Changing Norms: University Students and Volunteering in China

Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center presents a talk by Anthony J. Spires from the Chinese University of Hong Kong to discuss the changing aspects of volunteering among college students in China.

Over the past 20 years, organized volunteering has quietly developed as an important but contested field within Chinese civil society. This talk draws on a decade of research with various Chinese NGOs as well as recent interviews with 60 young NGO participants in southern China, mostly university students and recent graduates. The speaker Anthony J. Spires contrasts their experiences in off-campus, youth-led voluntary associations with the officially approved student organizations of ‘normal’ university life. These young volunteers are particularly critical of the party-state’s utilitarian efforts to funnel their enthusiasm and compassion into political projects and officially-prescribed goals. Unhappy with the ‘formalistic’ nature of typical organizations, youth engaging in bottom-up volunteer initiatives articulate their own priorities, including a strong desire for meaningful, personal engagement and more egalitarian decision-making processes. By bringing to the fore the voices and subjective experiences of volunteers themselves, Spires's findings suggest that government-directed volunteering is failing to satisfy the expectations of an important segment of Chinese youth. He argues that the gap between the two has given birth to an emergent, counter-hegemonic discourse about volunteering and civil society more broadly, one that valorizes alternative social values and democratic organizational norms.

About the Speaker

Anthony J. Spires, who originally comes from a small farming community in rural Georgia, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Centre for Civil Society Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Asian Studies from Occidental College. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and an MA in East Asian Studies from Yale University, where he also co-founded YaleGlobal Online. His recent publications include an analysis of the political survival strategies of China’s grassroots NGOs (in the American Journal of Sociology), an assessment of U.S. foundation grant-making to China (in the Journal of Civil Society) and a survey of NGOs in three key regions of China (in The China Journal). He is currently researching the experiences of international NGOs in China and also working on a book about youth, democratic culture, and civil society in China.

Persons with disabilities interested in attending the event who may require assistance, please contact Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center in advance at (812) 855-3765.