ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the meaning of charitable giving among the Christian (Protestant) community in progressive and prosperous coastal China. It provides a case study of the development and governance of a grassroots Christian charity in the southeast city of Wenzhou, the largest urban Chinese Christian centre popularly known as ‘China’s Jerusalem’. Rather than treating charity as solely a set of institutions, I focus on the local cultural and religious ideas that create those institutions and give them meaning. The notion of charity as a sociocultural construct is of great conceptual importance to the way we understand different actors’ desires and actions involved in the very process of charitable giving. In this chapter, I try to unpack the notion of charity by examining the charity giver’s underlying motivations and the complex moral relationship involved in charitable giving. In particular, I explore Chinese Christians’ construction of charity work at the grassroots level as well as how they grasp the concept of charity on its own terms. This study hopes to contribute to our understanding of the multiple indigenous notions of charity in the Chinese context and provide a lens onto how transnational social processes become localized and indigenised in the historical context of a modernizing China.
