This thesis of doctorate proposes to study the processes of co-operation by developing the diversity of the local practices. While highlighting the insufficiencies even antagonisms of the standardization by the economic one, it develops a glance of long duration on the history of the associationism and solidarism. By doing this, the author describes the social theories and movements which animated reformism and the social economy in Europe since first half of theⅪⅩeme century. It is with this passing that it approaches the development co-operation in favour of the country of the South and particularly China. This assessment, it draws the failures from the dominant practices of the development and the economic globalisation. Vis-a-vis with these anomalies whose essential source is the imposition of a single model, synonymous with a domination by the economic one, it mobilizes an interdisciplinary approach while opening its diagnosis with the cultures of the actors and the territories. It is in the theory of the sites that it finds the bases of its demonstration. From the Chinese experiment approached, it tries to associate this step the Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang. What enables him to better consolidate the principles of diversity, tolerance and pluralism of the economic philosophy of the sites. By doing this, in the empirical plan, while underlining the macroeconomic performances of China, it identifies of them the risks and contradictions potentials for better supporting the relevance of the modes of decentralized co-operation ensuring a greater proximity with the men, the inheritances, the cultures, solidarity, the ecosystems. In the support of a concrete socio-economic analysis of the coastal zone and city of Dalian in the North-East of China, this thesis pre-empts the need for a renewal of the practices of the economic development. This prospect finds all its direction in the philosophy of the taoism and the Confucianism whose principles rest on balance, the interdependence, the interaction, the reciprocal transformation, the opposition and, finally, the harmony with our world. Thus, this thesis launches the bases of the "economy of the yin and the yang ", synonym in imaginary Chinese of a nonviolent economy with respect to the man and of nature. For this reason, it is registered start against any reductionnism and excessive materialism.