Mobilizing the Masses
story by Dave Spart
Serving the people might seem out of date in the super soaraway socialist market economy, but try telling that to the China Young Volunteers Association.
"Since we started, about 70 million people have volunteered to work on short-term projects," said Lu Yongzheng, standing councillor of the association. "And 2.3 million people have taken part in our 'One-on-One' project, which involves volunteers helping elderly or disabled people on a long-term basis."
Although the Party has long sponsored a tradition of selfless devotion to the greater good -- centered on legendary model soldier and do-gooder Lei Feng -- an organized voluntarist movement only emerged in December 1994. Its mission: To implement the Program of Chinese Young Volunteers launched the year before by the Communist Party Youth League.
This appears to have been in response to movements at the grassroots, which began with the spontaneous organization of volunteer associations in cities and universities along the coast in the early 1990s. Leading the way were Shenzhen and Guangzhou, where the fairly strong tradition of voluntarism in Hong Kong had spilled over the border. In Beijing, one of the first such associations was the Love Society of Beijing University, founded in November 1993. A few students banded together to do good deeds, and their successors are still wiping blackboards and helping out aged professors today.
"Lei Feng is our idol," says the society's current president.
Yet the door to mass voluntarism was not opened by Lei Feng, but by the development of the market economy, which by its nature is usually thought to preclude disinterested action.
"Volunteers have only emerged with the reform," said Lu. "There would be no National Volunteers Association without the market economy. The progress of the economic reform in the 1990s towards a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics caused a lot of problems, so social organizations were needed to help combat this.
"For example, in the planned economy the care of the old or the handicapped was all done by the government. With deeper reform, the function of the government has changed, therefore the care system has changed. The volunteers program is a good way to mobilize, organize and develop human resources ... to help improve social security."
Two more major programs concern poverty-alleviation and environmental protection, but besides these there are many local initiatives that can be very simple and modest in their scope and aims. The Beijing Municipal Young Volunteers Association recently attracted volunteers aged between five and 80 to take part in a grass-planting project in the Jianguomen area.
The stupendous numbers cited by the CYVA are mainly generated by such small-scale action. More ambitious projects, such as the Poverty-Alleviation Relay Project, cost a lot more money, so they necessarily involve fewer people. The Relay Project has 2,000 volunteers working in some of the country's poorest counties -- at a cost of 6,000 yuan per volunteer per year, this obliges the association to engage in a constant search for funding.
"Most foreigners assume we are subsidized by the government," said Lu, "but we don't get a penny from the government. Everything comes from the public and from enterprises, although we do enjoy favorable policies from the government [e.g. work units in State enterprises are obliged to give volunteers their old jobs back once their period of service is over] and get support and attention from government leaders. It's one of my main tasks to ask [enterprises] for money."
The Poverty-Alleviation Relay Project has a lot in common with development work pursued by overseas volunteer agencies, with whom the CYVA is increasingly developing contacts. Skilled volunteers from the cities are sent into poor areas to share their skills and raise locals' ability to work themselves out of poverty.
Short-term projects also pursue this strategy. Kang Enkuan, 36, from Wheat Research Office of the Beijing Agriculture Institute, went to poverty-stricken Xiji County in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region on a one-week program to give training lectures on agricultural techniques.
"Agriculture is on-the-spot, hands-on work,"he said. "But the project was more than that, it was about increasing awareness, helping out through information. My greatest contribution was educating local people to help themselves."
