China's Salvation Army

For weeks, an army has striven mightily to fend off the floodwaters of an angry Yangtze River. Thousands of soldiers from the People's Liberation Army--joined at the dikes by countless villagers--have filled sandbags, evacuated homes, retrieved the dead. At one point, when the rising waters raced toward the central Chinese city of Wuhan, some nearby hamlets even volunteered to have their lands buried under the current if the sacrifice would save the larger town.Charity is clearly not a foreign concept to China, but charitable organizations are. After decades of communist rule, Chinese are used to letting the government take care of disaster relief, as well as social needs generally. But now home-grown charities are trying to tackle China's considerable social problems. Recently Chinese TV viewers were treated to a first--a telethon, cosponsored by the Chinese Charity Foundation (CCF) and the China Red Cross Society, to raise funds for this year's flood victims. The three and a half-hour broadcast brought in an astounding $72 million in donations from individuals and large institutions like the PLA, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Founded in 1994, the CCF now has 72 branches that undertake everything from building water tanks in arid Gansu province to arranging corrective surgery for children with harelips and cleft palates. Disasters come one after another, and China is so big, laments Yan Mingfu, CCF's founder. There are too many things that need to be done.This year in particular has provided much work for Yan's organization. Flood damage has been estimated at $24 billion, and that figure is likely to rise. Already 14 million people have been displaced, and many will join the 65 million Chinese who already live below the poverty line (which Beijing sets at a yearly income of $72). According to a 1997 United Nations report, a shocking 97% of rural folk lack access to adequate sanitation; nearly a third do not have enough drinking water. Only about 15 million peasants have been raised out of those dire circumstances in the past three years. Yet Beijing, which has pledged to eliminate absolute poverty by 2000, is spending only about $3.8 billion this year on poverty relief.Yan, 67, saw the result of that contradiction first-hand when he served in the Ministry of Civil Affairs in the early 1990s. There was no water, no food and no schools for kids in mountainous areas of Guizhou, he recalls of a trip to China's most threadbare province. To build more schools, orphanages and hospitals, officials had to beg for funding from the tight-fisted Ministry of Finance. Yan chose a different tactic, taking $1.6 million in donations and building up the CCF as an extra-governmental force. Staffed mostly by volunteers--including several other retired bureaucrats--the organization now survives on donations that total just over $4.8 million a year. Most of that comes from state companies and wealthy overseas Chinese. Even foreign multinationals have contributed: Exxon donated more than $250,000 to a CCF project funding surgery for children.Yan says he got the idea for the CCF from his father, who ran a YMCA in Shenyang before the 1949 communist takeover. His own career, however, followed a more traditional course through party ranks. By 1986 he had been promoted to head of the United Front Department and named to the powerful Central Committee. A close adviser to then-premier Zhao Ziyang, Yan tried to convince student demonstrators to leave Tiananmen Square voluntarily, weeks before PLA troops forced them out with bullets. The effort cost him his job, although he survived as a vice-minister in the Ministry of Civil Affairs until he retired in 1994.Yan remains a committed party member, but he has drawn fire from within the government for his charitable efforts. Ultra-leftists believe that the government should take care of these problems and that the public welfare should replace charity, complains Yan. An official in the Civil Affairs Ministry reluctantly allows that China's new NGO's have assisted us in doing a good job in disaster relief. But the stereotype of charities as attempts by the rich to suppress the poor has yet to be erased. If the government no longer bans them, neither do authorities provide financial or institutional support. They think all NGO's are troublemakers, and want to deal with them only when they have to, says a Beijing academic and volunteer.The same, unfortunately, might be said of those the CCF and others must then target in order to survive--China's newly rich. Beijing still does not offer tax breaks for charitable donations, and mainland millionaires have yet to show much enthusiasm for pure altruism. Individual donations to charities are few. Many rich people in China are only after money and pleasure, complains Yan. They have not yet given a thought to repaying society with their fortunes. For the sake of China's many poor, they would do well to become acquainted with the concept soon.Reported by Mia Turner/Beijing