ABSTRACT
Lisa Hoffman presents anthropological research on the emergence of volunteering and charitable giving as government-supported ways of addressing social problems in urban China. This development signals a shift from explicitly state-led welfare provisioning to a more complex governmental assemblage, involving the market, NGOs, and citizen-volunteers, which is producing an ‘intermediary’ space of social action. Governmental technologies of liaising, collaborating, and mobilizing are being prioritized, but a ‘politics of giving’ is emerging that resonates with global practices and rationalities of care as new actors are needed to do the liaising (municipal experiments), collaboration (NGOs), and to be mobilized (volunteers and donors).
