Won’t Get Fooled Again
Thursday, January 27th, 2011“Meet the new boss…same as the old boss” (go to about 7:35 in the video)
Continuing this week’s series on China and innovation, I suggested yesterday that among the varieties of capitalism, China will be good at innovation that requires lots of people acting in coordination – massive, massive amounts of people. What are the implications for philanthropy and the social sector?
The thing to think about is what philanthropy looks like in a non-democratic, semi-capitalist context. You’re building on a strong tradition of local-level generosity within communities – mutual aid and such. There’s no tax incentives, so foundations are set up with different incentives and for different reasons if at all. The “independent” sector isn’t particularly independent, it’s monitored closely by the government. The government is closely involved in regulating – in a way that the associations that word brings up in an American context can’t really capture – business activity, with state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises starting in the last 10 or 15 years. If you stay within the lines, you can build your business.
So this is a context where philanthropy is most likely going to be about advancing and to a degree complementing economic progress. It may also be about preserving traditional arts and cultures. Interesting question about whether those cultures will include ethnic minorities within the country – which ones get their stories told, in an officially-sanctioned way.
In its own way, the approach would be progressive – in that it’s oriented single-mindedly toward economic progress of the country, and bringing the most number of people out of poverty. Hard to argue with the numbers generated in the last 30 years. This is very troubling! It’s the Chile question all over again: would they have been able to generate those kinds of poverty-reduction numbers without an authoritarian government ramming policy change down the people’s throats? And who benefits, what’s the change in economic inequality? (Chile is one of the most economically unequal countries on earth.)
So in a context where innovation is about leveraging the power of massive numbers of coordinated people to solve problems that can only be solved that way, philanthropy becomes less about letting a thousand flowers bloom like in the U.S., but in harnessing the power of coordinated voluntary effort to promote cultural and social practices that reinforce and support economic growth. It’s just not any kind of independent sector.
That’s where this train of thought leads me…time to look into how things have played out in practice in Chinese philanthropy….