Around ten years ago, I experienced an embarrassing incident while volunteering for a fundraising event in Shanghai. It was organized by an international NGO to support an orphanage in rural China. My teammate and I approached a citizen in a supermarket with a handmade poster in the hope of persuading him to donate groceries from his purchases.

As I began to speak, he stopped me and said, ‘Nah, I don’t want to listen to you. I want to listen to him. I don’t trust you.’ He was turning to my teammate, who is European, while I am clearly Chinese, even though we were wearing the same uniform as the volunteers. This citizen may have been prejudiced against his countrymen, but that’s a glimpse of how little people trusted local nonprofit workers back in 2013.

 The reasons leading to the general distrust at that time were multifaceted. A survey on the real-life feelings of Chinese people conducted in 2014 by a Chinese media, ifeng.com, showed that 66.5 percent of respondents believed there were behind-the-scenes deals in charitable organisations, and 40.5 percent felt that charities were only propaganda arms of interest groups. The major scandal in 2011 about the lavish lifestyle of Guo Meimei, who claimed to be an executive of the Chinese Red Cross, took public trust to new lows. Even though the Chinese Red Cross claimed no involvement with her, questioning about the corruption and poor management in the social sector continued.

This is not all. The lack of knowledge about the social sector and the missing connection felt by the public has contributed to the sector’s vulnerability. The belief that charities are supposed to be completely free, the unrecognized necessity of administrative expenses, and the misunderstanding of the operations of unrestricted funding, among others, have made public trust in the social sector so fragile that any adverse incident could lead to righteous indignation and severe questioning of the whole sector.

Actions have been taken as the Chinese government has recognized the need to create greater transparency to build trust in Social Delivery organisations (SDOs). In 2016, China introduced the Charity Law, which makes information disclosure a legal obligation for charitable organizations. For example, charitable organizations should promptly inform the donor of the fundraising progress, and the management and use of funds raised from targeted groups. Charitable organizations with public fund-raising qualifications should regularly disclose their fundraising and project implementation.

The tighter regulation has certainly laid more solid ground for rational trust in the social sector in China, trust based on plain information. But it would be naïve to think this can close the trust gap

Positive changes have been seen. In a 2018 study, Chinese experts in the social sector believed that SDOs in China were generally not trusted by society, which was also the top reason for the low level of individual donations. But their answer changed to yes (somewhat trusted) in the 2020 and 2022 surveys conducted as focus groups. From the perspective of SDOs, 94 per cent of SDOs felt generally trusted by society in 2022, up from 92 per cent in 2018. All three findings were in the biennial study from the Centre of Asian Philanthropy and Society (CAPS), the Doing Good Index.

While the trajectory is positive, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It may seem that most of the Chinese SDOs feel more trusted than in previous surveys, but this number is lower than the Asian average, which was 96 percent in 2018 and 97 percent in 2022. In 2018, among all the SDOs surveyed in China, only 30 percent said they felt fully trusted by society, a much lower number than the Asian average of 48 percent. This number slumped to 15 percent in 2020, the second lowest in Asia, and 20 percent in 2022.

The tighter regulation has certainly laid more solid ground for rational trust in the social sector in China, trust based on plain information. But it would be naïve to think this can close the trust gap. The social sector needs a resilient trust environment to reduce its vulnerability, which can be achieved by building robust relationships with the public. As an article about How to Help the Public Trust NGOs Again, published on the University of Manchester website, puts it, ‘Social links act as a trust-filler for the absent information.’

Building relationships between the public and the social sector means at least two levels of connections. Professor Ma Jianyin from Beijing Normal University argues in an interview with a Chinese news media, The Paper, that a greater public understanding of the philanthropic sector is needed to prevent raising false expectations.

The first step is to connect with the public by promoting their understanding of the sector, including the difference between types of SDOs and roles of stakeholders, the necessity of overheads, and the social sector’s structure and mechanism, which goes far beyond raising and giving money. Improved knowledge helps clear the false beliefs and unrealistic expectations of the sector and brings the public closer to the sector, as Professor Ma further explained.

The second level of connection builds on deeper public engagement. Instead of simply asking for donations or volunteers to carry and distribute material resources, SDOs can consider public voices and concerns during their organizational governance and proactively engage them in their project design, implementation, and even decision-making.

Trust will grow and be more resilient when the public feels part of a democratized philanthropic community with a sense of identity in solving community and societal challenges. In the longer term, this identity could develop into philanthropic citizenship, a dimension of citizenship behaviour associated with intentions and actions that produce a public benefit.

A more trusted and resilient social sector will be in place when more robust public and social sector relationships are built on improved knowledge and engagement.

Ke Li is a research associate at the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society (CAPS).