Abstract
This study starts from an empirical question: After the “Social Governance Innovation” reform in Guangdong province, 2011, NGOs’ development divided to two different ways: Social work NGOs receive more legal and financial support from the government, however, rights defending NGOs face unprecedented crackdown at the same time. Under this contradictory phenomenon, how could we understand the Guangdong government's governance strategy on NGO issue, and how could we assess the development of NGOs in Guangdong? The field work has been conducted in a city in Pearl River Delta area, and I choose one new funded social service NGO, and one labor NGOs existing for several years as comparative cases. Through the five-month participatory observation and 42 in-depth interviews, I try to figure out the interaction between government and NGOs, its impact on NGOs’ development, and reflection on a transformation of government’s strategy on NGO governing. This study suggests that "legitimacy" and "fund" are two important variables that affect the degree of NGO autonomy, and government also take them as tools in governing NGOs. Government takes “soft means” (granting) and “hard means” (restricting) toward social work NGO and labor NGO respectively. And there is collaborative relationship between soft and hard means, present as “soft first and hard later”, “strengthen soft by hard”, and they together create an institutional environment of “NGOs can only survive under the reliance on government” And NGOs change their developmental directions and work content from rights defending to social service, with a view to prolonging the government’s sponsor. In sum, the government’s approach to NGO’s governance has evolved from “external”, “visual” management systems and state violence to “internal”, “invisible” self-examination, which seemed to give broader space to NGOs to develop, but actually restrict the autonomy of NGOs, placed them under the domination of the state, and that is the formation of governance system “Dominating through Facilitation”.