China, once a country that ranked near the bottom of the World Giving Index, has now seen the biggest jump in charitable giving and volunteerism in the world over the last decade, according to the 2024 index. The Charities Aid Foundation, which compiles the index, says that China had a 388 percent increase in the proportion of people who donated money during this period, propelling the country up 49 places to 95th out of 142 countries.
There is still much room for improvement, however. China still lags behind poorer developing countries such as Albania, Mauritius, and Nepal in charitable giving rates, with just 31 percent of Chinese people reporting having donated money in the previous month. In comparison, the rates are 61 percent and 59 percent in the United States and Australia, respectively.
China’s economic woes now threaten to put the brakes on progress achieved thus far. Entering the Year of the Snake, several year-end reports released by Chinese foundations and research firms painted a worrying picture of the state of Chinese philanthropy. Crucially, the downward trend raises questions about the viability of a key plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s “common prosperity” agenda, which emphasizes charitable giving as the “tertiary distribution” to supplement market mechanisms and government taxation in tackling rising income inequality.
The Amity Foundation, for example, one of China’s biggest charitable foundations, estimates that total charitable donations in China amounted to 120 billion renminbi (commonly called the yuan), or around $17 billion, in 2024 – an estimate it called “optimistic” in its year-end review released in January. If accurate, this total would mark a 14.3 percent fall from 2022, the most recent year for which there is official data, and the lowest amount donated in China since 2014.
Following a spike at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, China has now seen consecutive years of declining donations. Estimates of an even steeper drop in 2024 will worry Chinese officials given the fiscal blackholes many local governments are facing. One of the driving factors behind Beijing’s rhetoric surrounding tertiary distribution is its recognition that support from non-state actors is needed in the provision of social welfare, especially for the cause of “rural rejuvenation.”
However, the Amity Foundation report noted that “the share and role of charity in wealth distribution have not been significantly enhanced” despite such rhetoric in recent years: “Taking into account the various factors that affect public donations and the donation data collected this year, it is expected that China’s public charitable donations continued to decline in 2024, and may have declined significantly.”
The impact of the struggling economy is most apparent in the drop off in corporate philanthropy, which makes up the bulk of Chinese charitable giving, in contrast with Europe and North America where individual giving dominates. While there were several substantial corporate donations last year such as auto giant BYD’s launch of a 3 billion yuan education fund, data compiled by the China Philanthropy Times, a newspaper run by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, indicates a total of around 17 billion yuan in mega-donations in 2024, almost half the amount in 2023.
The sharp fall is also reflected in estimates of charitable giving by Chinese philanthropists. The China Philanthropy Research Institute’s latest Top 100 List estimates 13.2 billion yuan in donations, including pledges, from China’s leading philanthropists in 2024 – the lowest amount in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Hurun’s estimated total of 10.2 billion yuan in its 2024 China Philanthropy List is a 47 percent fall from 2023 and a 86 percent fall from 2022.
Central to the bleak outlook for corporate philanthropy is the real estate industry’s ongoing struggles, with some of China’s biggest corporate donors in the last decade such as Evergrande and Country Garden bankrupt or close to it. In January, the CEO of property developer Vanke, the biggest donor in China as recently as 2020, was detained by authorities as the company reported a record $6.2 billion net loss for 2024.
“Complex Societal Mentality”
As mega-donations dry up, some experts have suggested that the shortfall may be made up by greater charitable giving among ordinary citizens, at a time when state rhetoric has elevated charitable giving to a moral expectation.
However, the data suggests that the party’s exhortations over the last five years have yet to bear fruit. The latest iteration of Tencent’s 99 Giving Day, China’s biggest online charity fundraising drive, raised just 1.08 billion yuan, a year-on-year fall of 71.7 percent and the lowest amount raised since 2018. The number of donors fell 14.2 percent year-on-year to 19.7 million in 2024, while the average individual donation amount of 55 yuan was the lowest in the fundraising drive’s history.
While Tencent’s introduction last year of stricter criteria for donation matching, a key feature of the fundraising drive over the years, certainly played a part in dragging down donations, charities in China have struggled to raise funds for several years now. Surveys of urban Chinese residents between 2018 and 2022 have found that charitable giving participation increased between 2018 and 2020, before the state’s common prosperity and tertiary distribution messaging became widespread, followed by a fall between 2020 and 2022, likely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we are suggesting is that the state needs to be much more refined in how they target certain cohorts of society who will not be motivated by slogans alone,” said Reza Hasmath, a political science professor at the University of Alberta and one of the survey organizers, who has been researching the reasons why Chinese people choose not to donate despite intense state rhetoric in recent years.
The country’s economic challenges aside, Hasmath pointed to the other major inhibitor of charitable giving in China: continued low levels of public trust in charities.
China’s charitable sector began in earnest in 2008, when around 80 billion yuan was donated from all corners of society toward relief efforts following the Sichuan earthquake. However, corruption scandals involving some of the biggest recipients of those funds, such as the state-affiliated Red Cross Society of China and the China Charity Federation, caused donations to plummet in the early 2010s as people began to question whether donations would simply end up in officials’ pockets.
“It is difficult to raise money because of these scandals, even for non-governmental philanthropic organizations like us,” said Li Zhilin, the CEO of Charity Box, a Shanghai NGO launched in 2020 at the onset of the state’s common prosperity agenda to promote charitable giving among young Chinese.
Two of the biggest charity scandals in 2024 both involved state-backed charitable foundations: the China Charities Aid Foundation for Children (CCAFC), one of China’s most well-known charities, was involved in a 10 million yuan donation fraud, while the China Women’s Development Foundation, set up by the party-funded All-China Women’s Federation, was accused of spending 160,000 yuan on a choir with seemingly no performances or rehearsals.
The public backlash sparked by these recent scandals reversed some of the reputational improvements brought about by the country’s first Charity Law, introduced in 2016, which sought to professionalize the sector. The Amity Foundation report noted that overall trust levels in Chinese society remain low eight years on, with “Chinese society marked by a complex societal mentality and social trust situation amid changes and incidents in many different areas.” A recent survey of Chinese social delivery organizations found that only 23 percent feel “generally trusted” by society, compared to 79 percent in the Philippines and 78 percent in Bangladesh.
These scandals have also eroded much of the public goodwill toward corporate philanthropy fostered in the early years of the pandemic. In particular, public sentiment has noticeably soured in the last two years in relation to disaster relief donations, the peak fundraising periods in China historically. For instance, Chagee’s 5 million yuan donation following the dam breach in Hunan province in July was lambasted by netizens who questioned the milk tea giant’s motives for donating to a foundation overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs — a continuation of the recent trend of Chinese celebrities and companies going viral on social media because of netizens’ accusations that they are currying favor with the authorities or engaging in public relations.
The trend is especially worrying given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events in China. Non-governmental relief organizations and charities have expressed worries about declining public attention to such events, most notably during last year’s difficult summer months when China was hit with a quick succession of heatwaves and floods across the country.
The netizens’ accusations shed some light on the rationale of people Hasmath called the “bad citizen” – Chinese people who do not donate despite the state urging them to do so. In fact, he suggested that these people may be less inclined to donate as the state ramps up its rhetoric, based on his survey finding that party membership is one of the biggest determinants of charitable giving in China. Party members are much more likely to donate than non-members, and any expression of non-support for the state has a negative effect on donation behavior.
These findings cast “doubt on the ability of state rhetoric alone… to foster greater philanthropy and voluntary activity to reduce increasing socio-economic inequalities in the 2020s,” Hasmath and his co-authors wrote in a working paper published last year.
Building Trust
Given these institutional constraints, Li Zhilin believes the most effective way for charitable giving in China to become the “invisible hand promoting social justice and fairness,” as the party has called for, is for charities to be radically transparent about their operations and impact. The “meta-charity” he leads, Charity Box, launched a campaign last April to encourage Chinese people to donate at least 1 percent of their incomes every month. To promote trust among donors, they apply impact evaluation methods pioneered by leading American charity evaluator GiveWell to different charity projects, disbursing the funds raised to the most transparent and effective ones.
Such impact monitoring sets Charity Box apart from the majority of charities in China, which have yet to adopt international best practices for disclosure. In their reports to donors, Charity Box includes information about how specifically funds will be spent by their recipient charities: 60,000 yuan disbursed for 10 children’s congenital heart disease surgery, along with each child’s surname, age, and even redacted ID card number; 83,150 yuan earmarked for mental health interventions for 22 rural women – 14 emergency cases, five medium-risk cases, and three high-risk cases.
As of December, Charity Box has raised 325,752 yuan from its more than 400 monthly donors. Despite still being just a drop in China’s overall donations bucket, the substantial funds raised in less than a year nonetheless underscore one of Hasmath’s other survey findings: Chinese people are willing to trust specific charities even if they are skeptical about charities in general, as long as the charities can demonstrate good track records. “[A]kin to most jurisdictions, Chinese donors want to trust that the charity will make good use of their donation,” Hasmath and Qian Wei, an assistant professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University, wrote in a 2022 paper.
There are signs that officials are keen to address lingering public mistrust. The newly revised Charity Law, which came into effect in September, addresses a number of longstanding problems in Chinese philanthropy, including lax oversight of public fundraising and project implementation. For fundraising in the aftermath of major natural disasters, the focus of much public attention, the law now requires the “prompt” distribution of funds and resources received from the public and that charities disclose at least once every five days the acceptance and use of these resources.
On the back of the high-level edict, the Ministry of Civil Affairs in December launched a fresh national inspection campaign targeting charities’ public fundraising and project implementation – “a step in the right direction,” Li believes. One of the key enforcement areas is public fundraising executed by organizations on behalf of foundations with official public fundraising credentials, a common practice in China that has been the subject of controversy in the past due to cases of fraud and lack of clear accountability. In the past month, at least a dozen charities have suspended their monthly donations programs as their applications to renew their fundraising credentials for the coming year have been postponed or rejected by their local civil affairs bureaus.
These developments have led to concerns that the state’s footprint in China’s civil society will further widen. The Amity Foundation report criticized the trend of increased bureaucratic control over charities under the guise of “cleaning up” the sector, saying that it is “obviously contrary to… accelerating the formation of a modern social organization system with separation of government and society, clearly defined rights and responsibilities, and autonomy under the law.”
On the other side of this ideological divide about the proper relationship between charities and the state are establishment voices who increasingly refer to “Big Philanthropy” to describe the nature of Chinese philanthropy. As opposed to philanthropy in the West, which belongs to the realms of the private sector and civil society, “Big Philanthropy” in China must by necessity involve the state – a “simple fact in China that charities have to deal with,” said Hasmath. In light of China’s economic struggles and public mistrust of charities perceived as organs of the state, whether “Big Philanthropy” can translate into a big and vibrant culture of giving remains to be seen.