State role restricts charity's development in China
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Some people claim that a sense of charity is missing in Chinese culture, but this is hardly true.
A central principle of Confucianism is that "The benevolent person loves others," and compassion has been a key plank of Buddhist thought in China for over 2,000 years.
Due to such ideas, Chinese are hardly insensitive to social problems.
Apart from the rich, the public would readily participate in charity within each person's own capacity, donating to or actively helping others.
Almost all my friends donated money in the wake of the disastrous snowstorms and the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, and truly felt for the people in the devastated areas.
In this sense, despite different philosophical roots, most Chinese are not necessarily less willing than Americans or others to give to charity.
Only among China's wealthy elite is there a relative absence of charitable work observable when compared to the West, a fact the press uses to quickly deduce the impotence of charity as a whole in contemporary China. While still immature by many standards, people should have more confidence in its growth prospects.
The China Charity Donation Report 2009, published by the Department for Social Welfare and Promotion of Charities of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, mentions that China raised and received donations totaling more than 33.3 billion yuan ($4.91 billion) in 2009, a 3.5 percent year-on-year increase, while the total numbers of donors also increased.
This increase is happening at a moderate pace, and as a CNN report pointed out, "121 Chinese philanthropists donated a combined $277 million, less than half of what a single family, American financier Stanley Druckenmiller and his wife, gave away in 2009 in the US." But why not focus on the fact that it nevertheless still marks a step forward?
While the aggregate volume of donations is improving, few rich people are willing to part with the kind of sums that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been proposing to donate, such as half or all of their assets.
The late Fei Xiaotong, a renowned Chinese sociologist and anthropologist, suggested that Chinese see society in terms of social networks which has far-reaching effects on family and greater society.
People perceive their relationship as a circle with the self as the center, where the closeness decreases as one moves outward.
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