A New Generation of Philanthropy in China
March 26, 2019 12:00 p.m. ET
From left: Lawrence Chan, Niu Gensheng, Dee Dee Chan, Jet Li, Jack Ma, Li Ka-shing. ILLUSTRATION BY GLUEKIT; SOURCE IMAGES: GETTY IMAGES AND BLOOMBERG
In Hong Kong, home to some of the richest people in the world, philanthropist Dee Dee Chan is making sure her generation learns how to give back.
In 2014, Chan, who is in her 30s, started a group for her peers—young people from families with at least US$500 million in assets who play an active role in their families’ businesses—to learn about philanthropy and to put it into practice. The hope is to “raise the ‘future generals’ who will make a huge impact on society through their own charitable efforts,” she says.
Chan is the granddaughter of billionaire Chan Chak Fu, who ran a global hotel and real estate business. Today, she’s managing director at Park Lane Capital Holdings, formed in 2007 from the fortune made by her father, Lawrence Chan, who developed and operated hotels and real estate projects.
She’s also director of the Seal of Love Charitable Foundation, a foundation started by her father in 2010, which donated 80 million Hong Kong dollars (US$10.2 million) in 2017 to the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to support an industry that has become a growing employment sector for the underprivileged in Southeast Asia.
The six or seven core members in each of the two chapters of Chan’s Next Generational Organization (NGO, for short) contribute to a collective pot that they allocate as a group, traveling twice a year for field visits to grassroots nonprofits in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. “The point is really to make mistakes early together and also have a forum in which we can actually do this together,” Chan says.
Lawrence Chan, 65, says his daughter’s NGO chapters will redefine philanthropy, as his generation—including Hong Kong’s wealthiest man and philanthropist, Li Ka-shing—is “starting to fade away.”
“ The point is to have a forum in which we can actually do this together. ”
—Dee Dee Chan
Great fortunes have been made in Asia in the past decade. But as the region’s riches have swelled, and as a younger generation emerges, China’s wealthy are increasingly seeking to maintain their family legacies and to give back. Groups have formed to encourage collaboration and education, including the China Global Philanthropy Institute, founded by three Chinese philanthropists—Niu Gensheng, He Qiaonyu, and Ye Qingjun—along with U.S. billionaires Bill Gates and Ray Dalio. Jack Ma, through the Alibaba Foundation, meanwhile, has sponsored the biannual Xin Philanthropy Conference since 2016.
Ma represents a newer, more visible wave of philanthropists who are trained abroad, globally engaged, and in touch with the concepts of philanthropy, says Anthony Saich, director of the Ash Center at Harvard, which runs the China Philanthropy Project. But there are a rising number of individual philanthropists within China who are having a profound influence, notably Niu Gensheng, a billionaire born to extreme poverty who made a fortune as the founder of China Mengniu Dairyin Inner Mongolia. Niu, 61, began the Lao Niu Foundation in 2004 to support the environment, cultural education, and development of the philanthropic sector.
One strategy that the Lao Niu Foundation is using to boost philanthropy is to train nonprofit professionals, “so that they’re regarded as professionals, just as public officials and private-sector individuals are,” says Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which is aiding the foundation.
The One Foundation, founded by Chinese actor Jet Li, is also helping to strengthen nonprofits by being transparent about what they fund, and which outcomes they achieve, Berman says.
While Niu and others have turned to the West for inspiration and practical advice, Rob Rosen, a director at the Gates Foundation, expects philanthropy in China to remain uniquely Chinese.
China’s philanthropists will want to know whether their funds are “being directed toward important issues in a deeply thoughtful way, and if they are taking an appropriate level of risk to really lead to bold change,” Rosen says. “They’re definitely on the pathway there.”