Bertram Lang’s The Transnational Politics of Philanthropy: China’s Rise and Limitations starts from an apparent paradox. Over the past decade, the political space for civil society in China has narrowed, particularly for advocacy-oriented organizations and those with ties to foreign donors. Yet, during this same period, Chinese philanthropy has expanded and become increasingly international. Lang, a political scientist and senior researcher at Marburg University, uses this puzzle to rethink legitimacy under authoritarian rule. His central contribution is to show that Chinese philanthropy is a field in which philanthropic actors and the party-state are engaged in a multilevel struggle over legitimacy across domestic and international arenas.

Lang rejects two binaries that have long shaped how Chinese philanthropy is understood. The first is the tendency to see it as either an instrument of the authoritarian state or part of nascent civil society. The second is to treat US/Western philanthropy as the norm and Chinese philanthropy as a culturally distinct alternative. Rather than proposing a separate “Chinese model,” he shows how Chinese philanthropy has developed through a mix of international influences, domestic political constraints, and organizational strategies. His framework of “transnational multilevel legitimation” distinguishes actor-centered, norm-centered, and performative forms of legitimation and traces struggles among regime actors, philanthropic organizations, INGOs, international organizations, foreign states, and local civil societies.

Methodologically, Lang combines ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong with 62 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, policy and organizational documents, and large-scale quantitative text analysis. This combination allows him to compare what organizations say publicly, what practitioners say privately, what happens at field-level events, and broader patterns of organizational behavior.

The findings highlight the complexity of transnational philanthropy under authoritarian rule. The strength of the party-state notwithstanding, the internationalization of Chinese philanthropy was not simply directed from above. While the government has encouraged philanthropic organizations to “go out,” particularly under the Belt and Road initiative, this encouragement has not been matched by a coherent regulatory or financial framework. Organizations face ambiguous rules, bureaucratic hurdles, and financial controls that make international work difficult and risky. Lang therefore concludes that much internationalization has occurred not because of, but despite, government action.

Another important finding concerns the “charitisation” of civil society under tightening political controls. This fits a broader literature on hybrid and authoritarian regimes, where organizations facing shrinking space for advocacy often move toward service provision and politically safer forms of charity. What Lang adds, however, is that this depoliticizing pressure does not come from the state alone. Tencent’s online fundraising ecosystem rewards projects that are simple, emotionally appealing, and uncontroversial. Its structure and incentives also concentrate resources among a small group of organizations despite the rhetoric of democratizing giving. This is one of the book’s findings with the clearest relevance beyond China.

Philanthrocapitalism, praised by US venture philanthropists and tech-sector billionaires as a more innovative and efficient way to address social problems, can similarly reward easily marketable problems and solutions while pushing more contentious or structural forms of activism to the margins.

One of the book’s most compelling arguments concerns “authoritarian overreach” and the limits of “charity diplomacy.” Chinese actors have been relatively successful at securing recognition from elite international audiences, particularly UN institutions, but much less successful at building sustained relationships with local civil society and communities in the Global South. The party-state seeks to use philanthropy because non-state organizations can reach audiences and claim forms of credibility that state institutions cannot. Yet political intervention can undermine the autonomy and legitimacy that make these organizations useful in the first place.

The analysis is particularly persuasive in showing how legitimacy claims circulate among governments, nonprofits, international organizations, and other elite actors. It is less effective at showing how these claims are received by the broader publics they target. Local communities and civil society actors in the Global South are much less visible in the evidence. In part, this is one of Lang’s own findings. It also reflects the difficulty of researching the field shaped by censorship and limited access to open public opinion data.

The book really comes alive in its final three chapters, where interview excerpts, observations from events, and the voices of philanthropic actors come much more fully into view. Given how much material Lang has collected, it makes sense that the earlier chapters lean more heavily on the large textual datasets. Still, I would have liked to hear more of those voices earlier in the book. The interviews and ethnographic material often give the clearest sense of how legitimacy is negotiated in practice.

The Transnational Politics of Philanthropy joins a substantial literature that has moved beyond treating authoritarian state-civil society relations primarily in terms of repression or co-optation. For VOLUNTAS readers, its most useful contribution is Lang’s account of how political regulation, professionalization, market incentives, and platform power can push civil society in similar directions even when they come from very different institutions. It is therefore a useful contribution to broader debates about civil society, authoritarianism, and the changing politics of transnational philanthropy.