The Chinese state is eager to win the hearts, minds and cash of 34 million ‘overseas Chinese’ – many of whom also want to give something back to their place of origin – but Chinese NGOs have been slower to court this potentially lucrative constituency
June Shih and Nick Young report here on evolving patterns of philanthropy in a complex and multi-faceted diaspora that ranges from people of Chinese descent who settled in Southeast Asia 200 years ago to fresh-faced assistant professors in American universities who decided not to go home after acquiring their PhDs.
From the Ming dynasty merchants who defied the Emperor to open new markets in Southeast Asia, to the peasants who toiled on the railroads of 19th century America, to thousands of today’s top college graduates applying for visas to Western countries, steady streams of Chinese people have for centuries sought better lives and greater fortunes abroad. And for nearly as many centuries, steady streams of cash have flowed back home as these émigrés shared their success with the families they left behind.
In Guangdong Province, for example, where tens of thousands of young men left in the 19th and early 20th century to labour in America, the economic impact of their remittances home was hard to ignore: Western-style houses, electrical streetlights, telephones and quality school buildings arrived in the region long before they reached other parts of the country. To this day, the largest homes in many villages across southern China still belong to families with relatives abroad. Many counties, especially in Guangdong and Fujian, became known as Qiaoxian, (侨县 ) ‘overseas Chinese counties’, because of the number of people who emigrated from them and the amount of wealth they sent back. From 1929 to 1940, remittances from overseas averaged USD 80 - 100 million a year, enough to offset China’s balance of payments deficit and prop up entire provincial economies.
In recent decades, however, as China re-opened to the world and as more overseas Chinese thrived financially in their adopted countries, diasporan philanthropy has reached well beyond the traditional boundaries of family and hometown.1 Hong Kong tycoons and Chinese-American millionaires have made substantial donations to health care and rehabilitation projects, environmental conservation and, especially, education. Salaried professionals have clubbed together to create scholarship funds for students in poor communities far from their own ancestral homes. And some overseas Chinese have begun to give in yet more personal ways, returning to their homeland to disburse funds through their own charitable foundations, or to work themselves on public benefit projects.
The universities branch out
Over the past decade, Tsinghua University, China’s top teaching and research institution for science and technology, has seen a building boom. The departmental buildings on the eastern end of campus – a row of concrete and granite behemoths lining a long, landscaped lawn and fountains – opened only in the 1990s. Professors have nicknamed this section of campus the ‘white district’, white being the colour traditionally associated with the Communist Party’s capitalist enemies. The alma mater of Hu Jintao and many other top Party leaders, Tsinghua is still considered one of China’s most ‘red’ universities. But the white district would not have been possible without millions of dollars donated by overseas Chinese capitalists.
Tsinghua’s new library was built by Hong Kong entertainment tycoon, Ren Ren Shaw. Q.W. Lee, President of Hang Seng Bank, provided funds for the business school and a life sciences building. Liang Chiuju, also of Hang Seng, sponsored the architecture school. Hong Kong tycoon, Li Kashing, has pledged USD 10 million for a new Information Technology Park (and is also a major donor to Peking University’s library). Wu Shunde, of the Hong Kong restaurant chain, Maxim’s, provided the capital for Tsinghua’s design institute and museum. The new Tsinghua gymnasium, is the gift of Cao Guangbiao, also from Hong Kong.
The crown jewels of China’s education system, Tsinghua and Peking universities were once solely funded by government. In recent years they have sought to raise the extra sums they need to become world-class institutions by creating develo-pment and fundraising arms modelled after those at major U.S. universities such as Harvard and Berkeley. Full time staff with well appointed offices now court donors at home and abroad with glossy brochures and newsletters. Alumni associations also promise to be important vehicles of future fundraising.
Hong Kong Chinese have been the largest donors. Since 1994, Tsinghua University has raised some CNY 420 million (USD 50.8 million). Fully 70% of that has come from donors living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, says Huang Jianhua, Director of the Tsinghua University Education Foundation. Similarly, Deng Ya of the Peking University Foundation reports that of the USD 97 million raised since 1989, 65% has come from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
In Huang Jianhua’s view, Hong Kong entrepreneurs have been such great benefactors because they believe that making a donation to a top university is a quick way to establish their reputations on the mainland. In 1997, as Hong Kong prepared to return to China, Tsinghua received a tidal wave of major gifts from Hong Kong people. ‘They came to us,’ says Huang. ‘They wanted to show their status as major business players in China. They wanted to show the central govern-ment, too.’
While both Tsinghua and Peking University have set up subsidiary found-ations in the United States, the sums so far raised from Chinese Americans are no match for those collected from Hong Kong. ‘We’re not very satisfied with what we’ve raised from the US,’ says Huang, although some scholarships have been established. For example, cosmetics magnate, Ms. Xin Yuxi, has funded scholarships at Peking University for the top female student from every province in China.
US fundraising has been comparatively anaemic for a number of reasons. Of the more than 10,000 Tsinghua alumni in the US, most have not reached the levels of wealth that will enable them to endow buildings or professorships. ‘Most of them are just now beginning to make money,’ says Huang. The pool of established Chinese Americans with direct ties to the mainland is relatively small, since immigration from the mainland was cut off after 1949 and only began again after the ‘reform and opening’ of the late ’70s. Many successful Chinese Americans trace their roots to Taiwan and are more interested in helping Taiwan. Others seem to be more focused on philanthropic projects in the United States. ‘Chinese-Americans care more about what U.S. society thinks of them, while Hong Kong Chinese see China as their own market,’ Huang says. Still, he is optimistic about future prospects, as immigrants from the mainland rise to prominence. ‘Maybe in 10-20 years more Chinese Americans will look to China for their donations.’
Peking and Tsinghua are not the only universities to have established indep-endent foundations to raise funds abroad. Shanghai’s Jiaotong University Foundation has also raised tens of millions of dollars, mostly from Hong Kong donors, since its establishment in 2001. Xiamen University benefits from a variety of education development foundations whose support mainly come from overseas Chinese and foreign enterprises. Xiamen’s Alumni Association of America has also been active in raising funds for their alma mater.
Official NGOs lag behind
China’s university foundations are at the forefront of efforts to target diaspora donors. We began this study expecting to find that China’s other, quasi-official charities and foundations would be major beneficiaries of overseas Chinese philanthropy. In fact, this turns out to be much less the case than we had supposed.
The China Youth Development Foundation’s ‘Project Hope’ appears to be virtually alone in receiving significant, regular income from overseas Chinese constituencies, but this too has been largely passive. Since 1989, the project has raised more than USD 200 million for education projects whose mainstay has been primary school building and scholarships. Gan Dongyu, of the project’s International Department, says that aggregate donations from Chinese overseas have been substantial, but mostly unsolicited. In particular, Gan says, ‘thousands’ of Singaporeans have donated CNY 300 (USD 36.5) each in child sponsorship programmes, and ‘tens of thousands’ of Hong Kong citizens have made similar individual donations. The donations have come ‘mostly from ordinary people with a relatively small amount of money’, and generally in response to media reports on the Foundation’s work.
Gan believes that Chinese language newspaper reports were also a major factor in garnering some support in North America – combined with the fact that some of the overseas Chinese supporters had only recently left China, where the Foundation’s reputation was already established. The North American Chinese Education Foundation (NACEF), set up by Chinese students in San Francisco and linked to Chinese student associations in 33 American universities, began in 1998 to raise funds for Project Hope. But con-tributions appeared relatively modest, however, amounting to only around USD 23,000 in the first year, as recorded by the NACEF website. Also in 1998, according to Gan, a Toronto association of former Beijing residents collected and passed on around USD 60,000.
This is small beer compared to inter-national corporate donations to the Project. It has now received a total of USD 4 million from Coca Cola, USD 2 million from Motorola and smaller, but still significant, sums from many others. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the overseas Chinese constituency has not been targeted more systematically.
Other large, official NGOs we interviewed – the Disabled People’s Federation, Children and Teenagers Fund, Soong Ching Ling Foundation, China Charities Federation and Poverty Alleviation Foundation – all said that while they saw the potential of overseas Chinese donors, they had no specific straetegies for targeting them. Donations they receive from these sources usually came unsolicited from individuals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. None of the organisations we consulted was able to give a breakdown of their income indicating how much came from overseas Chinese.
Most of China’s newer and more autonomous NGOs seem not yet to have even considered the possibility of raising funds from Chinese abroad.
Government gatekeepers
Government-affiliated and more auton-omous Chinese NGOs may both have been deterred from actively courting the diaspora by the feeling that this is the exclusive turf of the governmental Office for Overseas Chinese Affairs and its corresponding ‘mass organisation’, the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese – commonly known, respectively, as the Qiaoban (侨办) and Qiaolian (侨联).
The very existence of a government department to mediate relations with the diaspora testifies to the diplomatic, pol-itical and commercial importance the Chinese state attaches to this overseas constituency. This is hardly new. From the late Qing dynasty, reforming intellectuals sought material and moral support from sympathisers in Chinese communities overseas. Before his brief stint in 1912 as China’s first republican president, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) spent 16 years of exile in Japan, Southeast Asia, North America and Europe mustering support for a series of abortive military uprisings. The following decades of civil war saw intense competition between Nationalists and Communists for the hearts, minds and cash of the diaspora. Since 1949, this turned upon the status of Taiwan.
Over the last two decades, the Qiaoban has vigorously marketed the economically- reformed New China to overseas Chinese. According to Hungarian scholar, Pál Nyíri, national and local Qiaoban have, along with other government agencies, actively encouraged Chinese abroad to form new professional, kinship and common-place organisations, even providing funding for such groups to hold conventions.2 Nyíri also points to an explosion in the number of publications produced by official mainland agencies for overseas Chinese consumption: Guangdong and Fujian authorities together publish over 190 such magazines, newspapers and periodicals, with a total overseas circulation topping two million, mostly distributed free. But most striking of all is the veritable traffic jam of exchange visits between mainland officials and overseas Chinese delegations. During 1998 alone, Nyíri notes, Qiaoban offices in Guangdong received no less than 3,000 delegations involving 270,514 visitors.
Much of this activity revolves around investment opportunities. Fully 70% of reform-era foreign investment in China has come from overseas Chinese sources (including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao) according to a recent People’s Daily article;3 with the way smoothed by a raft of preferential policies and regulations. Another, more recent concern, is to woo back foreign-trained Chinese brains to help develop China’s high-tech industries. The 1990 Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Returned Overseas and Relatives of Overseas Chinese formally guarantees their rights to own and inherit property overseas -- and to settle overseas again if the return to the motherland doesn’t work out. It further instructs local governments to support returnees’ efforts to establish commercial, industrial or agricultural ventures. Now, returning experts in fields such as bio-technology or software engineering are offered extraordinary deals, including tax holidays, rent-free space in ‘Returned Overseas Scholars Parks’ and special educational facilities for their children.
The Qiaoban declined our numerous requests for an interview, so it is hard to gauge the extent of its involvement in channeling donations from Chinese communities abroad. Two, separate articles of the 1998 Public Welfare Donations Law state that the Qiaoban is the appropriate body for receiving donations from overseas Chinese but, as far as we were able to determine, nowhere in China are such donations publicly documented. It is evident from sporadic Chinese media reports that the assistance extends well beyond the traditional counties of overseas Chinese origin. But the lack of any transparency in this process leaves us guessing what gifts, favours and banquets may be involved in it, or what proportion of donated funds donated reach the intended beneficiaries.
The Qiaolian, which did agree to an interview, is certainly engaged in soliciting charitable aid from the diaspora. This Federation was established in 1949 to help reintegrate overseas Chinese who came back to play a role in national recon-struction. In the event, the number of returnees was exceeded by the number who departed for Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere. Nonetheless, several hundreds of thousands of people did return to throw in their fortunes with the People’s Republic, and many of these were settled on more than 80 large farms that are still managed by the Federation.4
Over the last twenty years, the national Federation and its regional branches have, like the Qiaoban, promoted investment opportunities, along with ‘cultural ex-change’ and mainland tourism for overseas Chinese. (The national level Federation owns a large, luxury hotel on a prime site in downtown Beijing; and local branches also commonly own hotels). But it also has a social welfare department that, in 1998, established a subsidiary Overseas Chinese Economic and Cultural Foundation to raises money for cultural and educational programmes. Over the last three years, the Foundation has raised a total of CNY 500 million (USD 60.5 million), which has been spent on building 596 schools (for which local governments are required to provide 60% match funding), and providing scholarships for outstanding students from poor provinces in Western China to attend Beijing University. The funding has come from Chinese individuals (about 300 principal donors each year) and communities in Hong Kong, Macao, Southeast Asia and Europe. Only a relatively small proportion of the donated funds originate from North America. Apart from these efforts by the national organisation, branches in 23 provinces are encouraged to participate in a Qiaoxin Gongcheng (侨心工程 ‘Overseas Heart Project’) that sets a nominal ‘100-1,000-10,000’ target: each province is encouraged to find donors to build 100 schools, support 1,000 additional projects (such as equipping libraries and computer rooms), and provide 10,000 scholarships.
International NGOs cash in
Whilst Chinese NGOs may lack the will or expertise to target diasporan donors, some international NGOs working in China are proving more alert to the possibilities. One such group is The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a US-based environmental group that has been working since 1999 to protect 6.5 million acres of environmentally sensitive land in Yunnan Province. According to Ed Norton, a senior adviser to the project, TNC soon recognised that Chinese ‘wealth centres’ in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the US could be tapped to support the work in Yunnan. The organisation has opened a Hong Kong office, with a staff of three to raise awareness about biodiversity conservation in the region. In May 2002, it took a group of Hong Kong businessmen to Yunnan to visit the conservation sites. This inspired the entrepreneurs, among them Peter Wang, Chief Executive of Tristate Holdings, which manufactures the Nautica clothing line, to form a USD 2 million Asia Conservation Trust to benefit The Nature Conservancy.
TNC has also sought the support of Chinese American donors. Staff and volunteers in US communities with a high proportion of Chinese have promoted the project among Chinese American organ-isations and media. One well established Chinese American group, the Committee of 100, had planned to visit the Yunnan project site this year, although the trip was cancelled due to the SARS outbreak. Still, TNC has raised about USD 100,000 from Chinese American donors. Recognising that Chinese Americans often value education ahead of the environment, the organisation has worked to create oppor-tunities to support both. One donor, for instance, is supporting the construction of biogas stoves – to replace charcoal-burning – in a dozen village schools. ‘We’re very happy with the results so far,’ Norton says. ‘Everybody recognises that there’s a job here of developing an interest, cultivating a habit [among overseas Chinese donors] of giving for environ-mental causes.’
World Vision’s China programme is resourced mainly through fundraising in Hong Kong, but it also targets Chinese communities in Canada, the United States and Australia, looking for child sponsors, according to the organisation’s Yunnan program manager, Wang Chao. Films about World Vision’s work have been specially prepared for and aired on Chinese language TV stations, and Chinese radio stations are also targeted for fundraising appeals. All these efforts have been very successful, Wang says.
Chinese Americans do it their way
Rather than supporting established, phil-antrhopic organisations, several notable Chinese Americans have created their own.
Cyrus Tang, who left Jiangsu Province for the United States in 1950, made his fortune building a steel, scrap metal, office furniture and pharmaceutical empire, and his Tang Industries now appears regularly on Forbes’ list of the biggest private companies. In 1995, he created the Tang Foundation, which supports Traditional Chinese Medicine research centres in Beijing and Chicago and has provided more than USD 7 million for school construction and scholarships for poor college students. Since 1997, some 1,300 students attending 15 colleges nationwide have received grants of about USD 500 a year. Similarly, poor communities in 12 provinces have been beneficiaries of Tang Foundation school construction grants, says Zhang Xiaoli, a representative of the Foundation’s China office. Tang visits his Jiangsu hometown about twice a year – and tries to meet with scholarship recipients whenever he visits. ‘Mr. Tang hopes to cultivate a sense of social responsibility among the students,’ says Zhang. ‘In exchange for their scholar-ships, students are asked to perform public service while they are in school.’
Another multimillion-dollar fund is The China Foundation, established in 1997 by Dr. Jane Hu, an immigrant to the U.S. from Taiwan and a scientist who served in the first Bush Administration. According to Dr. Xiang Qian Dai, the Foundation's Beijing representative, Dr. Hu had retired, and was looking for a way to help China, when she decided to pull together her network of corporate friends to help fund health care and education programs in China. Former President Gerald Ford is honorary Chairman of the Board.
The Foundation’s first efforts were devoted to raising USD 10 million (from the Gates Foundation) in grant co-funding for a World Bank USD 70 million loan project to support health care in Western China. The Foundation also organises health conferences on the mainland and supports a smaller project to build schools in rural areas.
Although a raft of Chinese Americans hold honorary titles in the foundation, only a small proportion of the funds come from overseas Chinese, according to Xiang Qian Dai. The biggest individual donation came from Charles Wang, who gave USD 100,000 for school building.
Wang, of Computer Associates, has also donated USD 20 million to Smile Train, a programme to provide surgery for Chinese children with cleft lips and palates.
A second international organisation working in this field, Operation Sunrise, has received a USD 100,000 contribution from Chinese American, Huang Yongle.
Several groups of Chinese Americans have also come together to launch small-scale, hands-on efforts to tackle poverty and improve education in China. Among these is SOAR, a San Francisco Bay-Area non-profit founded by a group of Chinese Americans in 1995 to provide scholarships to middle school and high school students living in some of China’s poorest villages. The organization has provided more than a thousand scholarships of USD 85 a year for middle school students; and USD 225 a year for high school students. Forty SOAR scholarship recipients have gone on to college, including top universities such as Beijing University.
SOAR relies on a base of 400-500 donors, all of whom come from the San Francisco Bay area, and have been introduced to the organization through word of mouth, says its president, Albert Hu. Silicon Valley tycoons have provided regular, annual donations of USD 25,000, while one year a teacher donated USD 200,000. There a few salaried coordinators in China, but no paid staff in the United States, and board members – most of whom, like Albert Hu, are first generation immigrants from Taiwan – work for free. They undertake regular ‘fact finding’ missions to ensure that the money is reaching the intended recipients.
The Zigen Fund, founded in New York in 1988, is a similar organization that, in addition to scholarships, helps build and refurbish rural schools, libraries and health centres. (‘Zigen’ means ‘nourish the roots’) It depends on a small base of 800–1,000 mostly Chinese American donors who give USD 50–500 per year. While discussions are underway to expand the organization, no large scale efforts at fundraising have been attempted, says President Bik Lam, an immigrant from Hong Kong.
Giving of a different kind has been facilitated by the Center for US-China Arts Exchange, established in 1978 by Wen-Chung Chou. A veteran of the ‘Flying Tigers’ during the war against Japan, Chou emigrated to the United States in 1946 and, although already a qualified civil engineer, studied compos-ition at the New England Conservatory. He became a renowned composer and is now Professor of Composition at Columbia University, where he established the Arts Exchange Center. In the 1980s this worked to make contemporary music scores and recordings available in China, collaborated in the award winning film ‘From Mao to Mozart’, and organised a Beijing production of ‘Death of a Salesman’ directed by Arthur Miller. During the 1990s, the Center oversaw a Ford Foundation funded program to document and preserve ethnic minority art and craft in Yunnan province. This involved establishing a degree course in traditional arts at the Yunnan Minorities Institute, and working with local authorities to design an ethnographic museum of minority cultures in the provincial capital, Kunming.
New philanthropist returnees
Still other Chinese Americans have returned to China to oversee their philanthropic works in person. In 1999, Randy Yeh, the Chinese American former representative for Lucent Technologies in China, took early retirement and sold enough of his stock to create the New Path Foundation, based in the United States. Hoping to make a difference in Beijing, where he has chosen to retire, he has created a subsidiary organisation under the auspices of the China Youth Development Foundation. This focuses on NGO capacity building, facilitation of volunteering, medical assistance for the needy, and the care of elderly and disabled.
Yeh, who was born in China and grew up in Taiwan before emigrating to the United States, says it is largely coincidental that his philanthropy is directed at China: ‘I just happen to be living in China.’ Yet, he says, if his company had not posted him to Beijing many years ago his ‘giving would have been much less, more superficial, like just giving a check’. He believes that his efforts have been easier because of his Chinese heritage. ‘I can go into a much deeper relationship with the people here because of a shared cultural and language background . . . When you have a deeper relationship, it becomes a lot easier to do things here. That's the same for business.’
Another returned Chinese American philanthropist is Zhou Yan, who spent many years living abroad working for multinational banks, and now calls Shenzhen home. He founded the Phelex Foundation, registered in the United States, in 1995. Its goal is to help rural schools generate the income they need to subsidize tuition by running small, sustainable businesses – such as tea farms, pigeon coops and vegetable gardens.
Over the past eight years, Phelex has donated some USD 3 million to rural schools. The funds come almost exclusively from foreign donors: about 20 percent from Chinese Americans and another 30 percent from Hong Kong Chinese. Fan Ying, who manages the foundation’s operations, says it is coincidental that overseas Chinese have contributed half of the funds, since the organization has made no efforts to target these communities for fundraising. In fact, the biggest donations still come from ‘white’ foreigners from the financial world who are friends of the founder.
Typical of another new kind of returnee, albeit one who has committed time and energy rather than money, is Dr. Tan Leshan, a native of Yunnan Province. In 1987, Tan began to study for a doctorate in anthropology at Cornell University. Following the events of June 4, 1989, Tan’s wife and daughter applied for and received American citizenship. Dr. Tan did not himself apply for US citizenship because, he says, this would have complicated travel to and from China – and he was always quite clear that he wanted to continue to play an active role in China’s social development.
To this day, Tan remains a green card holding ‘American permanent resident’, but most of his time is spent in China, even though this means long periods of absence from his family in the United States. Following a short stint teaching at Cornell, he took as job in 1999 as Deputy China Programme Director of Save the Children Fund (UK) in his native Yunnan, where he oversaw a programme that included sensitive and ground-breaking work in areas such as HIV/AIDS prevention among sex workers and drug users, and prevention of the trafficking of women and children. In 2001, Tan moved on to become China Country Director of the well-known blindness prevention agency, Project Orbis International, a post he still holds.
Tan Leshan is beginning to consider his retirement plans. He hopes to build a bamboo house in Hosai Village, a poor and remote community on Yunnan’s border with Burma, and to divide his time between there and the United States. Hosai is where he spent seven years as a ‘sent-down youth’ during the Cultural Revolution. Although now widely reviled both in China and overseas, this forcible experiment in cultural exchange did evidently kindle, in at least some hearts and minds, enduring attachments that take Chinese philanthropy beyond traditional support for kin and the ancestral home.
It was just such an experience that eventually resulted in the Candlelight Project to help rural schoolteachers. This started in 1994 with a gift of USD 3,000 from an Chinese American scholar. The money was entrusted to a friend back in China, who was asked to use it for the benefit of schoolteachers in Baoding Prefecture of Hebei Province, where the donor and his friend had both been ‘rusticated’ during the Cultural Revolution. The project has since expanded and is now run under the auspices of the China Charities Federation with support from World Vision.
Wang Chao, of World Vision, is another recent émigré who found his way back to work in social development. A native of Hubei Province and graduate of Beijing University, Wang moved to Canada to study urban planning at the University of Montreal. But, after gaining Canadian citizenship and earning a PhD in Urban and Regional Development, Wang was ready to go home. ‘I wanted to do some work that was more related to China’. A friend recommended that he talk to World Vision. They warned him that he was overqualified for the job opening they had – as a rural development program officer in Yunnan province, but Wang took the job anyway. His Canadian boss offered to keep a job open for him for six months, in case he decided to come back to Canada.
‘Six months turned into three years,’ Wang says, and as yet he has no plans to return to Canada. Moving to Yunnan with his wife, the urban planner found himself helping villagers build schools, introduce new crops, and learn new, more efficient methods of farming. He says his ‘dual identity’ as a Chinese and a Canadian helped him in his work. ‘Dealing with the government is easier because . . . They don’t see me as a stranger, a foreigner,’ he says. ‘We have a common language and a common experience.’ A shared cultural background has enabled him to understand both the cadres’ and the villagers’ points of view, he says.
Wang is not the only expatriate of Chinese descent working for World Vision in Yunnan. Ten of the organisation’s fifty staff there are ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and North America. Most are drawn to China as much by their Christian faith as their ethnicity, Wang says.
Other faith based organisations, such as Hong Kong’s Christian Action and Jian Hua Foundation, and many smaller groups, actively recruit ethnic Chinese people from Hong Kong, Singapore, and further afield to work as volunteers on the mainland. Secular international NGOs with established programmes in China also receive frequent enquiries from young Chinese Americans looking for internship opportunities or volunteer work, often wishing to combine this with Chinese language study and the chance to become better acquainted with the land their parents left. The demography of the diaspora suggests that such returnee visitors will grow steadily in number, alongside growth of ethnic Chinese students from overseas undertaking post-graduate fieldwork in China. The numbers who manage to find suitable placements (or subjects of study) are doubtless very small by comparison with the numbers of those looking for career opportunities in the corporate world; but they may nonetheless play a significant role in fostering future philanthropic ties.
Concluding discussion
The economic importance of the diaspora to the Chinese state is incontestable. This makes it a constituency worth courting; and, in the case of those ‘overseas Chinese’ closest to the mainland, whose personal fortunes are most closely interwoven with those of China, the interest is clearly reciprocated. Much contemporary diasporan philanthropy appears to be bound up with this business relationship, although still significantly influenced by the cultural imperative of investing in and honouring the place of origin.
The mainland government-initiated official non-profit sector has so far proved lethargic in tapping this potential source of funds. Universities, which are more aggressively market driven and have the added fundraising advantage of traditional Chinese respect for scholarship, do better, currently looking mainly to wealthy Hong Kong and Taiwanese donors. This may change, however, as newer alumni prosper further afield.
China’s independent, citizen-initiated non-profit organisations seem not to have considered overseas Chinese communities as a source of funds, probably in large part because they lack access to them: if they do look overseas for funding, it is in the main to non-Chinese international organ-isations with representative offices in China. Yet the success of international and greater China organisations in targeting and raising funds from ethnic Chinese communities suggests that – especially among the professional classes and general public, as opposed to the gold cufflinked philanthropists – there is considerable demand for transparent and effective channels of charitable giving. This could represent a huge opportunity for emerging organisations in China.
Although government looms large in collection of philanthropic contributions, it is also the case that active overseas donors are quite free to explore other channels. Some of the most committed establish their own organisations, mob-ilising and distributing funds through personal contacts and networks. As international contacts deepen and multiply, space an opportunities for this free-market, private philanthropy will likely grow.
Generational change is an important factor in determining whether the philanthropic streams will continue to flow. Donations today come overwhelm-ingly from first generation emigrants. Their children, born and educated overseas, will certainly stand in a quite different relation to their parents’ native place; particularly those raised in North America and Europe, where societies are becoming more racially heterogenous, making acculturation easier.
The changing nature of the family as a global institution is another important factor. Chinese philanthropy is strongly associated in the first place with kinship ties and obligations, but in most societies, and particularly in the richer countries, the extended family is becoming weaker, and some new family forms are emerging as second marriages become more common, and as tolerance grows for phenomena such as gay parenting and cross cultural adoption. Migration can make relatives not only literally but also figuratively more distant. For international migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, family bonds and loyalties may in some ways have been reinforced by the hostility and discrimination they encountered in host communities; but the context is quite different for today’s American born Chinese college graduates. Our research has been far too slender to say what kind of philanthropic patterns this may produce in relation to China. As noted, the mainland receives a flow of curious and well-intentioned young people of Chinese descent who come with some hope of getting to know and also making some contribution to their ancestral home. But this is quite probably counterbalanced, and even outweighed, by those who are more concerned to develop their careers in the countries where they were born.
New migrants probably represent the largest future frontier for donations to China. Undoubtedly the Chinese state will vigorously court them as future reservoirs of intellectual and financial capital. This is likely to result in a greater degree of transnationalism, with ethnic Chinese members of an international elite increasingly free to cross borders as it chooses. The consequences for philan-thropy are by no means clear, except that a great deal of new wealth will certainly be created. This will provide opportunities for those with the imagination and determination to reach out for it, although China’s most needy communities will find it hardest to reach that far.
Li Kashing Foundation
This article is based on a longer paper prepared for a workshop on Indian and Chinese Diaspora Philanthropy that was held in April 2003 by the Center for Global Equity at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Contacts:
李嘉诚基金会
+852 2128 8888
lksf@ckh.com.hk
www.lksf.org [1]
Tang Foundation
唐仲英基金会
Ms. ZHANG Xiaoli (张小丽)
+86 (0) 512 63430082
tang@tangfoundation.org.cn
www.tangfoundation.org.cn [2]
China Foundation
美国中华基金会
Mr. DAI Xiangqian (戴向前)
+86 (0) 139 0116 2499
DaiXQ@163.net
www.chinafoundation1.org [3]
Newpath Foundation
美新路基金会
Mr. Randolph YEH (叶祖禹)
+86 (0) 10 82275730
postmaster@newpathchina.org
www.newpathfound.org [4]
Phelex Foundation
惠黎基金会
Ms. FAN Ying (樊英)
+86 (0) 10 8959 0620
china@phelex.com
www.phelex.com
Zigen Fund
滋根基金会
+86 (0)855 333 2329
lszg9687@sina.com
www.zigen.org [5]
SOAR
树华教育基金会
Ms. Siu Fong HUANG
+1 510 675 0680
soar@sbcglobal.net
www.soaronline.org [6]
US-China Arts Exchange
美中艺术交流中心歌伦比亚大学
Mr. Wen-Chung CHOU
+1 212 280 4648
us_china_arts@yahoo.com
www.columbia.edu/cu/china [7]
Junior Achievement
国际青年成就
Ms. Alice CHOU
+1 919-844-1090
alice@jachina.org
www.jachina.org [8]
1By ‘diasporan’, we mean people of Chinese descent living overseas. Despite the return of Hong Kong and Macao to PRC sovereignty, mainlanders still often refer to these communities as ‘overseas Chinese’. Our discussion includes Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, because they form part of a disaporan chain, having served as stepping stones for emigration further afield, and continue to serve as important nodes in diasporan networks. Taiwan and Hong Kong are also major sources of commercial and philanthropic investment in the Chinese mainland.
2Pal Nyiri The 'New Migrant': State and Market Constructs of Modernity and Patriotism, in Nyiri P and Breidenbach J (eds.) China Inside Out
3People's Daily (on-line English edition), March 02 2002, Western China Offers Huge Opportunities for Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, quoting Liu Huijun of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference National Committee
4We were unable to determine the number of returnees. Some official Chinese sources put the figure as high as 2.2 million, but a report on the official China Internet Information Service suggests that, from 1949 to 2002, a total of 1.14 million returned.