Give Or Else
It has been a long established fact (which any of you can verify with a simple Google search) that individual charitable giving in the United States is higher than any nation in the world, even when you exclude corporate donations. In fact, the only nation to donate more than 1% of GDP to charity is the United States, which gives almost 2%, with the UK at just under 1%. Whenever there is a disaster anywhere in the world there will be someone in the US who holds a bake sale at work, or organizes something in their community, to raise funds for the disaster. As an American this is one of the things I am most proud of about my country. We might do a lot of stupid shit in the world sometimes, and piss off a lot of people, but I think that Americans are at their core some of the most fundamentally decent people in the world. Part of this, I think, has to do with the sense of personal responsibility which is, unfortunately, slowly eroding in the US. Europe pays significantly higher taxes than we do, but they also view the government as the responsible party for solving most of life’s problems. Thus when a disaster strikes somewhere (say the Indonesian tsunami) other countries will expect their government to send money on their behalf, but Americans will be more likely to donate directly from their own pocket.
I mention this not as a rah-rah America thing, but to put a little context into what I am about to relay. You have all undoubtedly heard about the devastating earthquake in southern China. This was apparently a 7.6 or 7.8 depending on the news reports. To put this in perspective, neither the massive Loma Prieta nor Northridge earthquakes which struck California was above a 7, and they caused hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. I think this amazing photograph of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake is probably representative of the degree of damage in southern China, since the quality of the buildings down there (wood frame, hand-built) probably wasn’t much better than many of the buildings in San Francisco at the turn of the century.
According to the scuttlebutt around town the government has asked specifically for donations of money. Now, in a country as flush with cash as China, this sounds a little dodgy to me. I decided to donate money to the Red Cross through their website, so I knew that my money would go to a charity and not end up in the pocket of God-knows-who.
A few days ago our receptionist put up a small box at the front desk for donations for earthquake victims. I came in to work one morning and she pointed it out to me. I told her I had already made a donation to the Red Cross through their website. However, on Friday something very peculiar happened. She walked around with the box to everyone saying, “Have you donated yet?” You would NEVER see something this crass in the US or UK. Charity is considered voluntary, a “help if you want to or can afford to” thing. As our receptionist was walking around with the box the head of our company, the Chinese guy who is basically the capo de tutti capi of this venture, came around asking all the foreigners if they had donated yet. Through one of the Chinese I mentioned that, yes, I had donated to the Red Cross online. This wasn’t met approvingly.
The box was essentially a loyalty test. It was for the foreign devils to show their gratitude to China for all that their country has given us. So while all my Chinese employees were sticking in 10s and 20s, I stuck in 100, as did all the other expats. (Since we make so much more than the Chinese we were expected to throw in ten times the amount of money.) Now, this is a box of money in the office. I’d be willing to bet my entire salary for the rest of the year that not one yuan of this money actually makes it to an earthquake victim.
One of my coworkers asked the company why we don’t have a box out for the victims of the Burmese cyclone. “Well, um, yes, well, you see, while we operate internationally we are concerned locally.” In other words, we don’t give a fuck about them because they’re not Chinese. But when the Chinese are in peril, doing your part to contribute is seen as an act of loyalty to country and culture and ethnicity, and God help the foreigner who comes here to reap the benefits of all that China has to offer and doesn’t prostrate himself in public as a sign of gratitude for it.
This is Chinese racist nationalism in action.
One final point. My employees have been asking me a lot about earthquakes, since I lived in California for the past decade and felt many of them. I showed them photos online of the aforementioned Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes. Portions of freeways collapsed, buildings crumbled in on themselves, all sorts of damage. They said, “Wow, how many people died?” I said “About 80 in each one.” They couldn’t believe it. How could China have an earthquake and 20,000 or more deaths, while California could have an earthquake of similar magnitude and only 70 or 80?
One day the reality about China will sink in with the Chinese. I’ll be long dead and gone by that point, but one day they’re going to start asking themselves these sorts of questions.
