Making Chinese Charities Accountable

This chapter examines an outline history of Chinese charity institutions with a focus on issues connected with financial accountability. It distinguishes the one-off single-purpose donation (for temple building, for example,) from the control and management of properties, and suggests where property ownership provided for regular income, government and legal measures were introduced. Even then, charities were not totally secular, as religion might be invoked for maintaining governance.

Huiguan (會館‎) as an Overseas Charitable Institution

Seldom have studies of overseas huiguan, i.e., Chinese benevolent associations, covered their charitable service of repatriating coffins/bones of the deceased from their host countries to their hometowns in China for burial. This peculiar long-standing Chinese “modern tradition,” till the early 1950s, can now be solidly evidenced by the voluminous Tung Wah Coffin Home Archives in Hong Kong after the materials have been made known in recent years. According to the correspondence between the Tung Wah Hospital (a charitable organization itself) and huiguan all over the world, thousands of coffins and boxes of bones were shipped back to native places of most Chinese emigrants from the “Gold Rush” era every year through Hong Kong during the first half of the last century, especially after the Tung Wah Coffin Home was built by the Hospital to house coffins and exhumed bones awaiting shipment. Starting with a mapping of the sending points, this chapter attempts to first delineate the function of Chinese benevolent associations there as key organizations in the charity network of the global Chinese world. The implications of their operation in the historical connection between the host countries and hometowns of overseas Chinese via Hong Kong are also exemplified and explicated.

The “Letter Should Not Beg”

Through a comprehensive examination of worldwide philanthropic efforts for Canton Christian College (Lingnan University, 1888-1951), this chapter seeks to trace modern practices of diasporic Chinese philanthropy in higher education. At the core of modern institutions taking root in China, Christian universities and colleges fashioned new possibilities and new depths of support among contacts across urban communities in Asia, Oceania, and North and South Americas. National identity, welfare sovereignty, and state-philanthropy relations have been important analytical concerns of other scholars. My foci, however, are the ideas and strategies of domestic Chinese, diasporic Chinese, and Westerners that have shaped the liberal form and content of Chinese philanthropy in higher education, the “on-going enterprise of the human spirit.” I argue that cultivating overseas Chinese philanthropy for Lingnan University involved the packaging and repackaging of higher education as a fluid symbol of opportunity, hope, native-place, Christianity, modernity, progressiveness, nationalism, and worldism, depending on the specific donor base.

The “Invisible Work” of Women

This chapter explores how Chinese cultural expressions of charity, based on interpersonal relationships (guanxi) and native place (tongxiang) ties, came to mix and interact with contrasting traditions of Christian charity practiced in a predominantly British milieu in colonial and federation Australia over the late 19th century and 20th centuries. We employ the term “philanthropic sociability” to capture the spirit of innovation that came to characterize a number of voluntary organizations in which Chinese Australian women were active organizers and innovators. By analyzing male-dominated writings and records of charitable fairs and public celebrations, the chapter argues that women undertook “invisible work” in voluntary organizations and built a variety of informal networks among them. Although their social impact was limited, women contextualized their participation in male-dominated activities in ways that cannot be explained in terms of patriarchal values. We find that the impact of women in Chinese- Australian voluntary organizations was not just about the feminizing of community formations but also about promoting philanthropic sociability in ways that traditional organizations could not match.

Practising Charity (Xingshan行善‎) across the Chinese Diaspora, 1850–1949

This chapter takes a long historical view to examine a variety of charitable works performed among Chinese migrants at different levels and in different directions for the century after 1850. It aims to foreground the spatial and temporal character of such activities as a way to gain new insights into the multifaceted, dynamic and elastic nature of the diaspora. Looking at how Chinese migrants around the world related to others – including different groups of Chinese and non-Chinese peoples – the chapter notes the mechanism of far-flung networks that covered large geographical areas to capture the sense of the multidirectionality of charitable activities. Questions about the feeling of obligation of charity-givers and other people’s expectations of them, obligations and expectations occurring on different levels and coming from many sides are raised. It is especially these multilevel and multidirectional obligations and expectations that, hopefully, will help us redraw the contours of the Chinese diaspora.

Chinese Engagement with the Australian Colonial Charity Model

This chapter examines the Chinese response to the need of the people of Victoria, in the southeastern corner of Australia, to continually raise funds to support their charitable institutions. Resolved to avoid the taxes associated with a state based system of caring for the sick, elderly and poor, the settlers of Victoria established institutions that required public support. Fund raising was a constant concern resulting in frequent public events for charities, such as processions, fairs and grand bazaars. Chinese communities generously participated in these events and proved to be great assets for fundraising committees. They fashioned a means to utilize western fascination with the splendor of aspects of Chinese culture, to serve Victoria’s need to support its charitable institutions. The costumes, and acrobatic and martial arts traditions of Cantonese opera were publicly displayed and demonstrated to extensive gatherings. Eventually the processing of a Chinese dragon was also used to attract crowds to charity events. Despite the restrictions that the host society placed on Chinese immigration the Chinese in Melbourne and various Victorian country towns readily expended considerable energy and money in responding to frequent calls for their involvement in charity events.

Building Trust

This chapter traces the parallel development of charitable practices and forms of civic association in the Cantonese Pacific over the century to 1949 with a view to exploring ways in which Chinese overseas employed charity to build trust within their own communities and with their host societies in Australia and North America. Business activities and social transactions among Chinese diaspora communities are said to be embedded in personal trust, and to extend to larger trust networks. The chapter argues that the evolution of charitable practices and associational forms among Cantonese diaspora communities of the Pacific largely conform to this pattern. By drawing attention to some of the connections linking civic associations and their charitable activities to a range of trust-building strategies over time, the chapter highlights points of continuity in the work of Chinese community organizations overseas during a period of rapid institutional change from the late Qing Dynasty to the founding of the People’s Republic – specifically the relationship between engaging in private charity and working for the public benefit to build community trust.