Abstract: Participating in public service delivery is the way for Chinese science associations to serve the interest of S&T workers and meet the requirement of national strategy. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis is used in this study to explore the achievement mechanisms of their high-quantity and high-quality participation in public provision respectively. National science associations under the leadership of China Association for Science and Technology are used as the sample in empirical process. Based on 244 valid questionnaires, causal core and periphery are found out, and five configurations are empirically investigated. Then, configurations are divided into ‘resource-driving’ and ‘leadership-driving’, and an alternative between them is clear. It finds that financial condition, full-time staff and government support are the core elements of high-quantity services, while expert resources and leaders’ cognition leads to high-quality services. Furthermore, neutral permutations in each configuration also indicates that Chinese science associations need to find out the valuable elements relevant to their mission and goal, when seeking to achieve a successful public provision.