[This is a paper, based on preliminary fieldwork in China in the summer of 2018, given at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in San Jose, California. The title is from my pre-field abstract submission, while the content reflects nuances gleaned from fieldwork.]

The World Giving Index is an annual report, now nine years running, that measures the level of generosity of countries around the world. This year, out of the 146 nations polled, China came in at 142. Chinese are not typically portrayed as a particularly charitable bunch, and these yearly polls, picked up by mainstream news outlets like The Guardianand The Washington Post, certainly add to this view. At a panel on Chinese and Chinese-American philanthropy in New York City earlier this year, the speakers, a group of distinguished Chinese-American philanthropists, began their discussion by extolling the Chinese “spirit of charity.” “The seed for charity is our DNA,” one of them announced into the microphone. This statement was met with some discomfort from the audience, a perceptible moment of uncertainty and confusion. I wondered, why is there a disconnect between doing philanthropy and being Chinese? Why the rush to smooth over it by invoking some innate, essential quality?

Initially, I set out to explore philanthropy as a rising phenomenon among Chinese and Chinese Americans. I wanted to follow the ways in which philanthropy is mapped onto tradition, entrepreneurship, geopolitics, and circuits of capital. I also wanted to dig deeper into the back stories of philanthropists themselves. While these concerns continue to be relevant, I realized, over the course of three months in the field this summer, that perhaps this wasn’t quite the story that needed to be told.

In Beijing, I attended a congress organized around one of the hottest topics of the day: the federal government had proposed an overhaul of the statutes that regulate the operation of civil organizations, which include charitable foundations, social service providers, nonprofits, and NGOs, and it was soliciting recommendations from the public before ratification. In response, meetings such as this one took place all over the country. Here, in the capital, the heads of more than forty organizations were in attendance, as well as Party representatives, scholars, and journalists. The organizer, a powerhouse of a woman who has been involved in this arena for more than two decades – I’ll call her T – described her feelings toward the shifting terrain of philanthropy in China: “I haven’t left this world since 1993. I’ve seen it all, and I’ve done it all. After we passed the China Charity Law two years ago, I harbored so much hope for the future of our work here. And now this is undoing all the progress we’ve been making. Why is it that everything else – our economy, our technology – has hurtled forward, and yet our ideas and our politics are still stuck in the same place?”

We were clustered around three large tables at the center of the room, and T’s comments sparked a flurry of rebuttals from every direction. I watched these impassioned exchanges in silent wonder. The Party representative fought to get a word in, and T immediately shot him down, and then someone else, a younger woman, cut T off in turn: “You’re taking up myfive minutes!” she hissed. The deputy secretary general of the China Charity Alliance sat rigidly in his seat, scowling. The room seemed to get hotter. Barbed critiques flew back and forth, but it was the emotional force animating their words that filled the room.

One of T’s remarks was especially poignant. “The philanthropy-charity sector is like the sea,” she said. “Here we are, with our authority and spheres of influence, and we think that we are the ones shaping the future. But we are nothing more than little islands floating on the surface, and it is the sand at the bottom of the sea – the small, the local, the ad hoc assemblies, the ones disavowed by the state, the ones ignored by us – that is churning and carrying us toward the issues that are truly important. We need to pay attention to and foster the power of society itself, the power of the sand and the sea.” (My translation doesn’t quite do her words justice.)

Philanthropy and charity as we understand it here in the United States – the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, religion-based organizations, even the Red Cross – have no direct counterpart in China. Philanthropy is simply not translatable; it does not have a linguistic equivalent in Chinese, much less structural, discursive, or affective analogs. Chinese and Chinese-American practitioners employ the term 公益, or public interest, sometimes in conjunction with 慈善, or charity, to refer to their field of action. These terms, however, encompass a wide range of concepts, actors, practices, and organizational forms. “Philanthropy” is a construct that indexes a particular mode of capital exchange, intimately tied up with liberal notions of the individual, the social, and the norms of reciprocity. It is also a particular way of seeing and circumscribing social action and social relations. As such, “philanthropy” comes with a whole host of assumptions. It was uncomfortable to hear the speakers on the philanthropy panel in New York defending the Chinese spirit of charity precisely because philanthropy does notexist in China the same way it does in the U.S. At best, it is an awkward framework forced around complex and diffuse assemblages. It is telling that the only people concerned with putting a definitive name on this emerging field of practice are, well, the Americans. “What is the difference between 公益 and 慈善?” the executive of a U.S. nonprofit asked me. “Which is the proper term for philanthropy?” I posed this same question to many of my interlocutors in China, and their responses ranged from curiosity to indifference to exasperation. This is just what we do, they told me. We’re trying to improve the material conditions of life, broaden social consciousness, solve social problems, create social value… Why does it matter what you call it?

However, practitioners both in and outside of China recognize that there are significant operational issues when it comes to, for example, strategic investment, juridico-legal regulation, financial accountability, and social efficacy. In short, they realize that they don’t really know what they’re doing, only that something needs to be done. They look toward American models of philanthropy, invite European experts to train young philanthropists, borrow from Western philosophy and social science, apply methods and concepts they learned at Ivy League management schools, to understand what they’re trying to do. They try on ideas like clothing, testing, evaluating, making decisions at all levels of institutionalization to formulate the best way forward. As many of my interlocutors explained – wryly, self-deprecatingly, honestly – “We’re crossing the river by feeling for the stones under our feet.”

Toward the end of my fieldwork, I flew to Inner Mongolia for a three-day conference on cross-strait philanthropic collaboration. It was jointly sponsored by the China Charity Alliance, a state-affiliated organization, and the Lao Niu Foundation, a private charity worth more than half a billion dollars. Its founder is a retired entrepreneur who donated all of his profits to this charity, headquartered in his hometown – where, not coincidentally, the conference was held. On our second day, Lao Niu Foundation staff took all of us (some three hundred people stuffed into six coaches) on a tour of its local projects. One of these projects was a conservation effort, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, that sprawled across a vast expanse of farmland gouged by rocky ravines like enormous claw marks. The project’s long-term goal is to restore the land for agricultural use so that local farmers can “lift themselves out of poverty” while learning about the importance of conservation. I know how that sounds, and I know how problematic the rhetoric – and even the project itself – is, but, at the day’s end, when I stepped off that bus, into the dusk, I couldn’t get the sheer physical scale of the project out of my mind. I felt inspired, energized, abuzz. The image of tiny little pine trees planted in – actually, swallowed up by – the jaws of mighty canyons eroded by sand, wind, and water – swam around in my head. I couldn’t get over the enthusiasm that I had heard in our tour guides’ voices, undercut with a quiet pride and sense of purpose.

Mostly, though, I was abuzz with the conversations that I had listened to on the bus, all day long, as we were ferried back and forth from place to place. Everyone around me – men, women, new initiates and old hands, from every corner of the country – spoke earnestly about the work each of their organizations was doing. There were endless questions about their respective strategies, obstacles, successes, and failures. They compared notes and lessons learned. They complained about the government. They discussed the moral underpinnings – or lack thereof – of philanthropy in China as a whole. They were obsessed. At one point, just before we returned to the hotel, I sat, exhausted, drinking coffee and in utter disbelief at how much intellectual debate was still going on all around me. It seemed so laborious, after such a long day, but it wasn’t; it was pleasure. I commented to K, a new friend I’d made, “How are they still talking about their work?” She laughed. “Well, what else would they be talking about?”

Off the bus, I wanted to share my exuberance, this affective energy, with someone. I sat on a bench as the sun set and began to tell a friend and colleague of mine about my experiences that day. He was immediately skeptical: “Interventions like these come in, wash over the town, recruit people, actually convert people into really believing in them, then wash away without results. Why are they there? Can they correct more fundamental distributions of power that keep locals in their place?” And so on.

I found myself rising to my interlocutors’ defense. It was an odd compulsion: strangers, they all were to me. I had only spoken with them intermittently, in awkward Chinese. Most of them, in fact, had initially regarded me with undisguised suspicion because I was unaffiliated with an organization – and I looked like a foreigner. But there was something that buzzed in the air, something of their conversations that lingered, something about having shared an enclosed space with other bodies for nearly ten hours, something about having seen, all of us together, the material – the very real – traces of someone else’s dream. I knew my friend was spot-on with his analysis. But I needed to defend my interlocutors. I felt deeply that there was something to defend. I didn’t quite know what that was, or how to defend it. But there was something there, something that pulled my interlocutors along, stumbling over the stones in the river, toward something, something that also pulled at me.

We all know of Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” or the mimetic contagion of the crowd. But I think Mauss is appropriate here: “there is, above all,” he writes, “a mix of spiritual bonds between things that are in some way of the soul, and individuals, and groups who treat each other, to some degree, as things.”

I am suggesting, then, that we think of philanthropy in a slightly different way. Rather than instituting a series of dyadic relationships between donor and receiver, between gift and counter-gift – even if ultimately circular or interpenetrating – and wondering if we are looking at altruism or self-interest, we look instead at the generative potential of different sets of relationships across different registers and constellations. Rather than thinking through the equivalence of value in exchange and reciprocity, we think through value, as Nancy Munn tells us, as relative potencies that spill out beyond the strictures of any single transaction. Rather than beginning with the act of giving and the figure of the giver, we start with the ask, the demand of the social world for its own reproduction. As I mentioned previously, 公益, the makeshift label denoting philanthropy in China, translates into “public interest.” But, as the head of a prominent Beijing-based charity explained to me, 公益 is actually a contraction of a longer phrase: 公共利益, which signals “that which benefits the public.” In that light, what might philanthropy look like if we started at the membranes of social relations? Must we locate practices of giving in discrete entities like theindividual, the philanthropist,thecharity, and ground them in an origin myth of morality or religion or power or capital accumulation?

Something more, something in excess of capital and exchange and narrative structure, emerges out of disparate, often mundane and sometimes emotionally charged, actions. Crossing the river by feeling for the stones – but where are my interlocutors going, and why? No one seems to know, and the lack of an answer doesn’t seem to matter. They engage in concrete acts with material outcomes, sometimes in disagreement with each other, but it is as if each of them is working on a piece of a shared, larger puzzle that no one can quite see or name. By participating – by taking part in or being a part of – projects oriented toward and constituted by social relations, my interlocutors in turn constitute themselves as well as an unknowable yet sensible and potent whole. If the political is cracking open the visible from the inside, I think of this generative capacity, this energetic excess, this something more, as an emergent commons constantly being reinscribed by every act – by feeling for the stones. If the ends are unknown and the means are contested, then the logic of economy is no longer enough. Chinese and Chinese-American philanthropy becomes a political project, a process of taking the given – national and international politics, capital flows, Western and Party ideologies – and opening spaces within it to try on new clothes, to play, and to decide, in William Mazzarella’s words, “how we become what we can be in relation to each other.” Ethics and morality here is cartographic rather than archaeological. I think of T and how disappointed she was that “politics” in China seem intractable. Yet, this does not stop her nor her colleagues from being attuned to the social – to the sands and the sea – in an effort to reinstitute the political.

When I returned to the U.S., I attended another panel on Chinese and Chinese-American philanthropy, this time with slightly different eyes. One woman – a Chinese-American social entrepreneur with projects in both China and the U.S. – spoke about the complexities and shortcomings of philanthropy in China. It was interesting to me that, despite the depth of her discussion, the one issue that captivated the audience the most was the education and training of Chinese practitioners on how to do philanthropy. The conversation I had with my friend about the Lao Niu Foundation’s conservation project came to mind: philanthropy – what falls under its rubric, what it does, what it answers to – is different depending on how one chooses to see. Back from the field, I find myself struggling to hold in tension these different ways of seeing, and writing this is a reminder in itself that there are other questions to ask, and other stories to tell.