Abstract: By analyzing the history of nongovernmental charity in Shanghai before 1949, this paper discovers that various charity groups integrated and formed some large-scale charity organizations in modern times. They knitted a huge social net in terms of organization structure, charity activities and fund support. The charity network played a role of bridging in charity, which helped the civil society have great capacities to organize and manage itself even in the time when Shanghai was suffered from unstable political situation with complicated mix of foreigners and Chinese people. This demonstrates that during the process of social transformation in modern China, the civil society, instead of in a status of disunity, disorder and chaos, gradually formed and developed a self-organizing and self-managing system.