ABSTRACT
The claims that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can provide people with an improvement in their welfare and that it can enforce national unity represent two major pillars of its legitimacy. The assertion that the Chinese party-state can offer quasi-universal access to social services has been increasingly challenged as the reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping and implemented by his successor Jiang Zemin have gradually eroded the affordability of services in education, health care, and pensions. Concerned that this situation could lead to social instability, Jiang, and his successor Hu Jintao, decided to respond to this challenge by giving the private sector greater importance in the delivery of social services, and by calling upon the philanthropic sector for help. One can assume from these premises that the offer by a Taiwanese charity to provide disaster relief in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) should be well received, because it can help meet the two central priorities of “harmonious society”—which Hu Jintao links to a greater emphasis on social development, and “peaceful re-uni cation” with Taiwan. 2 Yet, as this chapter documents, since 1991 the activities in the PRC of Taiwan’s largest charity, the Tzu Chi Foundation (hereafter Tzu Chi),3 have elicited a wide variety of responses at local levels, ranging from some cases of genuine cooperation to cases of outright rejection and mistrust-despite their impeccable credentials as non-political compatriots. Is this diversity of responses to a policy determined at the center an illustration of fragmented authoritarianism, of conflicts between central and local governments, or of competition between local governments? This chapter takes a different approach and argues instead that these diverse responses display the capacity of the Chinese state to adapt to change.
