"Rehabilitating Charity" in China: The Case of Project Hope and the Rise of Non-Profit Organizations in the PRC.

This paper examines the rise of Project Hope, one of China's first and most successful donative-type charities. The organization, which solicits donations for poor rural schoolchildren to help them finish their educations, was founded in 1989 and paved the way for a new wave of charities and NGO's in the PRC. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector is especially surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form much like the Western donative-style charity. This paper draws upon new institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches to explicate the challenges faced by emerging Chinese charities, and to make sense of the strategies used by Project Hope in response to those challenges. Specifically, it examines two strategies and their consequences: 1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state, and 2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]