In March 2019, the coordination team, the German team and the Chinese team met in China to visit some of the case studies in Guangzhou and Hangzhou. The objectives of the visit were to deepen the German team’s understanding of the situation in China and to ensure the suitability and comparability of the case studies.
The visit began in Beijing with a conference by Prof. Ma Qingyu and Prof. Lester Salamon (John Hopkins University) on the “Economic Scale, Measurement and Statistics System for the Non-profit Sector”. The conference provided the LoGoSO team with interesting insights on how the third sector can be measured in economic terms.
Afterwards, the team went on a weeklong trip to Guangzhou and Hangzhou where we visited some of the organizations that had been chosen for the case studies. The trip allowed us to investigate and discuss with the different stakeholders how the cooperation between social organizations and the local state was put into practice and what the situation of the migrant workers looked like. We learned a lot about different co-operation structures and also the central role of the people who work and volunteer for the migrants. By visiting the organizations in Guangzhou and Hangzhou, we were able to fix final adjustments of the case studies and clarified central questions concerning the final comparison.
Overall, the visit in China proved very productive and informative. The case studies are almost complete now and we will soon start the process of reviewing, analyzing and comparing them. Our first insights already reveal that outsourcing and networking are common governance trends in all four sample cities, albeit under very different political circumstances. The coming months will be devoted to formulating and disseminating our research results. They will be made available soon here.
LoGoSO Germany China 