In recent decades the Chinese financial system has undergone dramatic restructuring, which has substantially altered the country's mutual and cooperative financial institutions. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the process, practice and consequences of these developments by systematically charting the trajectory and dynamics of the co-operative financial landscape in China, and by analysing the role that these financial institutions have played in China's socioeconomic change. It is argued that China's financial co-operatives have been de-localised through processes of consolidation and centralisation. They have also been increasingly commercialised within a system based on 'market logic', which has changed their developmental role in the Chinese economy. At the same time, however, recent policy has sought to reinstitute locally-focused financial and farmer co-operatives in rural areas. Moreover, local informal and semiformal modes of co-operative organisation and action have continued to be widespread across the country.

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This paper addresses a two-pronged objective, namely to bring to the fore a much neglected social issue of homelessness, and to explore the dynamics of state-society relations in contemporary China, through a case study of an NPO working with the homeless in Shanghai. It shows that the largely invisible homelessness in Chinese cities was substantially due to exclusionary institutions, such as the combined household registration and "detention and deportation" systems. Official policy has become much more supportive since 2003 when the latter was replaced with government-run shelters, but we argue that the NPO case demonstrates the potential for enhanced longer-term support and enabling active citizenship for homeless people. By analysing the ways in which the NPO offers services through collaboration and partnership with the public (and private) actors, we also argue that the transformations in post-reform China and the changes within the state and civil society have significantly blurred their boundaries, rendering state-society relations much more complex, dynamic, fluid, and mutually embedded.

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