Religious Philanthropy and Chinese Civil Society

Abstract

With the extraordinary growth of China's economy over the past decades, a new generation of successful business entrepreneurs and billionaires has appeared, most of whom are incarnations of dreams of "rags to riches." At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor has widened, and, far (and sometimes not so far) from the booming cities of the coasts, China's impoverished rural hinterlands often suffer from declining public investment in health and education. Many of the new barons of business have established charitable foundations to help alleviate poverty-a growing trend that is promoted by the Chinese state. In a bid to publicize generosity and encourage charity, many magazines and government bodies regularly publish honor rolls and lists of China's "top philanthropists." Most of them are wealthy real estate developers and pop stars-but one name that often appears is that of an illiterate, eighty-year-old former beggar, Lin Dong, a charismatic Buddhist healer who has donated tens of millions of dollars to build schools in poor villages all over China. Born in 1930, Lin Dong became an orphan as a child and began a life of errant mendicancy. He married another beggar and, after the People's Republic was established in 1949, was assigned a job as a manual laborer, helping to ship loads of goods along the waterways of Guangdong province. In the 1970s he lost his right hand in an accident, and a few years later he suffered from a stroke. In a state of near death, he had a vision of the Chinese god Jigong, who assured him that he would recover and entrusted him with the mission of rescuing those who suffer in the world. Jigong (1130-1207) was a monk who had been kicked out of his monastery for eccentric behavior and his love of meat and alcohol; he then roamed the streets and acquired a reputation as a crazy trickster with a benevolent heart, who had magical powers and could always be counted on to help ordinary people. Over the centuries he was worshipped as a popular god and as a character in

The Forgotten Bonds: A Coevolutionary Framework on the Diffusion of Tzu Chi in Four Southeast Asian Countries

“…Before presenting the analysis of each case, I will briefly discuss the background of Tzu Chi in this section. As one of the East Asian new religious organizations, Tzu Chi has become a globally known Buddhist and charity organization in the past three decades (Laliberté et al, 2011; Madsen, 2007). It now operates in more than 50 countries in various fields including disaster relief, medical humanitarian campaign, and education.…”

Biased Altruism: Islamophobia and Donor Support for Global Humanitarian Organizations

“…Religion can motivate altruism: scholars suggest that more devout people report more charitable behavior (Cnaan, Kasternakis, and Wineburg 2003;Ruiter and de Graaf 2006). This argument has been tested in countries such as the United States (Regnerus, Smith, and Sikkink 1998), Canada (Berger 2006), the Netherlands (Bekkers and Wiepking 2010), Australia (Lyons and Nivison-Smith 2006), and China (Laliberté, Palmer, and Keping 2011). The intuition is that religions generally teach that we should be kind to one another and help others in need.…”

Immortals’ Medicine: Daoist Healers and Social Change

“…In the late Warring States period, it notably developed under the influence of immortality cults and practices, expanded into millenarian and liturgical visions after the 2 nd century CE, and grew in conjunction with Buddhist notions, such as compassion (ci 慈), especially since the Tang dynasty (618-907) (see Verellen 1992). More recently, it has been imbued with the Christian concept of charity and institutionalized in religious NGOs, e.g., major Chinese religious organizations building hospitals, schools, orphanages, and working with other philanthropic activities (see Laliberté et al 2011).…”