China’s “New Philanthropy”: Cultivating Elite Chinese Philanthropists

Abstract

Faced with glaring economic inequality within China, and the need to grow soft power globally, president Xi Jinping has identified the urgent need to usher in a “new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and has specifically called for the expansion of “xin cishan” (新慈善), or “new philanthropy.” Both as a new phenomenon in the prc, and as a novel type, “new philanthropy” represents an opportunity for the nation to envision and cultivate charitable practice that mediates between market economics and socialist ethics, and grants China a moral authority that is legible to a Western gaze yet resistant to cultural imperialism. Based on yearlong ethnographic research inside an elite philanthropy training program, this article outlines three different visions that were found to coexist: philanthropy-as-new-revolution, philanthropy-as-new-legacy, and philanthropy-as-new-tradition. I also examine how wealthy participants responded to these various interpellations—part of a process I call “philanthropic subjectification.”