenges to social service provision and on the other the crisis and threat of emerging infectious diseases have pushed the boundaries of NGO political space in China and created some new models for NGO service provision in collaboration with government.