1Mr Liu heads an association helping children of migrants that is mainly funded by Chinese and international foundations and NGOs. Over 90 % of the funds come from three such organizations—Lianquan, Oxfam Hong Kong, and the Shanghai Charity Foundation. The interview with Mr Liu was conducted as part of a research program at the University of Shanghai that aims at building a more efficient care system for migrant children by coordinating the activities of the actors and the resources of different provinces neighbouring Shanghai. In this context, two contextual elements must be highlighted. First, in today’s mainland China, “social organizations” find themselves in a rapidly evolving situation. This involves an increase in and a multiplication of the forms of organizations (like the associations, the foundations, the NGOs, etc.) going hand in hand with an increasing professionalization of the associative and social work sectors. The plural—and often recent—nature of these organizations and the rapid evolution of public regulations by which they are sustained imply an imprecise distinction between the sectors supported by these types of institutions and public institutions. Second, in 2013–2014, the strengthening of population control policies in the territory of Shanghai produced a restricted access to the schools of Shanghai for the children of migrants (who do not benefit from the hukou local system [Feng, Chen and Jin 2017]). This had a significant impact on the activity of social organizations in charge of such issues. Therefore, we assume that, despite the recent development of public policies in favour of “social organizations,” the field of action of these organizations is complex, as it covers phenomena of delegation, superposition, or avoidance between public institutions and social organizations. Aid associations for the children of migrants must embrace plural relationships of cooperation with government institutions depending on local political contexts and public services depending on the municipal districts in which they operate.

Local Policies and Institutional Complexity of Social Organizations

2From the 2000s, the education of the children of migrants, and therefore of the populations living in Shanghai yet deprived of the local hukou, has been the subject of increasing support by public policies. Before 2001, these children could not be educated in the public schools of Shanghai. The only exception was in instances of a relatively significant pecuniary contribution compared with the low incomes of most of the targeted social categories. From that moment on, the Shanghai municipal government has progressively opened up to migrant children. Hence, in 2012, 70 % of these children had access to public schooling in Shanghai. These measures facilitated the task of associations providing assistance for schooling and taking charge of extracurricular activities. But more broadly, what happened was that in the central districts the children of migrants moved from private and migrant-exclusive schools to public schools. However, this pattern could not be reproduced in the outlying districts, as the smaller number of public establishments made it difficult to include all the new contenders. Therefore, private schools for migrants persisted in these spaces, nonetheless benefiting from public subsidies so that they no longer needed to rely on school fees (Feng, Chen and Jin 2017). As Liu indicates, population controls="true" have strengthened from 2013. In a global context of population reduction in large Chinese cities, the stay of “interior migrants” in Shanghai becomes harder. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of migrant children attending schools in Shanghai fell sharply.

3If Mr Liu’s organization faces a labile context, certain difficulties raised by this actor derive from the complexity of the institutional framework which governs social organizations. Since the law of 25 October 1998,1 social organizations must register with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and find a warrant agency. Such a device allows the government to regulate, organize, and supervise NGOs (Spires, Tao and Chan 2011). Yet, it has a downside. Several social organizations are deprived of the registration documents, so they operate on an ad hoc basis. In addition, in China, the label of “social organization” brings together very different structures: NGOs, professional and commercial associations, activity clubs, community organizations, etc. Not all of them are thus subjected to the same supervisory regime according to the nature of their activities. Some NGOs may receive constant aid from local governments, which provide them with offices, for example, without any clear institutional support being pursued. Despite a fixed tutelary framework, the daily life of these “social organizations” can, to different degrees, rely on links with public institutions depending on the nature of the operations carried out, the sources of funding, and the size of the organizations. Among these three criteria, that of the nature of operations is the most common. Some fields, such as poverty reduction, assistance to the elderly, programs for women and children, and basic education, are particularly supported in this regard (Wu and Chan 2012). If “SF,” the organization mentioned in the interview, works in the last of these fields, it is clear that lability prevails in its relations with public institutions. The uncertainty due to changes in the access to public schooling for migrant children is thus coupled with an institutional uncertainty of an organization engaged in plural cooperative relationships according to precise local contexts—and specifically within the Shanghai municipality. Doubtlessly, the nature of social activities is a variable to be considered when thinking about cooperation between public institutions and social organizations. Notwithstanding, it is also necessary to focus on the variations of this cooperation based on different practices between these two entities and districts endowed with public services.

Plural and Labile Cooperation between Public Institutions and Social Organizations

4The development of social organizations in China was led by the government. Dispositions to clarify the fields of action of non-profit organizations were put in place in 2004 (Spires, Tao and Chan 2014). So, since the 18^th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, there has been an acceleration of the delegation of public services under the name of “government purchasing services to social organizations.” A sum of 200 million yuan has been allocated to social organizations for their participation in social programs (Chen and Yang 2019). Such measures are established as a basis for public action. In these cases, methods of cooperation and association produce a priori unexpected coexistence of forms of local government and social organizations, in variations around support of the social order, rather than a challenge to it (Spires, Tao and Chan 2011)

5In the 2000s, the municipality of Shanghai was in the midst of regulating the education of migrant children. Relevant mechanisms and funding have been put in place to increase the enrolment rate of these populations in public schools. The support of social organizations that were already in the field and active in these areas has thus been sustained. This was so when in 2004 neighborhood committees supported the organization SF by providing it with offices.2 This is pointed out by Liu: “well, yeah, because there were a lot of immigrants at that time, even a village in the city, they thought it would be very happy to help. (Yes.) Give us two small rooms.”

6However, cooperation between local governments and social organizations is not stable. What appears from the interview with Liu is a gray area: the support of extracurricular activities of migrant children by social organizations is desirable as long as it goes with the Shanghai government’s public policies for these populations. However, there is no official cooperation between the local government and SF. Reflecting on the potential premises to be implemented by the local government, Mr Liu claimed that these have been changing all the time, and “we don’t know, and we haven’t been notified at all.” That is the reason why he ultimately refused public funding from the Shanghai municipal government. Eventually, the project in cooperation with the municipal government was not carried out. This is because the bureaucracy is considered to be inadequate for the size of SF (too many meetings for an organization which does not have a lot of employees) and the nature of its activities (making each child sign a document attesting to his presence at each activity); these things are seen as a waste of time if compared to the duration of the classes, according to Liu. Therefore, such cooperation was declined. Moreover, the procedures with the warrant are not stable either: being financed by three different foundations implies different arrangements for each of these institutions, and this blurs the links between social organizations and their guardianships. As Mr Liu points out, the controls="true" are randomly made and infrequent, yet they underpin strong control measures:

No one visits us from the Shanghai Foundation, but when auditing, it will make a lot of requests. You need to mention all the projects funded by the Shanghai Charity Foundation. You need to put forward a banner to publicize them. Then you have all the information, including the social service population, which will require the copy of the identity card of every floating population you provide services to be preserved.

7All in all, the situation of SF is paradoxical: its activity is necessary in the context of the inclusion of migrant children in public educational institutions. It is supported by both foundations and local structures, such as neighborhood committees. For some of its branches, cooperation with the government is developed, and this particularly from 2014, when the municipality of Shanghai strongly promoted social organizations. However, the complexity of the administrative work coupled with the challenges of control within the framework of official cooperation with public institutions did not allow this cooperation to be achieved. Visibly, cooperation takes many forms, both with governmental bodies and with foundations. Everything is possible depending on the time—some being more conducive to calling on social organizations if not in delegation of public service, or at least in support of new public policies—and also the locality—the branches of certain districts in Shanghai manage to engage in cooperation with local government, and others do not. In Minhang, a suburban district, this was facilitated by the concentration of migrants and therefore of migrant children, greater in these peripheral areas of the municipality and because there was a “desert of social organizations” there. SF was thus able to benefit from strong links with public institutions seeking assistance on issues related to the education of migrant children. At the same time, the organization works mainly with funding from private foundations in other districts of the city. For this last point, let us note as an example extracurricular activities, like the ones summer schools proposed to a “migrant-only” audience in central districts, which were not supported by the local governments, except on the condition that they be open to Shanghai children. In these cases, the support comes from the more sustainable funding of private foundations.

Conclusion

8The current context offers a framework in which the assumption of services by social organizations is an undeniable asset for the authorities. There are many variations between local initiatives and a patented government framework. However, the difficulties of cooperation are significant. These are concurrently related to rapidly changing social contexts and an institutional architecture which has not been completely stabilized. The clear demarcation that Mr Liu draws between foundations and local governments testifies to this. However, the partition between these two institutional levels does not seem to work so well when it has passed the empirical test. The cooperation initiated remains fragile and situated in space and in time. The situation of SF is obvious in this respect. If Mr Liu insists so much on a facade that would be devoid of long-term cooperation with the local government, it is because these cooperation processes are embedded in multiple elements: the different levels of openness of the Shanghai schools to the children of migrants, the location (central or peripheral) of the schools at stake, and the local neighborhood committees. In a general framework in which the central government emphasizes “social management” as a technique of the government to release social tensions (He 2012), the interactions between social organizations and the State increase. Above all, these provide evidence in a multiplicity of cases where the nature of activities and the local political context come into play in order to understand the processes of cooperation between social organizations, local governments, and private foundations.