Abstract:

The Guo Meimei incident caused a great disturbance in the society, which made the charitable organizations such as Red Cross Society of China highly questioned by the public A series of actions did not help winning their credit back, and on the contrary, China’s charitable organizations, as a whole, had to face the embarrassing situation of donation reduction This paper aims to explore the institutional reasons for this phenomenon Firstly, taking Red Cross Society of China as an example, through investigating its organization structure, this paper reveals that China’s charitable organizations are generally regulated by the government, based on which, a hypothesis is made that the institutional relation between charitable organizations and the government can be the main reason for the lack of public credibility Afterwards, this paper tries to analyze this embarrassing situation respectively from three perspectives – entry barrier, authority-responsibility relation and supervision mechanism, and the result complies with former hypothesis The conclusion is that the institutional relation between government and charitable organizations is one important reason for the lack of public credibility Finally, this paper gives three suggestions

Key words: public credibility, organization structure, institutional relation, privatization, charitable organization