The Chinese government launched a nationwide policy campaign regarding neighborhood governance in the early 2010s. The state-led movement served both to strengthen state legitimacy and enhance community development. But how it contributed to community empowerment or disempowerment is little examined. This chapter attempts to review the extant literature on the campaign from a community empowerment perspective. Implications and suggestions for future research are also included.

By following the Western mainstream theory on state–nonprofit relations, nonprofit research on developing countries usually overlooks the influence of political parties on nonprofits. However, political parties, particularly the ruling party, often decisively determine the development of the nonprofit sector in those societies. This article proposes a special model to analyze the state–nonprofit relations in the countries where a sole ruling party monopolizes the government. The model is applied in the one-party state of China to exemplify how the ruling Chinese Communist Party has fundamentally shaped the state–nonprofit relationship there in past decades. The article concludes with discussion about the model’s potentials and limitations.