Much has been made in recent weeks of the flat out rejection Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have run into when pitching their Giving Pledge idea to Chinese billionaires.
In a blogpost last week, Kevin Lee suggests that while a model of giving away half of one’s fortune may not work, more entrepreneurial models might.
But in doing so, he asserts that perhaps the Chinese are so reluctant to engage in the Giving Pledge because modern, Communist, China has a huge religious void and has not created a culture of giving.
He writes:
No Religious Precedent: While religion is not the only factor to birth philanthropy, it is an effective driver of the philanthropic mindset. The most famous philanthropists in history, and indeed the forefathers of the modern (post Industrial Revolution) philanthropic model such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and John D Rockefeller were rooted in their spiritual motivations. These pioneering philanthropists ascribed to the American philanthropic spirit, a cultural legacy from America’s forefathers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, Christians in the Age of Enlightenment.
China, a State that for many generations has had as its official religion Atheism, continues to be widely criticized for its lack of religious freedom. As a result of its policies, China has bred a general population that today is mainly faithless. The spiritual motivations and drivers that helped give rise to philanthropy in other nations are not present in China.
No Cultural Precedent: Even with all of China’s recent industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, China is still in an agrarian popular culture. More than half of China’s population continues to live in villages based on an agrarian economy. The other half of China’s population is mostly one generation removed from the same agrarian reality. Agricultural society is based on harvest and storage. Hoarding is a very strong cultural imprint that has lasted for many millennia. Even now with economic development, the hoarding culture — which is engrained in familial norms and passed-down by generational lessons — endures even beyond the first and second ‘moneyed’ generations. China will need at least one or two more generations of continued economic development and consistent education of its lower classes before the hoarding imprint can begin fading. Having a hoarding culture is a direct limitation to any rise of philanthropy in China.
