Voices
Time to give the elbow to this kind of giving
(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-19 08:05
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A survey conducted by China Youth Daily throughout 31 provinces and municipalities found that some 94.8 percent of respondents had made donations to charitable projects.
However, of those who said they had given, only 28.4 percent said they had done so completely out of their free will.
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The Sichuan earthquake in 2008 witnessed the biggest wave of individual donations, which was viewed as a milestone in the public's participation in charity projects. No big disaster happened in the following year, still, donations exceeded 50 billion yuan.
It is good to have more donated money to help those in need but the healthy development of charitable causes does not totally rely on the total sum of money being donated.
There are some shortcomings in work units driving donations.
In 2008, for example, when an enterprise organized a donation, the manager pointed out that those "cold-blooded" enough not to donate and those "with low moral consciousness" who donated and then complained would all be expelled from the company.
Some work units directly deduct money from the salaries of their employees without even notifying them.
Such action to force employees to make donations, fortunately, have largely been corrected since they were exposed in the media. But the current practices popular in many work units of organizing donations are still questionable. They still tend to make employees feel they are being forced to give.
Some units, for example, relate donations directly to the appraisal of employees' work performance. Others choose to make public how much each person donates. So, the work units take hostages of employees' personal interests and their pride in making them give money.
This more or less distorts the essence of charity.
It is no surprise that some 70 percent of the people who give feel they are forced to do so.
It seems that if someone wants to make charitable donations, they should do it via their work units. Otherwise, their actions would not be known by others.
In donation activities organized by work units, one has to ponder carefully on how much he or she should give. A middle-level cadre, for example, should not donate more than that given by a bureau chief or the chairman, but he or she must donate more than ordinary employees. Otherwise, they will make their superiors lose face, or place themselves beneath their subordinates.
Obviously, the popular work-units-denominated donations can garner the money quickly, but are more likely to cause forced donations, which will hurt the public's enthusiasm in participating in charity activities. This will affect the long-term healthy development of philanthropy.
In a modern society where telephone banking and on-line banking are quite popular, and the information can be spread very quickly, individuals and charity projects no longer need work units to reach people. Today, anyone wanting to make a charitable donation needs only make a phone call or several clicks.
The work units' carrot-and-stick policy in making employees donate should be phased out.
Excerpts from a comment in Mirror Evening News.
