Chinese Volunteers' Perspectives on the Rural Poor

• In Event: 575 - Regular Session. Voluntary Organization: Expertise and its Discontents

Abstract

How is China’s growing voluntary and non-profit sector influencing elite perspectives on inequality? To answer this question, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese young adults who had volunteered to teach in rural schools. I also conducted three months of participant observation with Chinese educational NGOs in the Chinese countryside, during which time I engaged in extensive conversations about inequality with Chinese volunteers and rural residents. I found that much of China’s education-related volunteerism teaches affluent volunteers how to ignore material inequalities, while reinforcing their perception that China’s urban citizens are more rational, autonomous, and innovative than rural citizens. This is a result of individual and collective framing processes in which volunteers, often upper-class young adults from China's top universities, seek to justify their authority as teachers and facilitators of development in rural areas. To protect their own positive identity and sense of purpose, volunteers interpret rural people's resistance to volunteer programs as resulting from rural people's ignorance, materialism, and other imputed cultural deficiencies. I suggest that to avoid reinforcing social boundaries between groups with radically different levels of privilege, volunteers should primarily embrace the volunteer identity of learner rather than teacher.

Author

• Henry Chiu Hail, University of California, Irvine