NGO as Sympathy Vendor or Public Advocate? A Case Study of NGOs’ Participation in Internet Fundraising Campaigns in China

Limited attention has been paid to market actors’ interventions and their consequences in regard to shaping NGOs’ behaviors in China. Drawing on a case study of a national disability organization’s participation in China’s largest internet fundraising campaign—the Tencent Charity Day—this paper examines how market actors constitute the institutional contexts that shape and restructure NGOs’ framing and practice. I argue that market actors transform the institutional environments of NGOs by transplanting social media platforms’ institutional logic concerning the attention economy to incubate NGOs’ charitable marketing practices. The consequences of this transformation are the re-coalitions of actors, as well as the rise of charitable framing and the market methods of charitable programming. Meanwhile, market interventions unintendedly open spaces for grassroots NGOs to pursue their social missions and re-envision rights and advocacy under transformed state–civil society relationships, even though this process is highly uneven and hierarchical.