Amongst the burgeoning literature on civil society in China, studies of the nature and role of philanthropic foundations have arguably taken second place to a focus on various forms of NGOs and associations (corporatist or otherwise). In this expertly written and deeply comprehensive new volume, Katja Levy and Knut Benjamin Pissler put to rest any doubt as to whether China's newly emerging foundations deserve our collective attention as China scholars.
The authors set for themselves the task of answering a related set of questions concerning Chinese foundations, namely “What space does the current legal and political system offer to them? What is their relation to the Party-state? What are they expected to do? How do they themselves see their role?” (p. 9). In the course of ten chapters, they provide thorough answers to all of these and more, grounding their analysis in a wide variety of sources, including databases from Chinese government and non-government entities, archival research into party and government policy documents, annual reports from foundations, and a series of semi-structured interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018.
An historical account of notions and practices of charity and philanthropy is split across two chapters, with one (chapter five) beginning in the Qin and drawing on both Chinese and non-Chinese sources by learned historians, and the next (chapter six) covering the rise of philanthropic foundations from 1978 onwards. For general students of China, including those interested in the moral and political implications of “charity,” these chapters will serve as a thorough guide in which future research questions can be grounded.
Bringing to bear the authors’ shared background in law, the book provides a detailed analysis of the modern legal history of foundation governance in China, focusing primarily on the Regulation on Foundation Administration of 2004 and the Charity Law of 2016. Beyond simple legal analysis, however, they also investigate the political concerns that inhibit the law's functioning and practical “innovations” that allow foundations space outside the strict confines of the law. Diving down into the workings of these legal provisions, they shed light on key questions of public fundraising, the responsibilities of board members, the rights of donors, transparency, and other issues of keen interest to legal analysts and practitioners. References to legal constraints and political opportunities recur throughout the book, showing how these interact to shape the behaviour and impact of foundations.
Beyond the sheer amount of empirical detail provided in terms of legal analysis, one of the book's greatest strengths is that the authors offer what is essentially two comprehensive literature reviews. The first covers the findings of research on foundations outside of China, identifying several social, political and economic functions that philanthropic foundations have been found to play elsewhere. The second review covers both Chinese and non-Chinese scholarship on Chinese foundations, suggesting that much of the Chinese scholarship on foundations has not engaged with the concerns of scholars looking at other societies. Rather, the focus in China has been on documenting the scale and scope of Chinese philanthropy. With these overviews in hand, the authors develop what they call a “functional governance approach” to studying foundations, asking what the manifest functions of Chinese foundations are – the ones that are most obvious – but also investigating their latent functions, which float under the surface and have wider-ranging political and social implications. Unsurprisingly, key amongst the latent political functions is support of the party-state's political priorities, as both “public” foundations (mostly government-organized foundations) and “private” foundations (funded by entrepreneurs, for example) are subject to explicit and subtle controls imposed by the Party. Whereas other scholars have been sceptical of the latent social functions of Chinese foundations, Levy and Pissler strike a more positive note, suggesting that foundations play an important role in social innovation by, for example, bringing business practices into the programs they operate and providing more opportunities – through online fundraising, for example – for average Chinese people to engage in charity and give back to society.
The book concludes with a glance at the political and social developments that may drive future change. First among these, perhaps, is the impact of the 2016 Charity Law. One of the novel changes wrought by the law is that it gives non-foundation social organizations the opportunity to fundraise from the public. Whether and how this creates “competition” for philanthropic foundations who also seek to publicly fundraise is yet to be seen, but the implication is that expanding the pool of “charities” to whom Chinese people can legally donate may push established foundations to innovate further and distinguish themselves as especially deserving of public support. At the same time, the shrinking space for civil society more broadly may put foundations under more pressure to conform to the policy preferences of the party-state, continuing a focus on politically “safe” activities like support for rural education or healthcare rather than innovating in other realms of social need. While these future developments are important, some readers may be left wanting for a sharper analysis of the political dynamics currently constraining foundation operations or their position vis-à-vis other actors within Chinese civil society.
Overall, this book will likely serve as the authoritative account of the legal structures governing Chinese foundations for some years to come. For scholars wanting to engage with larger theoretical questions in international non-profit studies, the literature reviews and identification of various functions of foundations in and outside China also offer a ready guide for how to enter those debates. In short, many will find it an indispensable reference for understanding the legal environment for and functions of philanthropic foundations in China today.
