In China, a multi-level certification system for farmer's cooperatives was introduced in 2010 and 2013 to compensate for deficiencies in the farmer's cooperatives system established in 2007. In the operation of this certification system, when farmer's cooperatives are assessed as certificated cooperatives by Chinese government, the cooperatives will be expected to be leader cooperatives contributing to the revitalization of regional agriculture. In the present research, we focused on the advanced farmer's cooperatives in Tianjin, which were assessed firstly as city-level certificated cooperatives and then as national-level certificated ones. We investigated the functional changes in business contents in the certificating process from general cooperatives to city-level and then national-level certificated cooperatives. Our result suggests that the multi-level certification system could contribute to development of regional agriculture and would be one of the promising system to compensate for imperfections of original farmer's cooperatives system in 2007.
