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Online fundraising has become part of an overall strategy to meet costs when insurance is insufficient, in addition to family savings, loans, and funds from foundations, says Wu Yue, a heart surgeon in Beijing’s Fuwai hospital. Like many Chinese doctors, Wu regularly directs patients in need towards alternative sources for funding. “It rarely suffices, but it lowers financial pressure on families. Even if it just means a few thousand less to pay back.”
The Chinese government welcomes the trend too. The 2016 Charity Law relaxed strict controls on fundraising in an attempt to promote a more diverse social service sector, for example. Medical-sector planning documents state that charity support should be “proactively enlisted” to supplement the still incomplete and unfair insurance system—as citizens whose registered home address is in a rural area, Deng and her son receive lower coverage than urban citizens.
“If we were Beijing residents, things would look very different,” Deng muses in a voice message.
Millennial generosity
The surge in online charitable giving is being driven largely by a young generation that is less influenced by the legacy of the socialist planning economy in which the state is supposed to provide for all social needs, says Deng Guosheng, vice-director of the Institute for Philanthropy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“Online individual giving is growing very, very fast,” he says, and “young people give the most.” According to a recent analysis by the institute, while those born after 1980 gave the most in monetary terms, the largest group of givers were those born after 1990.
Wu Jie (no relation to the doctor), a 26 year-old filmmaker from Yunnan province, regularly shares medical cost crowdfunding notices in his friend group on WeChat, China’s largest chat app. “Online giving is convenient, a product of the current shortcomings of the medical system and the development of online media,” says Wu. Even if most people just give 5 or 10 yuan, he says, “it adds up—we all have many friends on social media.”
