Abstract: Social organizations that have both reform agendas and practice inevitably encounter conflicts with the existing social and political structure when they attempt to bring about changes.Ascertaining their status, causes and results is key to the understanding of philanthropic organizations and their social actions in the current Chinese context. To address this issue, this paper applies the “social production” perspective to examine the structural feature and poverty alleviation practice of a charity organization, which has successfully solved the entry problem and meanwhile clearly advocate and maintained its independence.Our study finds that in dealing with conflicts, the charity organization risks losing its original social change agendas and falling into a state of uncertainty, even becoming a structural space for the reproduction of local society.By placing the organization in a local social and political content and exploring the obstacles it had come across from the perspective of the relationship between society and state, we are able to examine the complexity of Chinese transitional period and the “self-reproduction” process of society.This case study mirrors the current political and social issues of Chinese society and it enables us to gain a better and more holistic understanding of the symptomatic problems and mechanisms of a transitional society.

Key words: producing society, social welfare organization, poverty reduction