Currently，the development of Chinese environmental NGOs not only faces the problems of legal validity，but also social validity，which is the validity in the public opinions and the social underlying rules.This paper shows the status quo of the social validity of Chinese NGOs through several investigations which Indicate that those NGOs with social validity but lack of legal validity still operate successfully.Chinese NGOs improve their social validity by enhancing specialization，doing practical jobs，integrating resources，improving cooperation with government.This is the important issue for their capacity building.