The moralization of philanthropy in China: NGOs,voluntarism,and the reconfiguration of social responsibility

Abstract

Neo-liberalism shifts social responsibility to individuals. The practice of neo-liberal governmentality in China confirms this worldwide trend. This is evident when government retreats from the responsibilities of providing social welfare for rural migrant workers and leaves them to privately funded philanthropy programmes. However, the Chinese case also presents an anomaly in that the shifting of responsibilities under neo-liberalism results not only in individualization, but also in mutual obligations created by moralization. This article explores philanthropy programmes in migrant settlements in contemporary Beijing within a larger neo-liberal context. It provides an ethnographic account of the moralization process informed by the culturally specific notion of aixin (爱心), or loving heart. I argue that moralization within philanthropy programmes is crucial in reconfiguring the modes of responsibility in post-socialist China. Here, social obligations and consolidation of old hierarchies and social inequalities go hand in hand with social individualization.

Keywords

compassion responsibility philanthropy migrant workers neo-liberalism NGOs

On 19 November 2017, a fire broke out in the Dahongmen (大红门) migrant settlement in Beijing, killing 19 migrant workers. Two days after the fire, the Beijing city government commenced a citywide campaign to evict migrant workers from cheap rental apartments in Beijing. Safety was the reason given for the crackdown. Migrant workers received short notice to leave, and many had to relocate in a matter of days. In freezing conditions, tens of thousands of migrant workers were forced out of Beijing. Through public petitions, several Chinese scholars and activists criticized the mass eviction, calling it a ‘humanitarian crisis’.¹

To date, this mass eviction can be considered to be the strongest example of the Chinese state denying migrant workers a social contract. In other words, many migrant workers have no social safety net for their basic needs. At best, they are ignored and placed in a welfare vacuum; at worst, they are disposable.

The withdrawal of responsibility began long before the mass eviction in Beijing in late 2017. Since the 1980s, large numbers of rural migrants have flocked to the cities to look for jobs. These migrants find themselves in a welfare vacuum – lacking a social contract with the state.² Specifically, people who were born in rural areas are restricted by the household registration system, and their state-sanctioned social welfare does not extend to the cities. Once they venture into the cities, migrant workers, unlike the older urban workers with access to a comprehensive welfare package bequeathed from the socialist era, have no access to social entitlements such as housing, education, or pensions in the cities.³ Also, unlike older urban workers who have developed a sense of entitlement with regard to the provision of social services,⁴ migrant workers seldom pressure the state for such entitlements. Their basic needs are now met either through the market,⁵ or by the third sector, in the form of NGO programmes.

This research focuses on grass-roots voluntary actions in migrant communities in a contemporary Chinese metropolis, where NGOs and volunteers have entered rural migrants’ socio-economic space and reconfigured the mode of responsibility over the past several decades. My major empirical research questions are: (1) in what ways do NGOs and voluntarism shoulder social responsibilities that are evaded by the state in contemporary China?; and (2) how do NGO-supported grass-roots programmes reconfigure migrant workers’ perceptions of social entitlements and social responsibility in contemporary China? My deeper theoretical concern is how the Chinese case furthers our understanding of neo-liberal governmentality with regard to welfare provision and the politics of distribution.

Based on ethnographic investigations, my argument is threefold. Firstly, I argue that even though previous studies have often associated neo-liberal governmentality with individualization, self-responsibility, and communitarianism, Chinese voluntarism has an added dimension of emergent mutual obligation. In these programmes, self-discipline and reciprocity go hand in hand. Secondly, I argue that moralization plays a significant role in the reconfiguration of social responsibility in post-reform China. On the one hand, the state has been promoting the morally charged notion of aixin (爱心, literally meaning ‘loving heart’); on the other hand, NGOs, volunteers, and rural migrants translate the state-sanctioned discourse of aixin into social relations in their everyday practices, and thus bring morality to the forefront of the negotiation of responsibilities in migrant settlements in contemporary China. Thirdly, I argue that the moralization process has a contradictory effect, because it may consolidate the inequalities that it claims to fight against.

I will first introduce the theoretical discussion of neo-liberalism and how it transforms social responsibility in and beyond China. Next, I will introduce the development of voluntarism and NGO programmes in China, including the Chinese state’s effort to promote voluntarism and develop government-organized NGOs (GONGOs)⁶ in the 1980s, and the ground-level efforts to develop NGO programmes in migrant settlements in Beijing over the past two decades. The section that follows will elaborate on the moralization process in which compassion is encouraged, experienced, and distributed when people improvise voluntarism by implementing NGO programmes. I will then explore three aspects of moralization in terms of social relations, middle-class actors, and migrant subjects. Finally, I discuss the reconfiguration of responsibility and present my conclusions.

Neo-liberalism and responsibilization

Much of the recent scholarship on responsibility has suggested that one of the key mechanisms of advanced liberal governance, widely referred to as neo-liberalism, is a reconfiguration of responsibility. As David Harvey points out, neo-liberalism ‘holds that the social good will be enhanced by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market’.⁷ This new arrangement opposes the Keynesian welfare state, and has resulted in states worldwide shedding their social welfare obligations since the late 1970s.⁸ In a similar manner, Peter Evans argues that neo-liberalism is ‘congenitally blind to the need for social protection’.⁹ In a recently edited volume, Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle refer to this process as responsibilization.¹⁰

Responsibilization refers to actors other than the state, including companies, communities, NGOs, and individuals, who have stepped up to shoulder many of the tasks of welfare delivery and social services. One line of research focuses on private and for-profit actors, such as companies, taking control of development, welfare provision, and so forth. Hevina Dashwood and Douglas Eichar have both documented the historical process by which ‘corporate responsibilities’ move to the centre of welfare provision in the context of Western countries.¹¹ Another line of research explores the role of the non-profit sector in reconfiguring responsibility under neoliberalism. For instance, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta use ethnographic analysis to argue that there has been a ‘spatialization of governmentality’¹² in Africa, due to the work of transnational organizations in the third sector.

In a more critical manner, James Petras points out that NGOs pave the way for neo-liberalization by allowing the state to retreat from its responsibilities. He argues that the rising NGO sector, at least in the context of Latin America, has conspired with the imperialist and capitalist agenda.¹³

It is quite clear that China underwent a similar process of retreat after the market reforms of the 1980s. In the socialist era, the state had relied on work units and people’s communes to govern its citizens and to shoulder welfare responsibilities.¹⁴ To be more precise, work units and people’s communes were units of production and reproduction, entitlement and obligations, and economic function and social importance, all at the same time. In work units and people’s communes, rights, entitlement, responsibilities, and welfare were bundled together and linked to the socialist governance. Urban workers had enjoyed their rights and benefits with a sense of entitlement until market reform began. Throughout the socialist era, voluntary organizations were either banned or taken over by the socialist state.¹⁵ As a result, there was no separate ‘society’ beyond work units and people’s communes to shoulder any responsibilities.

Market reforms in China aimed to ‘unbundle’ what had been packed and delivered by the work units and people’s communes, namely, separating the welfare function from its main production function. The launch of reforms in the mid-1980s introduced the market principle and privatization. Communes withered away and most work units removed key provisions such as housing benefits, job security, and other benefits, leaving space for new actors to fill. However, what is unique about the responsibilization process in post-reform China is that the introduction of the market principle has not weakened the state.¹⁶ Rather, the state in the post-socialist era has been ‘governing at a distance’¹⁷ and continues to shape China’s NGO sector and voluntary actions. Even though the state no longer controls social welfare directly through work units and people’s communes, it still holds considerable influence over voluntarism, through administrative, moral, and discursive power. And voluntarism has stepped into the welfare sector in the post-socialist era.

The state has made legal reforms to foster the growth of voluntarism since the 1980s. Over the past two decades, multiple laws pertaining to the voluntary sector have been passed. In 1998 and 1999, the Chinese government passed two laws: the Regulations for Registration and Management of Social Associations and the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Donation and Welfare. These laws allowed more participation in voluntary programmes, and institutionalized philanthropic activities in reform China. In 2004, new legislation allowed private foundations to be registered, and the recent Charity Law, passed in 2016, has allowed additional financial leeway for charitable organizations. In summary, these legislations have carved out a new space for voluntarism in China.

While voluntarism, and later philanthropy, have stepped into welfare responsibility, it does not mean the state has retreated from exercising its power in matters of wealth redistribution, and even private donation and gifting. In a careful examination of Chinese NGOs, Anthony Spires found that the state and NGOs in China can achieve a ‘contingent symbiosis’¹⁸ after a calculation of the risks and benefits. The contingent symbiosis is stronger in service-oriented voluntary actions, because the political framework does not allow NGOs to claim independent space from the state. Following this line of work, this article focuses on NGOs specializing in service provision in Beijing,¹⁹ and explores how NGO programmes and voluntarism are not contingently symbiotic but instead operate according to the homogenous cultural logic of compassion and gift-giving. It is also important to note that, unlike NGO services in the Pearl River Delta, which often offer legal consultation,²⁰ NGO service programmes in Beijing tend to focus solely on social welfare provision.

Moral quality, citizenship, and compassion education

As Nikolas Rose and Filippa Lentzos argue, ‘to govern through responsibility is not just to install a certain form of self-reflection, but to create an ethic – a set of techniques of self-governance’.²¹ Or, from Raymond Williams’s perspective, state power often shapes what he calls ‘the structures of feelings’.²² Morality figures are important in neo-liberal transformation. Scholars have shown that with the expansion of neo-liberalism, morality has become central to the construction of citizenship. Even though morality is often perceived to be at odds with capitalism, it is actually an indispensable tool for neo-liberal transformation. Andrea Muehlebach coined the notion ‘ethical citizenship’ to describe how morality has become crucial in neo-liberal transformation in the context of Italy.²³ In China, the state has been active in cultivating responsible citizens to shoulder more welfare responsibilities.

One of the scholars to recognize the importance of morality in governance in China is Bin Xu. He focused on the ‘politics of compassion’ after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and argued that ‘moral governance’ figures are important in the practice of governance in contemporary China.²⁴ The state’s compassionate moral performances help its effort to respond to social challenges, even though the effectiveness of such performances can be temporary. At the individual level, scholars have noted that the Chinese state has focused on cultivating an active citizenship that revolves around the notion of suzhi (素质), which literally means ‘quality’.²⁵ In other words, ‘the party-state approved and promoted the cultivation of responsible citizens who share the burden of poverty relief with the state’.²⁶ In this context, ‘doing good’ (做好事) has acquired new meanings. As Robert Weller et al. point out, ‘new goodness rests on a conception of selfhood as universal, cosmopolitan, and fundamentally individual, and on an industrialized social organization of philanthropy mediated by the state’.²⁷ In short, the state has cultivated a civil society that shoulders social responsibilities yet does not claim independent space from it.

In the rest of this section, I discuss the state’s effort to develop a compassionate voluntary sector since the 1980s. In particular, I pay special attention to the state-sanctioned discourse of aixin and its relationship with Chinese voluntarism, which reconfigures social responsibilities in China.

Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has initiated multiple campaigns to educate the public about compassion, in connection with its efforts to create home-grown philanthropy in China. As Carolyn Hsu points out, the earliest and most successful programme is a social assistance programme called Project Hope (希望工程),²⁸ which was organized by a social association affiliated with the Communist Youth League. Over the course of 10 years, it raised more than RMB 10 billion and became the model for NGO/GONGO programmes in China. More importantly, with the help of state media, Project Hope received public attention and educated the Chinese public about the meaning of compassion.

Central to the government campaign of compassion education is the notion of aixin. Aixin has its roots in Buddhism, and it became popular in Chinese public discourse in the late 1980s. Perceived as a moral quality within a person, aixin functions as a major source of justification for voluntary programmes. In turn it is substantiated by NGO/GONGO-mediated good deeds. In NGO programmes, aixin can be materialized by cash donations, services, and other good deeds. In everyday language, aixin can be remembered, passed down, betrayed, or exchanged with gratitude. With compassion and altruism placed at the centre, aixin discourse is used to explain why people do good for their fellow citizens.

In 2002, CCTV, the Chinese government’s TV channel, began an annual programme called ‘Top Ten People Whose Deeds Move China Emotionally’ (感动中国十大人物). It praised compassionate good deeds and encouraged the Chinese public to be compassionate towards those in need. Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs began an annual programme called the ‘China Charity Award’ (中华慈善奖) to praise compassionate and altruistic individuals and organizations. Winners of the award were given the title of ‘Most Caring Individual Donor’ (最具爱心捐赠个人) or ‘Most Caring Corporate Donor’ (最具爱心捐赠企业).

At first glance, aixin is reminiscent of the virtue of self-sacrifice of the socialist era; however, there are several important differences. In the past, communist ideology was wary of unconditional, universal love, as exemplified by this quote from Lei Feng,²⁹ a model socialist soldier and a household name: ‘Treat your comrades as warm as a spring breeze, and treat your enemy as ruthless as a cold winter flurry’. In other words, the idea of love is subsumed by class politics. In contrast, aixin is a virtue that obscures class difference. Nonetheless, aixin is not a universal humanitarian virtue; in practice, it is a nationalist virtue as it is often justified by notions such as ‘blood is thicker than water’ and ‘we are all family’. This means aixin has boundaries and that the boundaries often overlap with those of the nation state. It is difficult to mobilize Chinese citizens to donate to people of other countries within the aixin framework. Generally speaking, in contemporary China, with the absence of state-sanctioned welfare for migrant workers, aixin is not just a principle for individual morality but also a guide for substituting state-managed social welfare.

NGOs and voluntarism in Beijing’s migrant settlements

Even though there has been no state-sanctioned welfare or social assistance available to migrant workers since their influx into China’s metropolitan areas, the state-led programmes of compassion education for the public have prepared moral citizens to take responsibilities. As a response to the rupture in welfare provision in recent years, many non-profit organizations have implemented philanthropy programmes and are providing basic social services to migrant workers.

NGO programmes took root in migrant communities in Beijing in the late 1990s. In the beginning, most voluntary activities were carried out by student organizations affiliated with universities and colleges. Because migrant children were excluded from the public education system in their adopted cities,³⁰ they relied on migrant schools for childcare and education. Most of these schools for migrant children were poorly equipped and understaffed. They welcomed volunteers to enhance their services to migrant children. One of the first student organizations to enter the migrant communities was ‘Sons of Peasants’ (农民之子) from Beijing Normal University. They organized college students to provide services such as tutoring and English language instruction in schools for migrant children. Even though most of these volunteers were untrained and their programmes were simple, they often worked as substitute teachers at the migrant schools.

In 2003, two incidents reshaped the public discourse on migrant workers in China. At the beginning of the year, Sun Zhigang, a college student, was stopped by police. Because he did not have his ID with him, Sun was mistaken for a migrant worker. He was arrested and beaten to death in police custody. His death stirred public debate on social exclusion and discrimination against migrant workers. Later that year, the then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao personally demanded back pay on behalf of a migrant family, making headlines across the Chinese media. For the first time, migrant workers were regarded as a ‘vulnerable group’ in the media and public discourse, with the underlying message exposing the predicament of migrant workers.

After these two incidents, more volunteers and NGOs entered migrant communities and began establishing programmes there. Unlike student organizations, which only had sporadic tutoring programmes, NGOs were able to set up semi-permanent centres and develop diverse programmes targeting different social groups in the communities. As well as tutoring programmes, they also offered after-school programmes and computer training for children. Moreover, because many NGOs set up offices and centres in migrant communities, they cultivated relationships with local residents.³¹

The villages and fieldwork in this study

I conducted 18 months of fieldwork in migrant settlements in Beijing, from May 2013 to December 2014. These migrant settlements had originally been rural villages on the outskirts of Beijing. As rural migrants migrated to the city, they realized they could not afford urban housing. They rented rooms in these rural villages to reduce their living expenses.³² Gradually, local villagers quit agricultural production and started building low-cost housing compounds on their own housing plots to house migrant workers. Eventually, rural migrants outnumbered local villagers by factors as high as 40 to one. Rural migrants living in these villages face different living arrangements than those who live in the ‘dormitory regime’, which scholars have previously documented.³³ Most of the rural migrants in my study had intentionally chosen to stay away from factory dorms when they had settled in Beijing. This was because they had migrated as family units and needed private space where they could live together as a family.

During my fieldwork, I visited more than 20 migrant settlements in Beijing and became acquainted with eight NGOs operating in migrant settlements. Most of my fieldwork took place in three migrant settlements: North Village, Little Pass Village, and Spring Village.³⁴ These villages are on the outskirts of Beijing, away from the city centre. My research methods included both structured and unstructured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation.

North Village was previously four separate villages. Due to the influx of migrants over the past two decades, the four villages sprawled and merged into one. As one of the biggest migrant communities in Beijing in 2014, North Village accommodated more than 60,000 rural migrants. The NGO working in North Village was called Grass-roots Support. This NGO was originally created and funded by a group of Chinese Americans. Grass-roots Support started their rural China education programme in 1996. In 2006, they expanded their programmes to migrant worker settlements and set up a community centre in North Village. Other than the standard after-school tutoring, they also offered computer classes, film screenings, and other cultural enhancement programmes.

Spring Village was further from the city centre and close to an industrial zone outside the Fifth Ring Highway. With only around 1000 local villagers, Spring Village was able to host a rural migrant population 40 times the size of its local population. In 2007, an NGO called Peasants Family established its migrant youth activity centre in Spring Village. It was founded by a group of idealistic college students who had been concerned by the hardship of migrant families. Their strongest programme was the after-school programme. In addition to educating migrant children, Peasants Family emphasized art education and community-building in recent years. They offered a yoga programme, a movie night, and a music festival to migrant workers in Spring Village.

Little Pass Village was scheduled to be demolished for urban redevelopment in 2011. However, due to unresolved disputes about compensation, the village was still only half-demolished when I lived there in 2014. About 3000 migrant workers, mostly members of low-income families, still resided in the village. In 2013, the NGO New Citizen Plan started their programmes in Little Pass Village. Even though two other NGOs had previously provided services here, New Citizen Plan was newer, and it was the only one still active in the community after demolition began in 2011. Since Little Pass Village accommodated many migrant workers with financial difficulties, NGOs also offered financial aid and free health check-ups for impoverished migrant families, in addition to their after-school programmes and teacher training.

The moralization of NGO programmes

During my fieldwork, I worked as a volunteer, a consultant, a project coordinator, and sometimes as an interpreter for various NGOs working in migrant communities in Beijing. During this time, I developed professional and personal relationships with employees and volunteers of the three NGOs just mentioned. I was most impressed by the constant theme of aixin prevalent in their service programmes. Even though the NGOs I worked with had different visions, missions, and ways of talking, when they engaged with migrant communities they shared the state-sanctioned discourse on aixin. However, this shared recognition did not guarantee that everyone in the organization embraced this notion, and other discourses circulated in everyday practice. However, it did mean that aixin as a state-sanctioned discourse often gave NGO programmes meaning, validity, and popularity. Furthermore, because of the discursive power of aixin, NGO programmes were often moralized. Previous scholarship has pointed out that welfare provision led by Chinese NGOs can be understood as a particular type of ‘moral economy’ that often promotes compassionate individuals instead of a just society.³⁵ Ying Xu and Ngan-Pun Ngai stress that Chinese NGOs often rely on ‘moral resources’ to buttress their development.³⁶ However, little attention is given to how, at the grass-roots level, different participants and stakeholders translate moral resources into power, subjectivities, and new sets of social relations. In the following sections, I will discuss the three components of the moralization process – the moralization of social relations, the moralization of middle-class actors, and the moralization of migrant worker subjects.

The moralization of social relations

From the perspective of political economy, NGO programmes are part of what James Ferguson calls ‘distributive politics’,³⁷ because these programmes often provide people with access to materials, services, and welfare which they otherwise would not have access to within the state system. In migrant communities, since the sense of entitlement to welfare provided by the state is virtually non-existent, NGO programmes driven by voluntarism carry meanings that transcend the redistribution of wealth. They imply a creation of social bonds between those who give and those who receive. More specifically, people are concerned about their effort to communicate moralized virtues in order to establish a moralized relationship in the name of aixin.

For example, in 2014, New Citizen Plan started a financial aid programme to support students from low-income families in Little Pass Village. The scholarship covered tuition and a stipend for up to three years. Shortly after the disbursement of financial aid, a meeting themed ‘the heart of gratitude’ (感恩的心) was held in Little Pass Village, in which all recipients of this financial aid were required to participate.

A teacher called Xiao Bai organized this meeting. It began with two student performances. A group of girls sang a song called ‘The Heart of Gratitude’. Then, five boys performed a song called ‘The Devotion of Love’, which included these lines in its lyrics: ‘If everybody would devote a bit of their love, the world will turn into a better place’. Shortly after the performances, Xiao Bai encouraged the students to reflect on the financial support they had received. After a few remarks, Xiao Bai delivered a speech with the core message: ‘Whenever you receive aixin from others, you should express your heartfelt gratitude; and the best way to express your gratitude is to work harder and study harder. And whenever you have the chance in the future, you should pass down the aixin to other people in need.’ At the end of the lecture, Xiao Bai assigned the students the task of writing a thank-you letter expressing their gratitude.

Two days after the meeting, I met Xiao Bai in her office. She told me that a fifth grader named Tingting had written a touching thank-you letter. Proudly, she showed me the letter, which read:

My father works in a small factory in Little Pass Village and my mother had just gotten sick. I always felt that I was an unlucky kid until I learned that there are so many good-hearted people who want me to learn and thrive. I thank all the good-hearted people for providing support and money for my education. When I grow up, I will repay you … I will also help others, just like you.³⁸

Even though education is officially recognized as a basic right, in the above case, access to basic education was framed as anything but a basic right. When Tingting accepted this financial aid, access to education had been conceptualized as a gift from good-hearted people. Once this give-and-take relationship is established, the only reasonable and acceptable action, as a decent human being, is to express gratitude. It is not to reflect or challenge the arrangements that have placed them in a disadvantaged position in the first place.

Anthropologists have written about gifting for many decades. Marcel Mauss correctly points out that gifting entails a reciprocal relationship that is both moral and obligatory.³⁹ Annette Weiner pushes Mauss’s analysis further and points out that gifting can produce hierarchical relationships in the process of what she calls ‘keeping while giving’.⁴⁰ Aixin and gratitude are reciprocal, and they resemble the mechanism described by Weiner. In the case documented above, writing a thank-you letter is not optional. It is crucial to ensure that both parties confirm their relationship. Once the relationship between volunteers, NGO workers, and rural migrants has been moralized, unequal social relations are performed, confirmed, reproduced, and legitimized.

The moralization of middle-class actors

In contemporary China, the middle-class⁴¹ experience is often associated with transforming one’s subjectivity through doing good. For instance, based on data collected from a state-run orphanage, Qian Linliang argues that ‘philanthropic tourism’ plays an important role in the production of middle-class identity in China.⁴² The situation in migrant settlements is similar. Middle-class actors also desire a meaningful experience that involves acquiring the virtue of aixin. However, aixin cannot be easily acquired. It must be achieved through self-cultivation, self-discipline, and even self-sacrifice.

One expression that emerges when people describe their experiences of doing voluntary work is ‘eating bitterness’ (吃苦), which is a term roughly equivalent to enduring hardship. Volunteers and NGO workers imply that it is through eating bitterness that the virtue of aixin is manifested to themselves and to others. Eating bitterness was a notion widely used in Mao’s time. In political campaigns initiated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the Sent-down Youth Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, eating bitterness was used to describe how enduring hardship could purify and transform one into a ‘socialist new man’.⁴³ In recent years, scholars have observed the trend that eating bitterness has come to be considered a key ‘moral quality’⁴⁴ in education for children. In voluntarism, eating bitterness is often perceived as the necessary process through which middle-class actors acquire aixin.

During my stay in Little Pass Village, there was an education programme that provided tutoring services for migrant children. The programme was staffed by students from the Affiliated High School of Peking University, one of the most prestigious high schools in China. Shasha was 16 years old when she volunteered for New Citizen Plan in 2013. Every weekend in 2013, she visited Little Pass Village to teach English and help migrant children with their homework. Shasha’s parents had been looking for volunteering opportunities for their daughter for years. They wanted her to have some volunteer experience to put on the cover letter when Shasha applied to US universities the following year. They also expected Shasha to eat bitterness so that she would be more grateful for what she already had. Shasha was a devoted volunteer. She was patient with the students and was always willing to help. During her stay in Little Pass Village, Shasha learned to cook simple meals for herself in the office and often walked 40 to 60 minutes to visit migrant children’s families. Each time, her parents would park their Audi outside the migrant centre and wait for her for about two hours. Towards the end of her volunteering experience, Shasha said, ‘I came here to eat bitterness. Even though I grew up in the city, I never knew about this miserable place. Now I appreciate what I have, and I think this experience will transform me into a better person.’⁴⁵

In addition to volunteers, NGO workers also rely on the notion of eating bitterness to make sense of the physical discomfort of their work. In many cases, physical discomfort is not something they consciously avoid. They embrace discomfort as a way of transforming themselves into better people. Peipei was a college graduate who joined Grass-roots Support in 2012. After his graduation, he worked as a full-time employee in a migrant activity centre in North Village. This migrant centre, a 300-square-foot facility, was more than a place of employment to him. It also doubled as a dorm where he lived. Grass-roots Support considered this housing arrangement as a benefit for Peipei, because renting a house in the village would have cost Peipei 40 per cent of his salary. However, living in a migrant settlement was not easy for Peipei. As in any other rental house in a Beijing migrant settlement, the heating in winter was insufficient. More often than not, the heating system would stop working in the middle of the night. It was often too cold for Peipei to fall asleep. Whenever the heating system stopped working, Peipei would go outside for a run in the middle of the night, just to keep himself warm. When Peipei told me about his late-night warming-up runs, I suggested he talk to the landlord and have the heating system fixed. Peipei smiled, politely noting that I was mistaken about the situation:

As long as the pipes are not freezing or below zero centigrade, the landlord would consider the heater to be working properly. That is the standard here, and people are used to it already. When I chose to work in an NGO, I was fully prepared to eat bitterness. Otherwise, why would I work here? I could have found another job that makes easy money. I want to test and improve myself.

For Peipei, the physical discomfort was a reminder of who he was and who he wanted to become. It was through enduring physical discomfort that he would transform himself into a moral person and create meaning for himself.

In many other cases, eating bitterness also entails self-sacrifice, or revoking personal pleasure for the sake of the greater good. In 2012, Li Jun was a PhD candidate in physics at one of China’s elite research institutes when he decided to give up his academic career to become a full-time NGO worker at New Citizen Plan. All his family members and friends thought he was sacrificing too much and opposed his decision. However, Li Jun persisted. On one occasion, Li Jun and I had dinner together and discussed his choice to work in the NGO. He told me it was not a ‘choice’:

I was a volunteer once. I couldn’t understand how some people would ignore the fact that so many migrant children are not having nine years of compulsory education and are about to drop out of school because they don’t have local household registration. I felt this burden inside me, and I had to do something. It was something I had to do. It was not a choice. But I am glad I changed my career path. I guess this is who I am.⁴⁶

For Li Jun, the burden he had felt when he met migrant children helped him make sense of his life. However, for his family members and many others, what Li Jun would otherwise have had and the path he never took was framed as a ‘loss’ and self-sacrifice. That is what makes Li Jun a person of aixin in the eyes of many.

The moralization of migrant worker subjects

In addition to establishing moralized social relations and serving as a springboard for self-cultivation, NGO service programmes are also dedicated to communicating moralized values in order to cultivate migrant worker subjects. Programmes for the cultivation of migrants’ character take different forms and have varying focuses. What these programmes share in common is that they often place morality at the centre. In programmes for environmental protection, parenting training, and food safety education, for example, it is common for NGOs to preach their morals to migrant workers and to consider this a higher goal than simply handing out money or resources.

Lin, a man in his thirties, was the director of Peasant Family. Since 2009, he had become drawn to Buddhism and begun to ponder the human vis-a-vis nature relationship. As a result, Peasant Family, as an organization, emphasized environmental protection and developed sustainable development programmes in migrant communities. In 2012, a long-term programme called ‘Organic Meal’ (绿色餐桌) first took place in the migrant youth centre in Spring Village. The programme was aimed at educating migrant workers about ‘ethical consumption’ and transforming them into ‘responsible citizens’ in their everyday food consumption.

When I was in Spring Village, the Organic Meal programme had been going on for almost two years. Local migrant workers could gather at the migrant youth centre once a week to socialize. Once a month, Peasant Family would organize a more formal event, such as a lecture or workshop. In October 2014, Peasant Family invited a college professor to discuss ‘ethical consumption’ with migrant families. More than 20 migrant workers attended the event. During the 30-minute lecture, the professor discussed the slow food movement, the organic movement, and community-supported agriculture in Italy, China, and Brazil. He then pointed out that organic food is generally more nutritious than non-organic food, and that consumers should consume organic food to be healthier. In the end, he stressed that it is citizens’ responsibility to consume organic products because the production process of organic food is more environmentally friendly than that of non-organic products. By consuming these products, the migrant workers were told, we decrease the agricultural pollution caused by pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

In the Q & A section, a migrant stood up and made a short comment:

I found your lecture very interesting because I am also very concerned about the food my family members and I consume every day. I have a 2-year-old son. We feed him formula and we are unsure if the formula is reliable after we saw the news about poisonous formula milk. The news also reported on gutter oil and bleached rice, which is very scary. We want to have food products that are affordable and safe.

Several migrants nodded upon hearing this comment. However, the migrant’s comment did not line up with the professor’s lecture. For rural migrants, their major concern is food safety, because they are the ones most likely to consume inferior products from the informal market. Mass-produced food is not something they want to boycott, but rather something that is out of reach due to their low incomes. However, in the eyes of Lin and the college professor, everyone has to shoulder responsibility in their everyday consumption and boycott food mass-produced by transnational food corporations and agribusiness; rural migrants are no exception. They believe values such as moral consumption should be extended to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds.

There is frequent misunderstanding about the formation of moral character, and different NGOs focus on a variety of means of cultivating morality. In 2013, New Citizen Plan received a small grant to implement a one-off programme in Little Pass Village. After a brief discussion between core NGO members, they decided to set up a cultural programme with the goal to transform rural migrants into ‘qualified parents’. To do this, the programme distributed free movie tickets to migrant families in Little Pass Village so that they could have ‘parent-child quality time’ (亲子时光). Parent-child quality time had become a popular child-rearing practice among Chinese middle-class parents in recent years. The suggestion was that busy parents should take some time off work and spend it with their children, because companionship is the key to child-rearing.

Lao Li was a parent of one of the families that received free tickets for Transformers, an American movie directed by Steven Spielberg. He had planned to watch the movie with his two daughters when he received the tickets. However, they finally decided not to go to the cinema since it was about an hour’s bus ride away from their village, and both Lao Li and his wife had to get up at 5 a.m. for work. When New Citizen Plan learned that Lao Li and five other families had wasted the movie tickets, the volunteers and NGO workers had a discussion about ‘why they can’t be responsible parents’.

The goal of cultivating migrants’ character was even more obvious and direct in programmes for migrant children. Migrant children are often considered more innocent and easier to change through education. The drive to prepare migrant children for a brighter future through moral education was often apparent. ‘Money is not just money. It is aixin. With this gift, please include the most important things – ethical + moral education’. A major donor left this note after donating RMB 10,000⁴⁷ to Development Support. Overall, migrant subjects in service programmes were under careful scrutiny. Transforming migrant personalities, character, consciousness, and even needs are the keys to these service programmes.

Morality and the reconfiguration of responsibility

In the cases discussed, the moralization of NGO programmes is prevalent in migrant settlements. The question remains: how do we evaluate the moralization process in voluntary activities? Nikolas Rose argued that in the Western context, before the rise of the welfare state there was no such thing as ‘society’, or the social.⁴⁸ All social problems related to poverty and crime were conceptualized as moral problems within the domain of the family and the individual. The rise of the welfare state changed perceptions about social entitlements because it refused to reduce social problems to either morality or the market. In other words, in the welfare state system, a free education or a pension is neither the price of a commodity, nor a gift. It is a social intervention and an expression of social solidarity.

Currently in China’s welfare vacuum, we first see the return of philanthropy. And with it, we see the return of the moralization of social problems. Due to this moralization of social problems, inequality is no longer perceived as a social problem, but a burden, or a responsibility mapped onto individuals. Middle-class citizens are compelled to offer their compassion. The disadvantaged groups are compelled to accept the compassion, rather than demanding their rights or acting collectively. Gradually, the major actors that shoulder responsibility have changed from the state to families and individuals.

However, it would be premature to conclude that neo-liberalization in China is merely about the promotion of self-responsibility, self-cultivation or individualism. Of course, we see all these elements in my ethnographic findings. Yet, the politics of responsibility in China cannot be summarized as a pure form of individualism. In fact, the newly emerged neo-liberal configuration in China can be contrasted to that of Latin America, and the developed West. In Latin America and the West, the state withdraws its responsibility and encourages individual self-reliance, and sometimes community responsibility, for welfare provision. In China, individual responsibilities are different for different individuals; for those from the middle class, the responsibility is to have compassion, while for migrant labourers, the responsibility is to have gratitude. Other than the promotion of self-responsibility, there is also the promotion of social obligations, care for others, and interdependence between individuals. However, these relationships remain individualistic and moral, never attaining the significance of distributive justice. Moreover, these individual responsibilities and relations are sanctioned by the state, in the forms of official campaigns and propaganda.

Concluding remarks

This research explores the reconfiguration of responsibility in contemporary China within the larger context of neo-liberalization. Focusing on the parallel modes of responsibility in Chinese migrant communities, I first introduced the migrant workers and the welfare vacuum they inhabit. I also discussed how voluntary programmes have developed over the past several decades to shoulder part of the welfare responsibility. I then discussed my fieldwork in migrant settlements in Beijing from 2013 to 2014. I demonstrated how NGO programmes have been moralized in contemporary China through the state-sanctioned discourse of aixin. Due to this moralization process, welfare provisions are conceptualized as gifts and good deeds in voluntary programmes. Individuals and families have shouldered the responsibility. However, this does not mean that individualism and self-responsibilization are the only processes relevant to the reconfiguration of responsibility in China. Reciprocity, indebtedness, and mutual care are also important.

The moralization of social services is not unique to China. In recent years, anthropologists such as Erica Bornstein and Andrea Muehlebach have discussed how neo-liberalism has given rise to ethical citizenship and moral neo-liberalism in India and Italy.⁴⁹ From my perspective, the moralization of social services poses a moral dilemma for those living in the age of neo-liberalism: for middle-class people, the moralization resulted from the fact that their voluntarism may not help to build a more just society. The more one shoulders the responsibilities, the more likely a regime of sustained inequality is reproduced. For rural migrants, the more they accept compassion from good-hearted people, the less likely it is that they will demand social entitlements from the state. The more they accept social services based on reciprocity, the more they become disposable to the state. Further philanthropic intervention is complicit with humanitarian disaster. This partially explains why there was no resistance during the mass eviction in Beijing in the cold winter of 2017. Migrant workers do not feel entitled to the spaces they inhabit. To solve this dilemma, this morally charged discourse should be discarded and a rights-based discourse instituted to find ways to remake the perception of social responsibilities.

Footnotes

Notes

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