China’s charitable donation culture is accelerating.
"Source of this article: China Network"
Charity donation is one of the important contents and manifestations of social welfare activities in contemporary China. Behind charitable donation activities can often reflect the charitable donation culture of a country and a nation. The culture of charitable donation here refers to the behavior consciousness, values and system of people’s voluntary organization and donation to participate in social public welfare activities by relying on the power of morality. Behavioral awareness here refers to the voluntary awareness of action to support and help the disadvantaged groups in society and enhance human well-being; The values here include altruism, voluntary service, equality and mutual assistance, friendship and tolerance and other moral and spiritual connotations; The charity system here includes the organizational system, institutional norms and legal system related to charitable donations. Charity donation culture is the foundation of charity behavior. The long-term accumulation of charitable behavior will form a charitable donation culture, and the two complement each other. The charitable donation culture of a country and a nation is the product of the long-term development of a society, and its connotation and extension will also evolve with the development of society. The author thinks that, as a country with a long history, China’s charitable donation culture combines the characteristics of the benevolent spirit of China’s traditional culture, the humanitarianism of western charity and the government responsibility of socialist countries. In recent years, the charitable donation culture in China has been growing in a relatively stable socio-economic and institutional environment, and the donation culture in China society is accelerating.
First, the party and the state attach great importance to it and the legal system is improving day by day.
The formation of charity culture requires the state to grasp the direction from the top-level design of social governance and the practical guarantee and support of laws and institutional systems. After years of exploration and reform, China has formed a system of "three regulations and one law" in the field of charity, based on the Regulations on the Registration and Management of Social Organizations, the Provisional Regulations on the Registration and Management of Private Non-enterprise Units, the Regulations on the Management of Foundations and the Charity Law. The Charity Law promulgated in 2016, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s Proposal on Formulating the 14th Five-year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-term Goals for the Year 2035, which were adopted by the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee in 2019 and the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee in 2020, clearly put forward that "the third distribution" is an important part of the income distribution system, which is an important milestone in the development history of charity in China, laying the legal foundation for charity and other public welfare undertakings and establishing charity and other public welfare undertakings in China.
The Party Central Committee recently issued the Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Supporting Zhejiang’s High-quality Development and Building a Demonstration Zone for Common Prosperity, which clearly pointed out that "establish and improve the incentive mechanism to repay the society. Encourage and guide high-income groups and entrepreneurs to be kind and caring for society, enhance their sense of social responsibility, actively participate in and set up social welfare undertakings … Give full play to the role of the third distribution, develop charity undertakings, and improve the institutional mechanisms conducive to the sustained and healthy development of charitable organizations ",which has raised the shaping of charity mechanisms and culture to a new height of socialist common prosperity demonstration, fully demonstrating that the party and the state attach great importance to it.
Second, the willingness of the first rich groups to donate is getting stronger.
The formation of charity culture depends on the material conditions of a country and a nation. Since the reform and opening up for more than 40 years, with the economic development of China and the confirmation of private property rights, China’s private wealth has grown rapidly, and China society has entered a well-off stage in an all-round way, which has provided a good material foundation for the formation of charity culture.
In the past ten years, the number of the first rich groups and the scale of wealth in China have increased rapidly. According to the 2021 China Private Wealth Report released by China Merchants Bank and Bain Company, the number of high-net-worth individuals in China reached 2.62 million in 2020, and the compound annual growth rate increased from 12% in 2016-2018 to 15% in 2018-2020. It is estimated that by the end of 2021, the number of high-net-worth individuals in China will reach about 2.96 million, and the scale of investable assets will reach about 96 trillion yuan. First of all, judging from the social donation behavior in China in the past decade, the rich first group has made important contributions to the charity in China in the past decade. According to the statistics of Forbes China Charity List over the years, the total donation of the first-rich group in the past 2017-2019 was about 54.39 billion yuan. According to the statistics of China Top 100 Charities List 2011-2020, there are 202 first-rich philanthropists who have donated more than 100 million yuan in the past 10 years, accounting for 93.28% of the total donations made by philanthropists on the list. A total of 28 people donated more than 1 billion yuan, accounting for 74.57% of the total donation; A total of 6 people donated more than 10 billion yuan, accounting for 39.97% of the total donation. Secondly, judging from the characteristics of donation projects, the first rich groups tend to make long-term large donations, support people’s livelihood and basic fields such as education, poverty alleviation and medical care through donations, and make charitable donations with strategic and extensive social influence for national development and human welfare. For example, in 2013,Dang Yanbao, founder of Ningxia Baofeng Group, promised to donate 1.153 billion yuan to 102,000 poor students through Yanbao Charity Foundation within seven years. By the end of 2019, Yanbao Foundation had donated 1.953 billion yuan to support 197,900 Ningxia college students. In October 2018, Guangdong Guoqiang Public Welfare Foundation announced that it would donate 2.2 billion yuan to Tsinghua University in the next 10 years to support basic frontier scientific research, talent training and the introduction of high-end talents in Tsinghua University, setting a record for China University to receive social donations at that time. Undoubtedly, the influential donations of the first rich groups will effectively guide the charitable donations of the later rich groups and the mass groups, thus promoting the formation of a benign donation culture.
Third, public donations and small donations are increasingly active.
In recent years, the increase in the amount of charitable donations and the number of participants in China, especially the increase in the number of small donations and the amount of donations, fully shows that China’s charitable donation culture is taking shape. According to the data of China Charity Donation Report from 2016 to 2019, the proportion of individual donations of Chinese citizens is increasing year by year compared with donations from enterprises and other institutions. The proportion of individual donations increased from 21% in 2016 to 38% in 2019. In recent years, the amount of donations and the number of participants in the field of Internet charity fundraising, which can best reflect the donations of the masses, have continued to increase substantially. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the total amount of Internet donations in China in 2018 was 3.17 billion yuan, up 26.8% year-on-year, and the number of participants reached 8.46 billion; In 2019, the total donation was 5.4 billion yuan, up 68% year-on-year, and the number of participants exceeded 10.876 billion; In 2020, the total donation will exceed 8.2 billion yuan, up 52% year-on-year, and the number of participants will exceed 10 billion. In September 2019, the "99 Public Welfare Day" of Tencent’s public welfare platform attracted more than 48 million people from all over the country in just three days, and donated more than 1.78 billion yuan, which fully demonstrated the powerful power of Internet fundraising. During the celebration of Tsinghua University’s 110th anniversary in 2021, a major breakthrough in the field of resource raising by Tsinghua University Education Foundation was to spread small donations mainly targeted at alumni, which laid a solid foundation for a substantial increase in the long-term alumni donation rate. During the anniversary month,Tsinghua University Education Foundation promoted 19 small fund-raising projects for all alumni in 12 departments and 3 grades. At the same time, Tsinghua University Education Foundation also cooperated with China Education Development Foundation to launch two public offering projects for the whole society. These small fund-raising projects attracted more than 5,000 participants.
Table 1 Statistics of total donation and donation structure in China from 2010 to 2019 (Source: China Charity Donation Report from 2010 to 2019)
Unit: RMB 100 million/%

Figure 1 The amount of donations and the number of participants in the field of Internet charity fundraising in China in recent years.
(Source: Wang Aiwen, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, spoke at the "China Internet Public Welfare Summit", the portal of the Ministry of Civil Affairs)

Fourth, social organizations and online fundraising have developed rapidly.
In recent years, the development of social organizations, the expansion of volunteer service teams and the involvement of the Internet in the public welfare field are all conducive to the cultivation of charitable donation culture. According to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of chinese social organizations has increased year by year, from about 153,000 in 2000 to nearly 867,000 by the end of 2019, an increase of nearly six times. Among them, the foundation, as an important organization in the field of charitable donation in China, has played a very important role. According to the statistics of the Foundation Center Network, as of June 30, 2020, there were 8,172 foundations in China, an increase of 3.03% compared with 2019, and an increase of nearly three times compared with 2250 in 2010. In terms of types of foundations, among all foundations in 2020, there are 1615 public foundations, accounting for about 19.8% of the total number of foundations; There are 6,541 non-public offering foundations, accounting for 80.2% of the total number of foundations. According to the statistics of the Foundation Center Network, the total net assets of national foundations reached 159.23 billion yuan at the end of 2018, with an average asset of 32.537 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.4%. The way of charity in internet plus has also greatly facilitated the large-scale collection and management of charitable funds. According to statistics, in 2019, charitable donations collected by 20 Internet fundraising platforms nationwide exceeded 5.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 68%.
Figure 3 Statistics of the number and growth rate of foundations in China (data source: data released by Foundation Center Network in July 2020).

Figure 4 Statistical chart of total net assets of Chinese foundations in recent years (data source: data released by Foundation Center Network in July 2020)

5. Emerging donation models such as equity donation are constantly emerging.
With the deepening of economic reform, the forms of personal assets and wealth are increasingly diversified. In recent years, there is a new trend of diversification of donation content and mode in the field of domestic charitable donation. The object of donation is not limited to traditional cash and in-kind donations. With the diversification of wealth carriers, many entrepreneurs and philanthropists began to try equity donation. In response to the long-awaited issue of equity donation in the industry: In 2016, the finance and taxation department issued Circular No.45, "Notice on Corporate Income Tax Policy for Public Welfare Equity Donation", which standardized the related issues of equity donation. In recent years, the stock right donation supporting the development of higher education has shown an increasingly active trend. In 2020, there are six large-scale equity donations in the field of domestic higher education charity.
Table 2 Incomplete Statistics of Large-scale Equity Donation Projects of Domestic University Foundations in 2020 (Unit: RMB)

Source: The author collates according to public information.
For donors, the first thing to do is to get a certain number of years and a certain amount of tax incentives; Donating equity is also an important channel for entrepreneurs to make influential investments and fulfill corporate social responsibilities, and the stable cash flow brought by equity benefits can be continuously used for charity; Donating shares will also help enterprises to establish charitable image and brand value effect, and gain more attention and favor from investors and consumers. In addition, the legal and practical issues of charitable trust have also attracted much attention in recent years. Experts in the industry and academia generally believe that the most effective policy tool to encourage charitable donations in the short term is the tax reduction and exemption policy of charitable trusts, especially the tax preference of charitable equity trusts, which can stimulate the enthusiasm of financial and trust institutions and the high-net-worth population. The Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Supporting Zhejiang’s High-quality Development and Building a Demonstration Zone for Common Prosperity, which was just released in June 2021, also pointed out that "the channels for all sectors of society to participate in charity and social assistance should be unblocked. Explore various new ways of donation and encourage the establishment of charitable trusts. " In this context, it is expected that charitable trust will become a new growth pole of domestic charitable donation market, thus promoting the maturity of China’s charitable donation system and culture.
The people of China, who have realized the power of charity in the infiltration of Chinese traditional charity culture and the development of modern charity, have gathered into a far-reaching force for good in China society with deep kindness and warm-hearted kindness. In recent years, the growth of the wealth of the first-rich, the increase of social organizations and online donations, and the emphasis on the construction of legal system, especially the increase in the amount and proportion of personal donations and Internet donations, show that the charitable donation culture in China is accelerating and maturing. However, at present, the rapid growth of charitable donation scale and the further formation of charitable donation culture in China still face two bottlenecks. The first is the contradiction between the formation of donation culture and the needs of social development, that is, the maturity and popularization of donation culture and charity concept lag behind the speed of economic and social development; Secondly, the contradiction between the supply side of the rapidly expanding donation market (donors and donated resources) and the immature demand side of the donation market (charitable projects and fundraising projects). Tsinghua University Education Foundation, as the earliest university foundation established in China, has accumulated some experience on how to promote and shape the donation culture of charity in the long-term practice of raising resources and supporting social welfare. Facing all kinds of challenges on the road of accelerating the formation of charity culture in China, Tsinghua University Education Foundation will continue to focus on related issues such as charity culture, the third distribution and common prosperity in the future, promote interdisciplinary theoretical and practical discussions and exchanges, and make suggestions and suggestions for promoting the development of charity, introducing relevant national policies and improving the system.Make due contributions to the maturity of charitable donation culture. (Author Yuan Wei, Secretary General of Tsinghua University Education Foundation)
Disclaimer: The content of this article is published or reproduced by this website, which only represents the author’s personal views and has nothing to do with this website. For readers’ reference only, please check the relevant contents yourself. )
Reporting/feedback