About China Charity Federation

China Charity Federation

The China Charity Federation is China's largest national charitable federation, a membership-based social organisation established in Beijing in 1994 by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Headquartered at Erlong Road in Xicheng District, Beijing, it stands at the apex of a nationwide system of charity associations that reaches from the national level down through provinces, municipalities and counties. Together with the Red Cross Society of China, it is one of the very few national social organisations in China authorised to receive public donations in major disasters, a position that has made it a central channel for Chinese giving in earthquakes, floods and, most visibly, the COVID-19 emergency of 2020. Scholars of Chinese civil society routinely use the federation as a case study of the government-organised non-governmental organisation — the so-called GONGO — and of how organised charity was rebuilt in China after decades in which formal philanthropy had largely disappeared.

Origins in the Rehabilitation of Charity

The federation was born at a particular moment in modern Chinese history. After 1949, private and religious charity was absorbed into state welfare provision, and the very word charity carried ideological suspicion for a generation. The reform era gradually reopened the question. In February 1994 the People's Daily published commentary calling for the rehabilitation of charity as a legitimate social activity, and in that same year the Ministry of Civil Affairs established the China Charity Federation to coordinate charitable activity nationally. Its founding president was Cui Naifu, a former minister of civil affairs, a choice of leadership that signalled from the outset the federation's close relationship with the civil-affairs bureaucracy it was created to complement.

The model was deliberately federative. Rather than building a single charity, the new body federated existing and newly forming local charity associations, most of them administered alongside local civil affairs bureaus. Local charity associations had begun appearing in the early 1990s, and the national federation gave them a common name, common branding and a national centre able to receive large donations, negotiate with central government and represent Chinese charity abroad.

A Nationwide Federation System

The scale of the system is the federation's defining feature. By June 2013, local branches at provincial, municipal and county level numbered some 1,996, covering effectively the whole country. Academic studies describe a network that by the mid-2000s already included thousands of donation collection posts across China — some 32,000 by one widely cited count — through which money and goods could be given locally and channelled into organised relief and assistance programmes. Several hundred organisations have joined the national federation as members, and the federation itself describes its mission in the language of humanitarianism and the Chinese tradition of helping people in poverty and difficulty.

This structure gives the federation a reach that few purely private charities can match. When a disaster strikes a county, there is almost always a local charity association able to receive goods, register needs and connect with the provincial and national levels. The same structure, however, is the source of the most persistent criticism of the federation, examined below: because local associations are mostly managed directly by local civil affairs bureaus, the boundary between the charity system and the local state is unusually thin.

Programmes: Relief, Poverty, Medicine and Care

The federation's programme work spans the classic fields of Chinese organised charity. Emergency relief comes first: the federation raises funds and materials for disaster-affected areas and distributes assistance to victims, a role formalised by its status as one of the organisations officially designated to receive public disaster donations. Alongside relief sits poverty alleviation work in poor communities, medical assistance for patients who cannot afford treatment, education assistance for children from poor families, and support for elderly people and orphans — the categories its own organisational summaries list as its core business.

One of its most visible branded innovations was the charity supermarket. The first opened in Shanghai in 2003, modelled in part on Western charity shops, and thousands of charity supermarkets — cishan chaoshi and related aixin, or loving-heart, supermarkets — were subsequently established in operation across the country. In these shops, donated goods are sold at low prices or distributed to registered needy households, turning a stream of donated clothing and household items into a permanent neighbourhood welfare institution rather than a one-off distribution. The model became one of the federation system's signature contributions to Chinese urban social assistance.

Disaster Giving and the COVID-19 Response

Major emergencies have repeatedly tested and displayed the federation's role. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, scholars such as Tsinghua University professor Deng Guosheng pointed out that the lion's share of public donations flowed to government-linked channels, above all the Red Cross system and the charity federation system, underlining both their capacity and the debate about their privileged position. The federation system was a principal recipient and distributor of earthquake donations nationwide.

The pattern repeated at larger scale in 2020. During the COVID-19 crisis the federation was one of five organisations officially appointed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs to handle public donations of money and supplies for the outbreak, with Hubei as the centre of need. Analysis by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported by China Development Brief, found that by 1 March 2020 some 5.89 billion yuan had been donated by 132 private companies alone, and that the federation had received more than one billion yuan through designated online fundraising platforms by early March — around 64.3 per cent of donations on those platforms — precisely because its designated status gave it authorised access to locked-down Hubei. The federation's own congress of members, held online in July 2020, reviewed the epidemic response as the defining work of that year.

A GONGO: Privilege and Criticism

No honest profile of the China Charity Federation can omit the debate about what kind of organisation it is. China Development Brief's widely cited 2011 analysis described it as a GONGO — a government-organised NGO — established from the top down through the support and intervention of party-state organs, legally registered as a social organisation or membership association rather than as a public foundation, yet enjoying fundraising privileges in disasters that public foundations did not share. Critics quoted in that analysis, including a Tsinghua University scholar, argued that the federation's privileges and exclusive resources, gained from its close ties with government, could undermine the growth of a broader, more independent philanthropy sector.

The federation's defenders can point to the practical record: in a country rebuilding charitable institutions from near zero in the 1990s, a state-backed federation created donation infrastructure in almost every county, professionalised large-scale relief intake, and gave corporate and public donors a recognisable national channel. The tension between those two readings — indispensable infrastructure versus privileged incumbent — has made the federation a standard case in the academic literature on Chinese philanthropy, cited in studies from Tsinghua, Stanford and other universities examining how China's charitable sector developed.

Leadership and Governance

The federation is governed through a congress of members and a board of directors, which meet to review annual work, approve organisational reform and personnel changes, and accept new members. Its presidents have reflected its civil-affairs roots: Cui Naifu, the founding president, was followed by Fan Baojun and Li Bengong, among others, in leading the organisation through its expansion from a new national body in 1994 into the nationwide system documented by 2013. It reports to the Ministry of Civil Affairs as its supervisory authority, and its headquarters address at Xinlong Building, 33A Erlong Road, Xicheng District, places it physically within Beijing's government quarter, close to the ministry that created it.

The Charity Law Era

The environment around the federation changed fundamentally with China's Charity Law, adopted in 2016. The law created a general legal framework for charitable organisations, public fundraising qualifications, information disclosure and charitable trusts, ending the era in which access to public giving depended mainly on administrative designation. For the federation system, the law was both a vindication — organised charity was now a recognised part of Chinese law — and a challenge, since qualified foundations and other charities could now compete for the public donations that had once flowed by default to designated channels. Studies of the federation in the Charity Law era treat it as an organisation adapting from a near-monopoly of legitimacy toward a leading position within a more plural, legally regulated charitable field.

Place in Chinese Philanthropy

Measured by reach, the China Charity Federation remains one of the defining institutions of modern Chinese giving. It was created in 1994, when organised charity in China was being rehabilitated almost from scratch; within two decades it headed a system of nearly two thousand local associations, tens of thousands of donation posts and thousands of charity supermarkets, and it stood alongside the Red Cross as one of the two great national channels for disaster donations. Its history — state creation, nationwide federation, disaster prominence, scholarly criticism and legal reform — is in miniature the history of organised philanthropy in reform-era China, which is why the federation continues to be studied, debated and relied upon in roughly equal measure.