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