Abstract: Shortly after the Eighteenth Party Congress in 2012, which renewed the call to "increase the strength of Party-building in social organizations," Civil Affairs Department officials announced that 40,300 and 39,500 Party branches had been successfully established in China’s social organizations and private non-enterprises, respectively. Some embrace the Party's increasing penetration of China's so-called "third sector" as part of an emerging model of "big Party, small state, great society” (da zhengdang, xiao zhengfu, da shehui 大政党、小政府、大社会), or even as a collectivist Chinese "people's society" (renmin shehui 人民社会) superior to traditional Western civil society, which centers on the rights and interests of private individuals. One distinguishing feature of this model is the prominence of the Party in “comprehensively covering” new social forces by actively managing the development civil society groups; in some cases, Party committees are establishing and registering new social organizations that I refer to as PONGOs (Party-organised non-governmental organizations), which take on Party-directed activities like recruitment and political education alongside their core tasks. This chapter reviews four distinct regional experiments in PONGO-building from Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Liaoning in the context of the evolving scholarly and theoretical debate among Chinese scholars and Party theoreticians regarding the Party’s proper role with respect to social organizations.