Changing Voluntary Service Policy in the PRC: Guest Editor’s Introduction

Voluntary services in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are a product of their times under ‘Reform and Opening.’ No round of social service reform over the past forty years would have been complete without the role of voluntary services. Looking back over four decades, the field has undergone a series of phases. First came exploration and development, then diversified development, followed by whole-of-society participation, and, most recently, development on a deeper level. I use this short introduction to capture something of each of these phases and review the process that brought us to where we are today in Chinese voluntary service provision and the related policies and legislation.

From the beginning of Reform and Opening in the late 1970s a stage of explorative development began. This continued until around 2000. As state enterprises and public institutions began to shed their social functions, and government functions were gradually transformed, this created an enormous ‘social burden’ and produced a vacuum with no one taking charge. This resulted in large numbers of people slipping into poverty or finding themselves in a vulnerable position; it produced social problems that directly affected the lives of many PRC citizens. The question was: who should be principally responsible?

Attempts to answer this question focused partly on whether community services should, by nature, be regarded as belonging to a notion of government ‘welfare’ or whether they should be a matter of mutual assistance. The Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) determined that community services should be regarded as mutual assistance activities organized by members of a community and championed by the government (Zhou, 2010). In essence, the idea was that these were society’s problems and society should step up.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Heping District in Tianjin, Xuanwu District in Beijing, along with Shenzhen and other localities began to launch neighbours’ mutual assistance activities, establishing community volunteer organizations. This early experience was picked up and promoted by the MCA, leading to sub-districts (街道) and communities around the country following suit and beginning the first wave of community voluntary services.

In 1993, the Communist Youth League (CYL), acting as the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass organization for ‘advanced youth,’ declared itself to be brandishing the banner of ‘Chinese youth volunteers,’ thus setting the stage for the notion of ‘Chinese youth voluntary action.’ In the years that followed, the CYL developed a series of projects such as the Youth Volunteers Poverty Relief Plan (青年志愿者扶贫接力计划), the University Students’ Voluntary Services in Western China Plan (大学生志愿服务西部计划), the Mother River project (保护母亲河), and the University Student Volunteers’ Rural Service project (大学生志愿者三下乡). The CYL pioneered voluntary service activities all over the country. During this period, such voluntary services stepped in to fill the vacuum left by government services and the market.

After the turn of the century, China’s voluntary services entered a stage of diversification and development. In 2001, the successful bid to host the Beijing Olympics and the hosting of the FISU World University Student Games sparked an enthusiasm for volunteering at such events. That same year, 100 countries around the world held events to mark International Volunteer Day, fostering greater understanding in China of the strengths and specialities of voluntary services in other countries.

As the PRC’s development under Reform and Opening continued, and its social structure became increasingly fragmented, social needs diversified and became more complex. This brought an increasing role for voluntary services in making up for market and government failure, creating new social systems and capacities, and easing social conflicts and protecting social justice. The status of such services thus grew and the CCP and government began paying volunteerism greater attention. Voluntary services appeared time and again in National Party Congress reports and the Premier’s annual Government Work Report. In 2006, the CCP Central Committee’s Sixth Plenum passed the Decision on Major Questions regarding the Building of a Socialist Harmonious Society. In this document, the Central Committee introduced the notion of building ‘a social voluntary service system linked to government services, and market services.’ In 2007, the 17th National Party Congress report stated the need to improve the social voluntary service system. This period saw a sharp rise in a whole array of voluntary services from community services to services delivered by youth organizations, the Red Cross, women’s organizations, and enterprises.

From 2008 onwards, spurred by the demand created by major incidents and events such as the Wenchuan Earthquake, the Beijing Olympics, the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding, the Shanghai Expo, and the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, Chinese voluntary services entered an era of ‘whole-of-society participation.’

After the 18th National Party Congress in 2012, volunteering continued to develop on a deeper, institutional level. Voluntary services gradually began to appear more frequently in state strategies, and the pace of institutionalization, regulatory development, and informatization quickened. In 2014 the Central Commission for Guiding Cultural and Ethical Progress issued the Opinions on Promoting the Institutionalization of Voluntary Services. In 2017, the 19th National Party Congress report called for greater institutionalization of voluntary services, and that same year the State Council Issued the Regulations on Voluntary Services《志愿服务条例》(translated in this issue of Chinese Law and Government). It was also in 2017 that the MCA’s online information system for ‘building the ranks of volunteers’ (www.chinavolunteer.cn) formally went live. In quick succession the MCA then issued the Notice on Promoting the Use of the Nationwide Voluntary Service Information System 《关于推广使用全国志愿服务信息系统的通知》and the Measures for Recording Voluntary Service and Issuing Certificates (for trial implementation) (also translated in the present issue). This pressed voluntary service informatization toward new breakthroughs. In 2019, the 19th Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum underlined the need to build ‘a robust voluntary service system’ and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping expressed the idea of ‘elevating volunteer pursuits to a strategic level of importance alongside the “Two Centenary Goals” and the socialist modernization drive’ (Xinhua News Agency, 2019).

In the PRC, voluntary service is both a form of service to society—an activity of a societal nature and an expression of societal belonging—and an institutionalized arrangement which the government regards as enabling ‘innovation in social governance.’ The CCP views voluntary services as an ‘important indicator of progress in modern social civilization’—a reflection of the values of ‘contribution, love, mutual assistance, and progress,’ and a means to pursue the era’s mission of championing the Spirit of Lei Feng, building ‘cultural and ethical civilization,’ and putting into action socialist core values. In other words, voluntary service in the PRC sometimes comes with certain features which are embedded in, and encouraged through, the systems and mechanisms which facilitate and regulate it. Toward these ends, Chinese voluntary services display certain common development trends or traits, which I outline briefly below.

Public service delivery orientation

Voluntary services in the PRC have long been characterized by certain notions of concern for disadvantaged groups. In 1988, in a community in Tianjin’s Heping District, 13 residents began organizing mutual aid among their neighbours. Heping came to be recognized as China’s birthplace of community volunteer organizations. This form of spontaneous mutual aid organization gained significant traction around the country and was further spurred on by the MCA’s efforts at promotion. By 1997, nationwide, there were around 55,000 community volunteer organizations, and 5,470,000 volunteers (Deng, 2002, pp. 108–110). After the turn of the century, voluntary services began to draw even wider participation and to develop greater diversity. According to statistics from the MCA’s volunteering platform (ChinaVolunteer.mca.gov.cn, 中国志愿服务网), by May 2023, China had 231 million volunteers who had registered using their real names; voluntary service projects had passed the 10 million mark. Some scholars adopted a civil society perspective to emphasize the growth of society’s self-governing capabilities and of push back against an overly interfering state (Wang, 2012). Others, however, feared that an over-emphasis on the autonomous nature of voluntary services could easily lead to fragmentation or poor standards (Guo & Zhang, 2019).

State building orientation

Voluntary services principally focus on functions related to public service provision and tend to avoid or minimize functions related to public interest articulation. Hence those offering voluntary services find it relatively easy to gain government support, and services can be used by the government in such a way that they ultimately come to resemble an extension of the bottom rungs of the bureaucracy (Huang, 2022). In this sense, voluntary service in China is not simply a kind of spontaneous, autonomous behavior of a social nature but rather an institutionalized arrangement that falls under state governance.

From around 2000, the Chinese state began a process of primary-level state building nationwide. During this round of administrative structural reforms, despite the emphasis on the ‘self-governing role’ of residents’ committees in communities, such committees nonetheless morphed into a de facto extension of government. Myriad administrative matters sapped away most of the residents’ committee members’ time and energy and squeezed their space for responding to community needs. Their service functions played second fiddle to their administrative functions. Faced with constantly growing and diversifying community service needs, residents’ committees found themselves with neither time nor means to effectively respond. Community volunteers, as an important form of human resource, were naturally swept up into the work of the residents’ committees and became a significant means by which for them to keep on top of their work; voluntary services to some degree also took on an administrative cast. Further, different government functional agencies and mass organizations such as education and health departments, trade unions, and branches of the CYL, the All-China Women’s Federation, and the China Disabled Persons’ Federation saw the opportunity and began to draw on voluntary services to supplement and extend their own respective functions, launching voluntary services within the scope of their jurisdictions.

‘Spiritual civilization’ orientation

Lei Feng continues to be regarded as a model practitioner of socialism and Communist thought and morality. In the 1960s, China saw a wave of ‘learning from Lei Feng.’ Given the commonality between the notion of contribution inherent to volunteerism and that of ‘finding joy in helping others’ in ‘Lei Feng Spirit,’ voluntary service is sometimes regarded as a development and extension of learning from the ‘Spirit of Lei Feng.’ With strong promotion from the CCP’s propaganda departments, voluntary services have gradually evolved into ‘learning from Lei Feng Spirit’ voluntary services. In 2012 the CCP Central Committee General Office (CCGO) issued the Opinions on Carrying Out in Depth Learning from Lei Feng Activities 《关于深入开展学雷锋活动的意见》requiring that voluntary services become one of the regularized forms of learning from Lei Feng. In 2013, the CCP CCGO then issued the Opinions on Cultivating and Practicing Socialist Core Values requiring that learning from Lei Feng voluntary service activities be rolled out at the grassroots, entering communities and families.

Since the CCP’s 18th National Congress, ‘leading through Party building’ (党建引领) has become a new form of governance mechanism permeating whole processes and all aspects of state governance and restructuring the development logic and ecosystem of Chinese voluntary services in the ‘New Era.’ In relation to public service delivery, the aim of leading through Party building is to leverage the CCP’s advantages in using incentives, action, and resources to reorganize and consolidate the people, entities and resources involved in providing voluntary services across all levels and thereby strategically tackle difficulties in involving voluntary services in public service provision. In relation to grassroots governance, the core aim of leading through Party building is to use the CCP’s political and organizational strengths to press for and absorb ‘mass participation’ and improve governance at the primary level of the system, employing ‘co-production’ in social governance. In terms of the lean in toward ‘spiritual civilization,’ the CCP’s propaganda departments are beginning to embed ideology and value guidance into service delivery as a way of having people embrace Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, conducting their moral education and ideological propaganda duties in a more down to earth way (Ji, 2017). Understanding voluntary services in the PRC today requires placing their development in the context of the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of politics, society and culture and paying attention to the governance ecosystem of ‘leading through Party building,’ government playing the leading role, and multiple parties in cooperation.

Shifts in the voluntary service field also offer ripe ground for reflecting on the shift in China studies from thinking about ‘state–society relations’ to thinking about ‘Party–state–society’ relations. The present issue of Chinese Law and Government brings together three original research articles based on policy analysis of various aspects of the development and regulation of voluntary services in the PRC. The article by Zhang Yuan, Zhang Qiang, Lu Qibin, and Dong Qiuyu uses a systematic bibliometric study of national-level policies on voluntary services from 1978 to 2019. The authors adopt a ‘policy issuing network–policy focus–policy tool’ framework to probe questions including: ‘who are the main policy actors driving the voluntary services field?’, ‘how have the main foci of policies in the voluntary services field changed?’, and ‘what are the features of policy tool application and how have these changed?’ They present a comprehensive picture of the characteristics of the evolution of voluntary services in China.

He Zhifeng, Xiang Yu and Liu Xiaohe, in their article, adopt an institutional perspective to analyze the influence of major field-configuring events on the development of voluntary services. While it has been typical in research to examine the existence of causality between disasters and events such as the Wenchuan Earthquake and the Beijing Olympics on the one hand and the development opportunity windows for voluntary services on the other, just how field-configuring events can act as a causal mechanism in shaping the voluntary services sector remains understudied. Hence, He and colleagues examine these two very different ‘events,’ and the role they have played in shaping the meaning systems, relational systems, and policy formulation in the voluntary services field.

The third research article, by Zhang Wangcheng, Gong Huizi and Peng Yandan, adopts an ‘action system theory’ approach to examine the core, intermediary, and peripheral policies on voluntary services to support people with disabilities and the content, characteristics, and thinking behind the design of such policies. In China, aside from the general policies made by authorities charged specifically with voluntary service administration, mass organizations and government departments such as education departments, emergency response departments, the trade union system, and local branches of the CYL, the Women’s Federation, and the China Disabled Persons’ Federation all have teams of volunteers throughout their respective systems. They are responsible for managing volunteers and formulating related policies within their own systems. Zhang and colleagues offer a detailed examination of China’s policies specific to the field of voluntary services for people with disabilities, while at the same time providing insight into the Chinese government’s thinking on voluntary service policy more generally.