Crowdfunding as a Practice of Cultural Citizenship in China: A Case Study of Four NGOs

Introduction

With the spectacular growth of social media, there has been a profound change in Chinese society. In May 2016, a group of graduate students in Beijing successfully raised 222,945 RMB for Zananchu, a youth space located in Wudaokou. ¹ The funds were raised and collected through a popular crowdfunding platform called Zhongchou (a word that roughly translates to crowdfunding) in 30 days through a proposal which detailed the history and mission of the youth space. Zananchu is not the first youth space that utilized crowdfunding to accumulate its operational expenses. In late 2012, the 706 Youth Space raised more than 100,000 RMB on Dreamore, the first crowdfunding platform in China, and at the present time, the space is still in development.

These cases provide a glimpse into the typical operations of non-profit crowdfunding projects in China. To encourage donations, funders of crowdfunding projects receive souvenirs or are given priority access to events or activities held in the youth space. In China, the youth spaces usually offer opportunities for young people to gather together, hold talks and communicate their ideas with each other. Events that cover documentaries, books or rights protections are also arranged in the youth space. Most of the participants in such activities are college students and intellectuals. Faced with skyrocketing rent, however, it is hard for such physical cultural spaces to persist in major cities. Fortunately, through crowdfunding, the initiators of youth spaces are able to find some solutions to their financial problems by turning to the crowd.

Before the existence of physical youth spaces, such as 706 Youth Space and Zananchu, virtual communities, such as Tianya BBS, QQ of Tencent and Blog of Sina played remarkable roles in citizens’ public communication in China. Users were relatively free to share their opinions and discuss hot topic issues through online platforms. In recent years, social media sites, such as Flickr, Instagram and WeChat have encouraged users’ behaviour of sharing information about themselves, their lives and political and social views in their online communities. In fact, regardless of whether the communities are virtual or physical, participants are exercising their rights of communication and expression while acting as members of a cohesive community. Relying on digital and physical spaces provided by the communities, citizens in China are engaging themselves in many forms of civic participation, thus creating new cultural trends in society. This growing dual citizenship, where members move fluidly between virtual and physical borders, is the central motivation for investigating citizenship from a cultural perspective.

Distinct from the political right to vote or the economic right to work and prosper, the cultural opportunity to participate in social affairs—to both understand and to voice an opinion—are the main concerns of cultural citizenship (Goode, 2010; Miller, 2006). So far, the studies on citizenship in China tend to focus on the protection of the rights of disenfranchised groups (Fong & Murphy, 2006) or simply pay attention to the condition of political citizenship (such as the right of election and opposition) while ignore the changing cultural characteristics of Chinese society. Moreover, although some scholars have paid attention to the practices of citizenship education in China under the influence of globalization (Law, 2011), few analyses on people’s participatory cultures have been conducted. As a result, it will be meaningful to investigate the lively and dynamic practices of Chinese citizenship from a cultural perspective, and explore how these practices can contribute to the development of a civil society in China.

The crowdfunding activities established by social groups, such as Zananchu and 706 Youth Space are primarily aimed at raising the necessary money online from a group of like-minded people who support the cause. Harnessed by the immense power of social networking and communities, there are also crowdfunding projects that target social problems. During the process of fundraising, not only is the monetary goal of funding a project achieved but also the rights of communication and participation— the core concepts of cultural citizenship—are also given an open space to be performed.

This article will analyze crowdfunding as a practice of cultural citizenship by investigating the crowdfunding activities initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China. First, this article will take a theoretical perspective in tracking the conceptual development of cultural citizenship, which will underscore the significance of social media in performing cultural citizenship. Next, the literature on crowdfunding will be reviewed, and a new perspective of studying crowdfunding from the cultural dimension will be stressed. After putting forward our research questions, this article will discuss a range of crowdfunding activities engaged by NGOs on the basis of non-participant observation and in-depth interviews in order to illustrate how citizens exercise their rights of communication, expression and civic participation, which are the elements of cultural citizenship. To conclude, the cultural meaning of non-profit crowdfunding to Chinese civil society and youth culture will be evaluated.

Cultural Citizenship in the Network Society

Cultural citizenship is significant in that it correlates with the development of the communications-based network society (Stevenson, 2003, p. 19). We are now witnessing an extension of the political and social dimensions to a cultural dimension of citizenship as a result of the profound economic transformation. Distinct from the industrial society which was structured around ‘largescale production organizations and extremely hierarchical state’ (Castells, 2004, p. 5), a network society is constituted by networks that cooperate or compete with each other (Castells, 2004, p. 4). As innovative technologies offer new opportunities for social connectivity (Goode, 2010, p. 528), individuals currently are more capable of sharing their resources and coordinating with those in their networks due to the low cost of communication. Moreover, advanced Internet-based technologies free individuals from the constraints of formal relations in stable organizations, and provide opportunities for them to ‘act in response to all their motivation’ (Benkler, 2006, p. 355). By breaking the controlled roles of employees and consumers in the industrial economy, the degree of individuals’ autonomy in the network society has been greatly increased. In other words, in the network society, the popularization of information and communication technologies ‘has raised people’s expectations for having rights to communicate and participate in virtual and real worlds’ (Law, 2011, pp. 85–86). The new informational economy has also increased the importance of knowledge and culture in the global network society (Stevenson, 2003, p. 16), offering new opportunities for the public to exercise their rights. Due to the proliferation of new communication media, citizenship has gone beyond the boundaries of political or economic rights, and shifted toward emphasizing ‘the right to propagate a cultural identity or lifestyle’ (Stevenson, 2003, p. 7). Therefore, this article will concentrate on the trajectories of cultural rights and their impacts on the cultural identity of citizens in China.

This article has chosen non-profit crowdfunding to discuss the practices of cultural citizenship due to the unique context of civil society in China. The Chinese notion of civil society generally refers to the activities of individual social organizations, including non-profit and NGOs (Law, 2011, p. 84). Since the 1970s, when social organizations became involved in public affairs, they have been increasingly co-opted and administrated by the government. During this time, the Chinese government gradually loosened its social control, and left some space for NGOs to provide services to the public. Such changes in the state attitude finally prompted a significant increase in registered social organizations from 2000 to 2008 (Law, 2011, p. 85).

Nowadays, the increase in communication technologies has expanded the public space for civic activities, which enable Chinese Internet users to ‘become new powerful civic forces’ (Law, 2011, p. 86). People have wider access to online social networks to express their views about social issues and call for public action. Crowdfunding has undeniably become one of the more popular activities conducted through online platforms and an important manifestation of cultural citizenship in China.

Crowdfunding as a Social Business

Crowdfunding refers to a method of fundraising from a group of generally non-affiliated supporters and giving gifts or other incentives to the donors in return for backing a project. According to Griffin (2013), there are four categories of crowdfunding: donation-based crowdfunding, reward-based crowdfunding, lending-based crowdfunding and equity-based crowdfunding. In regard to non-profit crowdfunding, this article refers to the donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding projects put forward by non-profit social organizations or NGOs. ² There are three types of players involved in the crowdfunding process: the creators who propose ideas and plans, the crowd who supports these ideas financially, and the platforms which offer the service of crowdfunding. In most crowdfunding platforms, creators will establish funding hierarchies that designate various gift donors receive to incentivize higher donations and participation. If the project reaches the financial goal, the platforms can get a small cut from the funding in return for allowing the creators to leverage the technology and audience of the platform.

Crowdfunding has been studied from various perspectives in recent years, and many scholars regard it as a new social business based on the Internet. Booth (2015) defines the process of crowdfunding as ‘a hybrid system of production and consumption’ (p. 156). In this sense, funders are a crowd of consumers who help to finance new projects of producers (Ward & Ramachandran, 2010). Instead of being separated from the production, the crowds are able to integrate themselves into the process through the many social networks to which they belong. As Dresner (2014) points out, ‘the rise of the social network is vital to the success of crowdfunding activities as it not only provides the opportunity for people to support the projects, but also enables the mobilization of a wider engagement into the crowdfunding campaigns’ (p. 10). Through engaging themselves in crowdfunding activities, users in different networks are able to act as consumers of the same product. To make a crowdfunding project successful, social networks, which are built through interactive practices, such as sharing photos, sending instant messages or making short videos, are indispensable (Moisseyev, 2013). Interactions between producers, technology and consumers create a unique community culture (Booth, 2015). After interviewing 47 entrepreneurs who used crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects, some scholars concluded that creators relied on the community’s efforts to overcome difficulties of getting advice, designing one’s campaign, getting feedback and publicity (Hui, Greenberg & Gerber, 2014). Moreover, supporters are not only motivated to collect rewards, but also to help others, be part of a community, and support causes in which they believe strongly.

Previous scholars have paid attention to some more detailed aspects of successful crowdfunding projects. Through investigating the phrases and variables commonly used in the storytelling texts by the creators of Kickstarter, Mitra and Gilbert (2014) indicate that language plays a vital role in the success of funding a project. More specifically, a set of persuasive phrases which exhibit the principles of reciprocity, scarcity, linking, social proof, social identity and authority have shown to be efficient in motivating potential funders to support the campaigns.

In the existing research on crowdfunding, few studies have called attention to the differences between profit-oriented and problem-solving crowdfunding projects. Yet, in an empirical analysis of individual crowdfunding practices, some scholars find that crowdfunding initiated by non-profit organizations tend to be more successful than other organizational forms in achieving their fundraising targets (Belleflamme, Lambert & Schwienbacher, 2013).

Currently, non-profit crowdfunding has been developing rapidly as more and more NGOs choose crowdfunding to be one of the main sources of their funds. Considering the specificity of China’s legal policies, social organizations or NGOs are not allowed to raise money from the public unless they obtain permission from the government (SWChina, 2016). Before the growing popularity of crowdfunding in China, most NGOs chose to affiliate themselves with governmental departments to raise money or apply for funding from foundations as they were not permitted to accept donations directly from the public (Ifeng, 2011). Under this restriction, it was difficult for NGOs to build direct relationships with the public as NGOs were required to work with the government or foundation regulators, not their supporters.

The Internet has provided NGOs with more opportunities to reach out to the public, and the role of crowdfunding is even more significant as it has provided indispensable platforms for NGOs to raise money online as a means to avoid the strict limitations of donation activities. However, scholars in China tend to define crowdfunding simply as a financing model, without acknowledging the process of collaborative production and its cultural dimension. Most studies of crowdfunding in China focus on the business mode (e.g., Meng, Zhang & Dong, 2014). For example, some scholars investigate the relationship between social capital and the success rate of crowdfunding projects by analyzing the creators’ information on social networking platforms (Zeng & Gan, 2014). In our view, Chinese NGOs have played a central role in creating new spaces for the citizens to exercise their cultural rights, such as rights of communication, expression and civic participation by putting forward various non-profit crowdfunding projects. Limitations in the previous research offer us an opportunity to explore how non-profit organizations engage with crowdfunding activities and their impacts on the civic culture of China.

Methodology

Four NGOs experienced in crowdfunding were selected as case studies in this article. Organizers and staff of the four crowdfunding NGOs in China were interviewed during February 2016. Two of the NGOs had successfully completed more than five crowdfunding projects through the end of 2015. Tianjin Green Collar, an NGO aimed at protecting the environment, initiated more than 10 crowdfunding projects on a variety of platforms since 2014. Nine of the projects were launched on Lejuan, a subset of Tencent Company to accumulate funds for alleviating the water and air pollution in particular areas in China. Welcomed by opinion leaders and non-governmental sectors, Lejuan’s public influence is increased primarily by its affiliation with the Internet company Tencent, which is one of the leading Internet platforms in China and the provider of popular online services, such as QQ, WeChat and Tenpay. Based on Weibo, one of the most popular social media websites in China, Wei Gongyi also allows citizens to fund projects initiated by NGOs. This NGO also launched four projects on Wei Gongyi in the past 2 years. Keli is an NGO located in Guangzhou that provides communication services for groups who contribute to non-profit projects in China. It raised money on Lejuan and China’s first crowdfunding website Dreamore in 2015 to support the participants of its programmes. The Young Directors Project is one of Keli’s core programmes. As the two organizations are experienced in conducting successful crowdfunding activities, their interviews are the main sources for this research.

Compared to Tianjin Green Collar and Keli, the other two NGOs interviewed for this study are not as experienced in crowdfunding, as at the time of their interviews, they had only successfully completed one or two projects. Mantianxing has launched crowdfunding projects on Zhongchou and Lejuan of Tencent to seek sponsors for books and writing materials for its libraries across the Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces. Their latest project is to fund the construction of libraries. The Library of Qingyijiang River was built by the NGO Wu Hu Ecology Centre in Anhui Province to set up a comprehensive database on the river, and in January 2016, the Ecology Centre collected 10,000 RMB in less than 1 month to continue the library’s construction.

As crowdfunding in China proliferated at an unprecedented pace, observations and data collection began for the purpose of garnering the information necessary to complete this research. During a 6-month period between September 2015 and February 2016, we closely observed crowdfunding activities online and investigated their fundraising procedures. We combined the methodology of in-depth interviews with non-participant observation to study successful crowdfunding cases initiated by NGOs.

In terms of the interview component of this study, snowball sampling was applied to identify the participants for interviews. The subjects for our interviews were established through two sources, both of which were social connections to an author of this study who had previously completed volunteer work in a Chinese NGO. Through these social connections, the authors were introduced to two experienced crowdfunding campaigners on WeChat, as well as staff members at Tianjin Green Collar, Mantianxing, Keli and Wu Hu Ecology Centre to carry out the interviews. Additionally, unstructured interviews were conducted regarding the topics of how to design and implement non-profit crowdfunding projects.

Emerging Environmental Identity: Recovering Rights of Communication and Expression

According to our investigation, non-profit crowdfunding projects play an increasingly important role in articulating citizenship rights. There has been a significant increase in crowdfunding websites since 2014. Displaying a range of projects on their web pages, crowdfunding platforms enable campaigners to communicate their ideas with the public. Through the end of 2015, there were more than 360 crowdfunding platforms with distinct features and styles. Zhongchou is one of the most influential crowdfunding websites in China. It helps non-profit social groups in China to carry out projects with dedicated web pages to promote the funding and professional support. As the first crowdfunding platform in China, Dreamore even created a mobile app in May 2015. It has encouraged youngsters to initiate projects with relatively smaller goals, such as short-distance field trips. Meanwhile, Lejuan and Wei Gongyi are two crowdfunding platforms that have become increasingly influential since their introduction into the market. As the government tightly controls the spread of information regarding public issues, these platforms have created a space for the public to learn about and demonstrate their concerns about social problems.

Facilitated by Internet communication, the creators of non-profit crowdfunding programmes rely very much on storytelling to publicize their causes. The storytelling of the projects includes three crucial components. First, it is necessary to introduce and clearly articulate the problems that the project is going to solve. Second, pictures related to the project that may impress and excite the viewers and draw their attention are indispensable in telling a touching story. Lastly, a specific budget and production timeline that informs people of how the funding will be used is included.

Emotional appeals are essential while telling the story of a proposed project. According to the experiences of Mantianxing, ‘writers of the text must intensively pay attention to the stories, emotions and details of certain people involved in the case or event’. Wu Hu Ecology Centre also shared their experience of building emotional connections with the pubic in a project called, The Library of Qingyijiang River. ‘Lejuan rejected our original proposal for the reason that we described our project in a boring way and suggested that we should find out the elements that can be used to touch the inner emotions of the public’, said the project manager we interviewed. In the final version of the proposal, the story of the Qingyijiang River was rewritten from historical and cultural angles in an attempt to arouse citizens’ sentiments for protecting the river, by emphasizing it being ‘the bearer of the civilization in the southern Anhui Province’. ‘As the library will function in recording the historical, environmental and ecological materials related to the Qingyijiang River’, the staff told us, ‘people in the Anhui Province may be touched by our emotional words on the necessity for the construction of the library’. With the online platforms and emotionally laden stories, the coordinators are able to put forward their projects and raise money from interested people. For Wu Hu Ecology Centre, no tangible rewards were given to the supporters as the creators believed that when people give money to environmental organizations, they are caring about the relationship between nature and themselves, rather than being motivated by material rewards. In other words, as stated by Ritov and Kahneman (1997), funds are not paid for personal utilities, but to achieve a sense of moral satisfaction in such projects which aim at protecting the environment. The carefully designed storytelling actually revealed a sense of connection of being part of the nature, and helped viewers to understand themselves in a natural environment. This is part of the cultural process that people form their self-understanding and environmental identity, which is defined by Clayton and Opotow (2003) to be ‘a sense of connection to some part of the non-human natural environment, based on history, emotional attachment and similarity’ (p. 53)

While more and more environmental issues in China are revealed to the public by NGOs through crowdfunding projects, a belief that ‘the environment is an important part of who we are’ (ibid., p. 45) is gradually affecting the ways that citizens ‘perceive and act toward the world’ (ibid., p. 53). By articulating a range of environmental issues, the NGOs are able to construct an environmental identity (ibid., p. 51). With the emergence of such environmental identity, there has been a rise of the green public sphere in China as non-profit crowdfunding projects not only collect funds but also provide new forms of public engagement in environmental problems (Yang & Calhoun, 2007, p. 212).

Acting as an ad hoc platform for public communication, Internet crowdfunding platforms enable the NGOs to facilitate massive social connections with the public and the construction of an environmental discourse in China (Sima, 2011). In contrast to the earlier Maoist and Marxist views of the human conquest of nature (Shapiro, 2001), this new environmental discourse offers an alternative conception of nature, and calls for public attention to environmental issues. As the successful crowdfunding example, The Library of Qingyijiang River has demonstrated citizens’ awareness of the issue was aroused through well-designed and executed storytelling.

Relying on the existing crowdfunding platforms, emotional storytelling, which offers the audience a cultural and historical information, is likely to attract and encourage potential donors to engage themselves in communicative actions that may ultimately contribute to environmental protection in China. In the case of The Library of Qingyijiang River, supporters’ feelings of group affiliation with the river are constructed through sharing crowdfunding messages, leaving comments on social media and funding the project. It is during the process of carrying out such projects that the environmental public sphere is created, and a cultural belief of caring about nature, or an environmental identity, is constructed. In addition to the cultivation of an environmental identity, these practices in the digital sphere also afford a different perspective for us to look at the practice of cultural citizenship of young people in China (Goode, 2010, p. 537).

Shifting Youth Identity in China: From Spectators to Supporters and Participants

With the rapid development of online crowdfunding, more and more social groups and NGOs have regarded crowdfunding as an indispensable vehicle through which to publicize their issues and gather funds. Acting as the main force in the realm of crowdfunding, young netizens are increasingly involved in public affairs while attracted by NGOs with their fundraising projects. According to Zhu, a project manager of Tianjin Green Collar, the environmental organization established by a group of youngsters in northern China that aims to raise the young generation’s environmental awareness, it is vital to fulfil the demand of the youth to participate in social and environmental issues, and to mobilize spectators into supporters and participants. Zhu remarks that, ‘Supporters shall feel that they can participate in and interact with the project. We prefer to communicate with people individually in order to create the feeling of participation’. For him, the most effective way to succeed is to design an appealing personalized message. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize the specific details of a project that allows readers to share the proposal with their friends. Zhu advices that project creators to ‘give a brief summary of the project’s target and highlight the rewards. Do not forget to attach your project link at the end of the message’, he said. Such strategies imply the organization’s understanding of the method that young people use social media to address particular social issues and to ‘make their voices heard by a wider audience’ (Buckingham, 2008, p. 5). Zhu’s experiences also indicate that young people’s engagement with environmental protection can be seen a means through which to cultivate an alternative identity.

Since the reform and opening-up policies in 1978, Chinese people began to understand the term freedom through their everyday practices of individual freedom, such as freedom of speech and freedom in consumption (Zhang, 2008). With the unfolding of the reform, Chinese people were offered more freedom to choose, even though the ethos of freedom ‘has been widely internalized by Chinese people, especially the younger generation’ (Liu, 2010, p. 29). Distinct from the situation in Mao’s era where people’s individual freedom was under strict control (Yan, 2009), the party state has attempted to guide people’s lives through launching a moral education generally called, ‘Socialist Spiritual Civilization Construction’. Seeing the widespread ideologies of individualism and materialism as a potential threat to social order, the party state articulated the socialist ideologies of selflessness, collectivism and devotedness to the party (Liu, 2010, p. 29). However, the party control has also been weakened by the rise of digital communication which allows the Chinese youth to construct their own cultural identities. Providing the youth with accessible channels to express their concerns and solutions to public issues, non-profit crowdfunding projects can be viewed as new cultural resources which are employed by young people to construct and perform their identity.

Through giving money to crowdfunding activities initiated by NGOs like Tianjin Green Collar, young people perform their identity of civic participants. In an attempt to involve the youth in their projects, these NGOs have devoted much time to designing crowdfunding products for young netizens. To cultivate potential funders, Tianjin Green Collar has paid attention to the hobbies of the youth, who are the main participants of crowdfunding in China. According to Mantianxing, ‘Creators should care about the interests of young people, especially the popular culture among teenagers since they are the potential supporters of non-profit crowdfunding in the long term’. As Chinese young people have access to various information and communication platforms, their online communities have become the object of observation for crowdfunding organizers. Through getting in touch with such online communities, understanding their ideas and catering to the interests of young people, these NGOs can create new opportunities of popular participation for the Chinese youth. In one of Tianjin Green Collar’s projects aimed at raising money for protecting the wetland in northeast China, supporters were offered varying amounts of rice from the paddy field near the wetland as a reward for donating. After reaching their goal, however, the rice reward proved not to be cost-effective, as some donors did not leave their contact information as requested. Therefore, Zhu held the view that ‘material rewards could reduce the operational efficiency of staff, and “spiritual rewards” can be more helpful in deepening the connection between contributors and the project without increasing the cost’. As a result, he changed the form of rewards in subsequent projects to create a feeling of engagement by establishing groups on WeChat for those who are willing to donate money. In the groups, interesting social activities, such as online Karaoke or skill-sharing (e.g., how to use strategies of new media operation) are organized to reward the supporters. Once the connection between creators and supporters is built through such activities, it becomes possible to expand the existing social networks or communities. Every single supporter is likely to become an efficient node in his or her own social networks to spread the meaning of crowdfunding after participating in online activities based in a WeChat group. Gathering those young people who are willing to devote time and money to non-profit crowdfunding, Tianjin Green Collar formed a team of volunteers with WeChat. During the process, the original function of WeChat as spaces for daily communication shifted into a place that a new culture of sharing and participation is performed. As central nodes in their networks, these supporters or participants are gradually turned into contributors of NGO projects. To encourage the active volunteers, some NGOs express their appreciation to those helping promote crowdfunding activities on social media. As the main actors in China’s civil society (Law, 2011, p. 84), NGOs put forward crowdfunding projects not only to collect financial resources but also to ‘cultivate’ young supporters and expand organizational influence. In this process, a new NGO-inspired community is emerging. Informed by issues like environmental pollution and the construction of public libraries, these young contributors are practicing the rights to create and participate in a shared cultural space, and thus to construct their own identity as participants of civic culture instead of spectators.

Expansion of Civic spaces: Bridging Offline and Online Engagement

According to the coordinator of Keli, an NGO that targets the promotion of social organizations, there is a common mode of practice that can be generalized as ‘point-to-surface transmission’, which means key messages are instantly spread to a vast number of people through one’s social networks. The promotion of a project can usually be divided into three phases aiming at spreading the information to as many citizens as possible. At the beginning, the organizers often introduce the project through online official accounts and immediate friend-circles to reach out to those who may be supportive for fundraising activities. In the second round, the organizations who participate in the collaborative programmes will help spread the message through their own online platforms and social circles. If necessary, there will be a final round in which the organizers will collaborate with other media outlets to publicize the event. In this case, applications of digital media do seem to forge a connection between media, potential supporters and NGOs. Citizens create their own civic space online via social media beyond sharing photos, showing events in their daily lives and contacting friends. Take the popular instant message application WeChat as an example. NGOs usually chose to collaborate with popular official accounts on WeChat to increase publicity of their crowdfunding projects. As a function of WeChat, ‘official accounts’ (gongzhonghao) are enjoying more popularity as the Chinese users are increasingly getting used to obtaining information via this social media. By subscribing to official accounts that they favour, individual users can receive up-to-date messages automatically. Allowing subscribers to add comments on the messages, official accounts offer new platforms for netizens to participate in public affairs. The power of official accounts varies according to the number of subscribers. According to the experience of many NGO practitioners, the followers of these non-profit-related official accounts tend to be more willing to support crowdfunding activities than those who do not subscribe the accounts. For example, by the end of 2015, the official account of Tencent Foundation had over 3 million followers, and all the followers of this account can be seen as potential supporters of Lejuan’s projects of Tencent. In addition to official accounts, the function of ‘Circle of Friends’, available on WeChat and Weibo, also marks a new realm of civic spaces. What differentiates this function from traditional online forums is that it enables individuals to access public topics in a relatively private and personal manner. Both the functions of official accounts and Circle of Friends have contributed to the expansion of civic space online by utilizing social media.

Meanwhile, the civic space offline has been extended as well. In the case of Mantianxing, the ultimate purpose of initiating crowdfunding projects is to transform the online supporters into offline volunteers and participants. Inviting the funders to engage in part of their public activities as a reward, the staff of Mantianxing strive to maintain ongoing relationships with their supporters. Crowdfunding enables the convergence of online and offline civic spaces by involving the supporters who reach out to NGOs through the Internet into various kinds of offline activities. During the process, the public spaces for civic engagement have been expanded.

Conclusion

This article investigates the cultural impact of crowdfunding on Chinese society. Relying on storytelling and social media communication, the practices of crowdfunding have spread the meaning and consciousness of public participation and expanded the civic space in China. Meanwhile, during the process of crowdfunding, a new environmental and youth identity is shaped, and a connection between online and offline worlds is forged. In the convergence of civic spaces, we can observe the rise of a new participatory culture in Chinese society.

Employing crowdfunding as a tool to raise and collect financial resources, the NGOs we investigated have not only developed a wide range of online channels, but also found effective ways to bring communication, expression and participation into the daily life of Chinese netizens, especially the youth. Even though the civil society of China has long been restrained by the state, new opportunities for cultural citizenship are emerging. In addition to the official discourse which advocates loyalty to the socialist ideology, there exists the participatory culture which respects and emphasizes the rights of communication, expression and participation. New technologies can allow members of a community to reject the official gatekeepers’ control on social issues (Goode, 2010, p. 533). As we have demonstrated in this article, the environmental identity constructed through crowdfunding projects which target the protection of nature indicates the central role of social media in performing cultural citizenship. In such a dramatic shift, individuals are no longer passive readers, viewers or spectators, instead, they can be participants in the public sphere (Benkler, 2006, p. 272). Through participating in crowdfunding activities, Chinese people are ‘becoming’ citizens by creating new relationships and connecting with diverse public issues. As current debates on cultural citizenship have mainly focused on the cultural rights and the identities that are shaped ‘by the opportunities citizens enjoy for participating in society at various levels’ (Goode, 2010, p. 527), we argue that non-profit crowdfunding has facilitated popular civic participation in both virtual and physical spaces within the constraint of the Chinese state.

Such cultural practices have also demonstrated the profound creativity of networked individuals and groups in the digital age. Faced with official constraints, NGOs can make use of crowdfunding platforms and social media to raise money and spread their ideas. While taking part in these activities, more and more people have become NGO supporters. As a result, NGOs are given more opportunities to engage in the rectifying of social problems and contribute to the culture of public participation.