 Welcome to SOAS. My name is Lucia Dolce. I'm the chair of the Center of Buddhist Studies here at SOAS. I'm delighted to welcome you to the first of the 2022nd Robert H. Ho family foundation lecture series in Chinese Buddhist. This is the first time that we are back on campus after two years of online meeting, online seminars, postponed speakers giving the difficulties of international travel. So I'm delighted to see so many of you here and even more to have an eminent speaker who has made it across the pond. So thank you all and thanks to our speaker. I would like to say a few words about this lecture series before introducing you. This is the fifth year that we hold the whole foundation lecture series in Chinese Buddhism. We normally have three lectures every year. We will have another one this year as well. The aim of this lecture series is to engage Chinese Buddhism from a non-sectarian perspective and to explore the impact of Buddhism on Chinese culture and society from different angles, from different disciplinary perspectives. We have covered history, art history, material culture, sociology, politics of health today, both in the present and in the past. So we'd like to offer just a platform to think more about the importance of this tradition that we call Buddhism in the vast geographic area that we call China. This lecture series also offers an opportunity for further training of advanced postgraduate students. And so after this public lecture tonight, we'll have an extended seminar tomorrow for our graduate students, graduate students from the southeast of Britain, maybe, we'll make it as far as Oxford and Cambridge, I think. So this is a wonderful opportunity for us to take advantage of the presence of specialists in one or the other fields of Chinese inquiry about Chinese Buddhism. So let me take this chance to express our appreciation to the Robert H. O. Family Foundation for having enabled us to create such a marvelous occasion of learning and sharing knowledge. Now I'd like to introduce the speaker, but actually I introduced my colleague, Dr. Travanyi, who is our lecturer in Chinese Buddhism, and who will kindly tell us something more about our speaker. Thank you, Lucian, and thank you, everyone, for being here today for this talk. It's my great honor and even more pleasure to introduce Professor Andrea Liberté, who is a close colleague and a dear friend. Professor Liberté completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 1999 and is currently a professor at the University of Ottawa in the School of Political Studies. As a political scientist, Andrea has been looking at domestic policies and, of course, working on China also close trade relations. He looked at social welfare, law, so a number of matters, but he also been working a lot on the relationship between religion and politics, both in China and in Taiwan. He has been also looking at law, social welfare, and all these issues from the perspective of interaction between especially Buddhist organizations, so to say religious, but especially Buddhist organizations and politics, focusing mostly on the contemporary time, with exception of a couple of books that I'm gonna tell you a little bit more in a second. He has been exploring important concepts that we find in the study of Buddhism and religion, that we find in the study of culture and politics, the idea of modernity, the idea of secularities, and he also tried to redefine them in light of his work on China, but he also in light of his conversations with colleagues in China and Taiwan. So Andrea Liberté is one of the, not many colleagues in his field, but he's also had very fruitful and respectful relationship with academic colleagues in China and Taiwan, has been exchanging, trying to see also native concepts that we may not be so much familiar with in a Western academia. So always trying to find the balance between Chinese and Taiwanese framework of concepts like secularities and modernities, for instance, and what we usually know from a more Western perspective. So this is something that says a lot about Andrea. He also has extensive fieldwork in China and Taiwan. He has been invited to give talks also in China, in Chinese, and in Taiwan. In Chinese, not in Taiwanese, as far as I know. And in Western countries, he has been part of a number of team projects, including one on religious diversities with a multi-year project led by a scholar also to the University of Ottawa, Laurie Beeman, that involved a very large team and look at religious diversity and again secularities, modernity, and West and East and West. And more recently, he has been part of another multi-year research project, LIPE-Z, led by Philip Clark on multiple secularities, also looking at East and West. While he was there, he received, of course he was part of many others, I'm just trying to summarize his CV, and of course when I was there, he also received a research award from the Humboldt Foundation in 2018, especially for his work on China and Taiwan and in the idea of secularities. I would just mention a few of his publication, thinking of his work on Buddhism. His very first book from 2004, The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan, focusing mostly on the Zheji Foundation, has been also a revision of his PhD dissertation. He's co-editor of Buddhism After Mao, the very first edited collection of essays to try to explore what happened to Buddhism in China after the Cultural Revolution. He has co-edited also a volume, Concert and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions with a certain Stefania Travagnini, I don't know who that is, and thinking of his idea that goes not just into religion but also the idea of secularity, has co-edited a volume, Secular States and Religious Diversity. Among his last publication in 2021, he published China in a Secular Age, Copying with a Legacy of Religious State from Rio. And what he's gonna present us today is part of his work of his many, many years research on philanthropy, Buddhist philanthropy. He's gonna look at China more specifically but he will also make reference to Taiwan. He has been doing very long research on Buddhist philanthropy in pre-modern China, then moving into the Republican period and then focusing on the contemporary age. The manuscript was too long, so the publisher suggested to have two volumes out of it, the very long titles. So one is Religion and China's Welfare Regimes, Buddhist Philanthropy and the State. The second one is Chinese Religions and Welfare Regimes beyond the PRC, Legacies of Empire and Multiple Secularities. In his work is a, of course, look beyond China and so Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Chinese Overseas. So we can say that social welfare and philanthropy is a kind of team that has been going through his old work since the time of his PhD. These books are gonna be out in a couple of, in a few months, but this year by Paul Grave. So we are very fortunate to have him introducing today and tomorrow, part of his research on this topic. So I will leave the floor to you, André. Okay. Thank you very much, Lucian. And thank you very much, Defania, for this very kind introduction. Thank you all for coming. It means a lot for me to be here. That's my first trip since I was writing that book in Leipzig more than two years ago. So I'm really grateful again for hosting me here to present this project. And you said everything there is to say about the origins of that project. And again, thank you very much for providing this very important context. Now what I would like to say is that I'm aware that most of you are looking at Buddhism from a historical perspective, textual perspective, from the perspective of religious studies, anthropology. My talk is going to be a little bit geared towards the politics. But let me reassure you, I'm not going to talk about contested or controversial issues. I want to talk about, in the spirit of the Roberto Foundation, more about the contribution of Buddhism in contemporary Chinese society. And I think that when you want to look at it, there's many ways to look at that. Many of you who have looked at the history of Buddhism from an anthropological or a cultural perspective are aware of the contribution of Buddhism for aesthetics, for philosophy. But that's not my focus. My focus is actually looking at how the tradition has been over centuries translated into providing goods for society. Today my talk is going to be focusing primarily on contemporary China. And when I say contemporary China, I'm not going to talk about Buddhism from 49 to 78, because that's a very tragic and sad story. I do touch upon that a little in the book, but I don't think that's what we need to discuss. I think what is more significant is how Buddhism has revived since the beginning of the reform and opening period, and how much the government, and then I will have to make some subtle distinctions here between the government, the Communist Party, and the Buddhist Association of China, how they have worked together to ensure that Buddhism would be significant as an influence in Chinese society, and how much the rest of society have responded to that, because that's not an easy relationship at times. So what I will do first is just to give you a sense of what inspired me to do that, and keep in mind that as a political scientist, I have some obligations. I have the obligations to frame my research into a certain context. I have to ask political questions, and I have to say it's not the easiest part, because in political science, especially in Canada, we don't tend to look at religion as being an important element of contemporary societies, except when we talk about the secular state and controversies that are related to New Canadians, which is an important issue, but I was interested in China. So how religion is relevant to contemporary Chinese societies for a political scientist is always a bit of a challenge, because I know that many of my colleagues in political science, when they talk about religion very often, they will focus on the contradictions between the Communist Party and the religious life of contemporary Chinese. I was not interested in that. You probably guess why, because it's just impossible to research that kind of topic, unless you're willing to court controversy, and I don't think it's productive, and I don't think it's useful, and I don't think that helped us appreciate the reality of contemporary Chinese society. So I deliberately choose to look at Buddhism, because I'm aware that for many decades now, Buddhism has been one of the Chinese religions that has received a rather positive appreciation from the regime, and also I deliberately choose not to look at Tibetan Buddhist tradition, because the Tibetan tradition is, as you're aware, unfortunately embroiled in a very difficult relationship with the Chinese government. That's a choice I've made, and that's not pleasing everyone, but I assume it, and if people want to talk about that after the question period, I'll be more than happy to do that, which will not be recorded anyways. So the question that I wanted to ask, and I have to frame that, again, I have the professional obligation, if you like, to frame my research into a broader context. What can we learn from the examination of a problem in China? And so I have to ask, what is the relevance of religion in contemporary societies when it comes to big issues like social welfare? You probably are aware that in Western societies for centuries, churches were big providers of social surfaces in areas like healthcare. Education and the history of Western societies is a struggle for the state to establish its responsibility in the delivery of these services. The theoretical question here is that, to what extent this approach to understand the relation between religion and politics is something that exists in other societies? Many colleagues looking at the politics in the Middle East, in South Asia, in Latin America, in Africa pay attention to this issue and they find that many post-colonial societies are, in a way, not reproducing. Of course, they have their own way, their own path-dependent trajectory. But they do have, when the state is lacking the capacity to deliver social services, relying on non-state actors, which often happen to be religious institutions. So, in the United States, there's a theory of the social capital, but I didn't use that that much, but I was more interested in the approach used by people like Melanie Camet. She did a study of the delivery of social services in the Middle East and what was the consequences for politics in Lebanon and other countries in the region. So I was having these questions in the back of my mind. What would be the political consequence in the long run if we think that the Chinese government would consider outsourcing the delivery of some social services to religious organizations? So that's the broad question. And of course, to explore that question, I also look at it in societies like Taiwan, where this is actually, this has happened since Taiwan was under the rule of the Guomintang in 1945. And that's not an issue that is much controversial and that's an issue that is still ongoing today. But I wanted to look at how does that work out in the People's Republic since 1978. The interesting thing is that when I was starting this research, even before going to do field work in China and looking at the knowledge that was already starting to emerge, I had first to have an understanding of the religious reality of China. I have to say that was a steep learning curve. First of all, you cannot compare the Catholic Church in Europe to any religion in China, even if there's a Catholic Church in China because of the political system. And I'm not talking about the Communist Party here, I'm talking about the institutions during the imperial era. There's a particular way in which the political authority dealt with religion. But I was pleased to see that now there's emerging in China with colleagues like Tao Feiya, Liu Yi, Li Xiangping, et cetera, many people who are really interested in looking at how religion can be significant for Chinese society through the medium of charity. And how much that has contributed really to shape the evolution of the policies there. And one of my inspiration and certainly one of my guide was Wang Jia. She's a young scholar who has literally mobilized a number of sociologists, historians, and political scientists looking at this specific issue of Buddhism and charity since the North and South Dynasty when Buddhism arrived in China. So she managed to collect these others. So just to have a sense of the existence of Buddhist philanthropy in China, there's a long tradition behind what we can observe today. Now, so that's for the background. Now, if we want to, the question, the puzzle if you like that I want to ask myself as a political scientist is not the attitude of the religious actors. For people who study religion, you understand, you're attuned to the desire of people to live their faith. You understand why people do what they do because they have beliefs, they have a worldview, they have sentiments. You want to realize their religion. So Suzanne McCarty wrote about that and she is a fellow political scientist, but she was really, really explaining how much people who were in Christian Buddhists and Muslim charities were really living through their faith by the practice of charity. And then just when I was finishing writing this manuscript, I just encountered that great text by Robert Weller, Julia Huang, Fang Liju and Hu Ke Ping who wrote about Buddhist charities in China, Malaysia and Taiwan. But looking at the perspective again of the religious believers, not from the perspective of the government and hence my question for myself is not so much what's the motivation of the religious actors, not the motivation of the Buddhist believers. To me, it's not a mystery. People who are Buddhists, they want to express their sense of compassion by having charitable activities and they express their own belief and views of the world. But why the government would decide to outsource to Buddhist organization the delivery of social services? There are practical reasons, one which is that governments in many societies consider that to establish a solid and generous welfare state with all the different services that are offered can be quite expensive and represent a burden to the state. So outsourcing is a mechanism that makes sense. However, in the context of China, the outsourcing to religious institutions might just raise issues like the issues that Melanie Kemet mentioned in her book on the outsourcing to non-state actors in the Middle East. To what extent outsourcing to religious organization in a society like China could generate contestation or simply empower actors that are not necessarily willing to cooperate with the Communist Party. So not a words why the Communist Party was willing to take that risk. So that's a question to which I don't have a definite answer. It's impossible to get a definite answer because China is so complicated, so diverse that it's as hard as to say too much. So I will intersperse my lecture with some of these images to give you a sense of the depth of the issue. So what I want to do now is just give you a little bit of the context of why the Chinese state under the PRC has decided to take this action. And what I wanted to do is to understand philanthropy from the perspective of the state, from the perspective of the government, to what extent the government is mutually constituted with religious institution. And I relied for that on the work of Yoshiko Ashua and David Wang, who a couple of years ago wrote a book where they look at different religious traditions and how the Communist Party has managed to literally institutionalize the very sometimes chaotic and fluid religious life in China by putting some sort of a straight jacket in the very, very again fluid religious life in China. The other aspect of course that cannot be avoided is looking at how the party state really ensures that there's a firm control that limits the possible activities of religious institution with the work of James Tong who looked at how much the government is able to control religious life. So his work was about Falun Gong and that work was really a very, very detailed description of how much the Communist Party is able to manage religious life. So in other words, the Communist Party has the ability if ever it perceive a challenge to its authority, it has the ability, the capacity to manage that. So in other words, the Communist Party by allowing Buddhist institution to deliver social service was aware that it has the capacity also to limit that intervention. So the question is why then the Chinese government is willing to take that risk? And basically the hypothesis is the context of the state retrenchment from social policies. I don't know how many of you are used to the history of the People's Republic after 49 and the ambition on the Mao Zedong of having the state provide social services to the population from the cradle to the grave, that is childcare, education, elderly care, pensions, everything was to be covered by the state. Not exactly like the model of the welfare state in Western Europe or Canada, but more the ideal of the communes for people in the countryside and in cities, in factories. If you are working for a large corporation that is state owned, then you would have social services. But under Mao that was ruining the country economically. China was poor, could not afford to have this fast comprehensive welfare system and in the policy of reform in 78, then shopping decided that the Communist Party will dismantle that form of comprehensive welfare system. And ever since the Chinese government has been tried very much to establish the foundation for a comprehensive welfare state and it's still struggling to establish that. There's many legislation, there's many laws and regulation to provide pensions and all sorts of service but it's still an unfinished work. There are many places in the countryside in poverty-ish provinces that have difficulties in providing those services. And there's also new challenges that are making the situation of welfare provisions in China even more complicated. As you're aware, China is facing one of the most dramatic aging of its population and that's going to represent an enormous burden for Chinese society. So in my work I paid attention to these issues very much so the work of Ralph Frazier on the mounting demographic issues that are affecting China but also the limits of the state provision and the work of Bisharov and Baylor was bringing together a dozen scholars who looked at specific policies and they all pointed to the same direction that the Communist Party wants to provide to the population but at the same time it's facing many challenges and the issue here is that in as much as the government might provide for elderly care and services for the whole population there will be elements of the population that will be left behind. Orphans, people who suffer from disability, people who are even in our wealthy societies are very often neglected. So that's where the religious institutions certainly in Taiwan, that was where they were providing the kind of services that the government considered too expensive and therefore the policy of outsourcing. To what extent the Communist Party was willing to go ahead with that kind of outsourcing. So the research was about looking into that. So I started in Taiwan because that was easy in the 1990s to do that kind of research and it was also important for me to understand how does that work out in reality. So that's why I found out about Cedigong Derui which is this huge philanthropy that runs hospital so I could see the materiality of what it means to say that there's Buddhist philanthropy. Does that exist in China? That was a question. And the evidence came a long time before it to emerge and the evidence was I would say sparse, and varied in space and time. And the question that arise and I will share with you in a moment some of the findings. But the issue that interests me now is what explain the regional variations and also how sustainable is that approach. Because on the one hand it meets some needs but at the same time is it likely to be existing in the long run. So that will proceed in a comparative context again to show you the relevance of the situation that China is experiencing. So what you have here is to go back to my point about the ambition of the Chinese state. What you have here is the people's commune. This idea that the state would look at every needs social needs of the population. And therefore in my book I tried to put China in comparative perspectives in three different stages. China starting from 49 until the reform and opening period as being more of a developing state and therefore having the same predicament but choosing its own particular way to address the issue of social welfare. Primarily it's a story of state consolidation and therefore an attempt to establish a foundation for welfare state. China choose as you're aware particular path of socialism with the state being very present in delivering a service. And I explain why it was considered unsustainable and China has adopted the third stage which is a strategy of the developmental state that Taiwan, South Korea, Japan have adopted. A policy where the state is giving some directive for economic development and invest for the important aspect of social policies like education, like healthcare to ensure that you have a healthy and well-trained workforce but leave to the private sector the service that are not considered from a purely macroeconomic perspective to be important. So I would like now to give you the context since the beginning of the reform policy of the different changes that have allowed for the development of Buddhist philanthropy and what made it possible. So I will start by discussing first the political context and after that I will move to the different regulations that allowed for the presence of Buddhism as an actor. What I want to say and that photo is just an illustration of how much and as much as I talked to you about the difficulty of the party state to put in place a comprehensive social welfare. I still want to emphasize that the Chinese government wants to do something and has also a very remarkable realization in providing and keep in mind that Buddhist philanthropy is really about trying to fill the gap and trying to complement if you like the issues that the state cannot address. So the thing to keep in mind is to look at the different stage of this evolution and the outsourcing to religious institutions came very slowly. Under the policy of dainty shopping, this was not even an option. That was still under the shadow of the Maoist policy that the Communist Party should look after every aspect of social policy. Under Jiang Zemin though, under Jiang Zemin the policy of economic reform was starting to show some of its less positive aspect, increased inequality and the dismantling of the communes led to a lot of people being unemployed, people without pensions and all sorts of social ills that were caused by the economic change. And therefore under Jiang Zemin there was a realization that well maybe the state should consider outsourcing to non-state actors the provision of social service. But there's something that happened as you know in 1999. The culmination of the Qigong fever with Falun Gong which was and that's something that is not really discussed because people focus on the political religious challenge but there was something deeper in the emergence of the Qigong in general. That was a form of, it's not even a protest. When people were in the street and doing all of these different calisthenic movements and claiming that it was good for their mental health, spiritual health what they were saying is that well the government is not really competent in providing healthcare. So it was not a criticism, it was not an open criticism but that the symbolic value that really hurt. And so that's why if you want to understand the intensity of the government repression under Jiang Zemin against Falun Gong and all the other movement in the Qigong that's part of the explanation. That was really for them a very, very strong disapproval of the policy of reform and its consequence. Under Hu Jintao I would say we have a short period of time where all of these issues were reassessed. And under Hu Jintao there was this growing realization that China has to prepare for the challenge of demographic change caused by the aging of its population and to what extent it has to quickly think of alternatives to state provision and therefore there was at the end of the Hu Jintao administration this opinion that was published about the necessity or that the possibility that religion could serve the public interest. And I'll get into a moment in a moment about the legal dimension of these aspects. Now I leave that open for the last paragraph here. Under Xi Jinping, is that policy going to continue? And that's where I cannot conclude now, it's too early. We don't know how long it will stay in power but what we can say with some certainty is that Xi Jinping is questioning the policy of Hu Jintao because he does think that giving religion any kind of influence is something that the party is not comfortable with. However, it's not clear to what extent other members of the Communist Party in the Central Committee and below and the local branches of the party at the provincial level. It's not clear what they think about this because especially in the provinces where you have a more shaky or more difficult regimes of social welfare therefore outsourcing provisions might be considered more favorably. So in other words, I leave that open as a question. To what extent we can be sure that this policy is going to stop or will that be resumed after Xi Jinping? Because the demographic challenge will stay with China. I mean the aging of its population and all the difficulties that people have to meet is going to be an issue. Now I want to move, why Buddhism? Because when we think of social welfare in China outsourced religion and when we look at the experience of Taiwan it was not Buddhists that were present at the beginning. There's lots of complex reasons for that. And very often that was the Christian churches. What you see here is an hospital that was established by the Protestant Church of China. And they were not supposed to do those kind of things. But during the period of opening and reform Deng Xiaoping really encouraged Chinese Protestants to collaborate with their international co-religionists and looked favorably at the Amity Foundation which is actually based in Canada. So he encouraged that because the Amity Foundation was if you like the progressive branch of Protestant churches in North America. So they looked favorably at that because they wanted to learn how a religious organization provide for different form of social services in particular here healthcare. So which religious actors had to be chosen? In the beginning of the reform policy there was some consideration for Protestant churches because they had experience because they have showed what they were capable of in other East Asian societies. And so the Amity has established the Jinder Foundation which was very, very, and still today is one of the largest charity of its kind in China. Then they also encouraged Catholics to do the same thing. But of course because of the relationship between the Protestant churches and the Catholic church with co-religionists abroad they felt this was not their favorite option. And therefore Buddhism, sorry, Buddhism was considered a more palatable option. And by the way, I have to just say a few things about the other religions, right? Why not Islam? You can imagine Islam is not a religion that is practiced by Han ethnic Chinese. So therefore there's no possibility in that regards except perhaps for the Hui and the other Muslim population of China. But for Taoists, Taoists don't have the kind of institutional experience that the Christians had or Buddhists. And hence the choice of Buddhism as a possible actor to support the state. Buddhists had the institutional capacity. That is they were organized. They also had the intellectual, the background to justify why they could be active in helping the government. And that's a very complex story. There was, of course, at the beginning of the 20th century, I'm sure that many of you are aware of this, that the movement for the modernization of Buddhism, the Ren-Chen Fodiao and Ren-Chen Fodiao, which really encouraged Buddhists to be more active in society. Not only worry about religion, but really care about society. And also, of course, again, the experience of other East Asian societies, of what Buddhists have been able to achieve, and what is important to keep in mind is that also the networks of the Chinese diaspora was a channel through which knowledge, resource, and support could be transmitted. And finally, Buddhists had also another advantage. They are really integrated in all level of Chinese society. They are present at the level of village, cities, and, of course, the Communist Party, encouraging the institutionalization of religion favored the constitution of very far-reaching organization that would allow for the development of other activities. That started in stages. And now we'll move to how that came about in China. It's interesting, and I was the first one surprised by that development, actually, is that in as much as theoretically speaking, Buddhism was seen as a possible source of support to the Communist Party. And again, the outsourcing of social service to vulnerable populations, it didn't come about easily because in as much as there's a potential, there's still a need to ensure how does that work. And here, the experience of Tsejigongdehui in Taiwan was seen as a model, but what you see here is actually not photos of Tsejigongdehui in Taiwan. This is in China. So Tsejig started to respond to calls from local governments in China in the 1990s following floods, following natural disaster, and send volunteers for a short period of time just to provide support and local governments for their own reasons. Sometimes they lacked support from higher authorities. They lacked resources, mainly. And therefore, how does that work? And so on the top here is an orphanage for young children in Wuhan. Here is a school in Hubei, and below is a hospital for triage in Suzhou. Not a full-blown hospital because that would be, I think, too much. That would be going too far. But nevertheless, a school. That's not a school, of course, where they teach Buddhism because that's forbidden. You can well imagine. But nevertheless, this is the logo of Tsejig here. So it kind of surprised me when I saw that. So in other words, that was a stage process. Like very often it works for all sorts of policies. Economic reform came about very gradually. I'll talk to you about the dismantling of the communes before. It was decided in 78, but that was completed in 94. So to outsource to Buddhist organization social policy came very gradually. But look at the beginning. It's 1981. Already the Buddhist Association of China through its leader, Zhao Puchu, thought that they have to think about how Buddhists can justify that they would cooperate with the Communist Party for providing social service. So intellectually that was making its way within the Buddhist Association. And then the key point is that by saying that religion is compatible with socialism, then they clear the political obstacle. By providing social services, they were clearly saying that, no, no, we're not opposing the authorities. We're working with them. And then Zhao Puchu from the perspective of Buddhist devotee says that, well, Renjian Fujia is going now to be our approach. So the approach that was encouraging Buddhists to get involved in society became adopted. And then it became part of the charter of the Buddhist Association. It still is the case today. What is interesting is that when Soji arrived in China, it was in 1992, 94. Just two years after, the Nanpu Tuo temple, and I'll show you a photo in a moment, the Nanpu Tuo temple in the province of Fujian, facing Taiwan, where Taishu was teaching, became one of the first charity that was receiving the support of the local Buddhist Association and of course the local government. In 95, we had the first provincial Buddhist charity association established. And then these developments were incremental, invisible for the most part for outsiders because let's face it, when Westerners during those years were looking at religion in China, they were looking at issues like the Qigong movement, they were paying attention to Christians and very often didn't pay too much attention to the Buddhist associations. And frankly, that was not visible. I have to say that too. The government may have wanted to learn from what was happening in Taiwan, but for the Communist Party, that was not something that would be publicized. And even today, it's very difficult to find the evidence of charity unless you really go and ask for it because that's not something that is advertised for pretty obvious reasons of legitimacy in the sense of the party being in control. But what was key was in 2008, the earthquake in Sichuan, where really the event really hurt very, very hard the province. There were hundreds of thousands of people who perished and there was instantly a rapid mobilization from the Chinese government asking for help from outside organization, then religious organization intervened and that's where the potential for Buddhism came very clearly, but also Chinese Buddhist associations were very active in contributing to the rehabilitation of the communities that were destroyed by the earthquake. So four years after, the Communist Party United Front Work Department issued that legal opinion that I mentioned in which religion should be accepted as working for the public interest and on the same year was established the first National Buddhist Charity Association. So it was not a religious organization, that was a charity. So let me now share with you some of the concrete evidence of how does that translate. So you have at the bottom here, what you have is in Guangzhou, a provincial Buddhist association that provide Chinese traditional medicine. So it's a network of clinics that clearly dispense for a kind of service that is not the same thing as a hospital that is accredited by the government, but nevertheless that look at kind of if you like palliative healthcare, a form of healthcare that is helping people who have no access to healthcare, the way that people who are fully covered by the Hukou and the institutionalized system. Then you have here activities for protection of the environment and I'll say something in a moment about that in Beijing. In the middle activities where people are collecting donated clothes and on the far left, above you have a school for orphans and children with disability that was operated in Hebei. So here you have the Nanpu Tuo temple that is established and again, that's a temple that had a very important reputation in Chinese Buddhism for since the beginning of the 20th century and that has established here I'm sorry that the character are blurred, but that's really the seat, the headquarters of the charity of the Nanpu Tuo temple. And then the Duitian Charity Foundation in Shanghai. So in other words now you do have, for those who follow closely Chinese Buddhism who read the journal published by the Buddhist Association like Faiyan, they would see these activities being from time to time advertised. And then when you go to visit the temples, you do have also material representation of what they have been doing, even papers that are commenting about their activities, who are their donors and how much people were contributing. So I'll go very quickly now to, because how much do I have? Okay, so I will go quickly through the examples and after that I'm happy during the Q&A period to come back to these because I want to go to the important issue here. So in other words, what I'm saying here is that there's many different ways in which the Buddhist philanthropies organize at the level of temple-based charities like Nanpu Tuo, but sometimes also it's the local municipal Buddhist Association that create its own charity and in the case of provinces like Hebei, that's at a higher level. So in other words, that's coming at different levels, which suggest a variety of resource. Of course, a temple does not have the same resource as a province, but at the same time, a temple also can benefit from its reputation and therefore attract also funding from abroad. So the importance of connections with the overseas Chinese community really matter in that sense. So the Hebei Provincial Buddhist Association, which was one of the first one established, provided a model and still the question is open today and that's part of the kind of difficult problems that I have to deal with and for which I cannot provide a resolution why the province of Hebei because that's not where live most of Chinese Buddhists. Most of them live in Fujian, the Jiang, and Hebei is not a province where you have many Buddhists, but that's one of the first Buddhist Provincial Association and there's no Fujian Provincial Buddhist Association. There's Xiamen, there's the Nanpu Tuo Temple, but in other words, there's a kind of different politics at the provincial municipal level that explain these variations. So different path to institutionalization and that is an area for which there's much more research that need to be done, but I don't want to spend too much time on that. I want to focus now on what were the activities that Buddhist philanthropic associations have been doing. So they do things that really the government like and that's before COVID, right? They are actually reaching out to people in remote communities that want to have basic healthcare. So there's an aspect of public education that is really supporting the state effort to reach out the communities. So charity clinics is an activity that is often undertaken, but also, and that's the key, right? People who suffer from physical, psychological, mental disability or people that are not considered as productive for a government that is really focused on development rapidly. And therefore, they need to have some resource to help the people who are disadvantaged. And so that's an important service they provide. And keep in mind that when the government allow that kind of activity, it derives legitimacy because it allows that to happen in the first place. But also, and that's where it's the, I would say the liminal space between which the state encouraged charity, but at the same time, to what extent it is allowing that to continue is in the area of poverty elevation and support to education. Because when you're talking about poverty alleviation, you're starting to talk about the primary goal of the Communist Party. You're talking about its source of legitimacy. Likewise for education, when Buddhists contribute to education, it's never in giving Buddhists education. That's something completely separate. You go, if you want to become a monk, if you want to take the precepts, you have a separate stream. And that's clear that you do that as in addition to the normal education that everyone has to follow. What they do, though, is they do provide scholarship. They do provide financial support to children in impoverished regions who otherwise would not have access to education. So the main activities that the Buddhist associations have been doing throughout the period of Jiang Zemin under the radar, but more clearly under Hu Jintao, more visibly, are in terms of disaster relief and starting really with great success and visibility in the heart quake in such one in 2008. Then support to students' education, Zhu Shui, poverty alleviation, medical treatment assistance. Again, four cases that are heavy and difficult, but also two other things that are a little bit more recent, elderly care and environmental protection. And environmental protection is interesting because that's something that is, in a way, congruent with many of the views that Buddhists hold very dear. So the next part of my presentation I'll skip because it's about ethnographic data about the temple of Lungchuan, which was owning the charitable activities of the Renai Foundation, which was an interesting example of a charity that was emulating what happened before in Taiwan in particular and tried to follow a little bit on the food step of the Tseji Foundation. But I will show you through these images what they advertise as their activity. So one activity that they do is to provide congee to passerbys in different cities. But it's not an activity that has anything to do with poverty alleviation, with education. So it's just the level of symbols showing that they want to nurture different feelings in Chinese society. They do, however, provide some form of support to students. And they do encourage education for filial piety. So in other words, they are more into a form of cultural influence rather than social policy, except for a little bit of poverty alleviation. Now what you have here is Shreya, who was the previous chairman of the Buddhist Association of China. As many of you are aware, he has been demoted, so he's not in charge anymore. But he was responsible for the Renai Foundation. He was one of the founders of the foundation. Is your question about Shreya, or? Yes, of course. No, well, I'm not going to say anything about him. I'll just say that he founded that. And he's OK. No, no, I'll be happy to discuss that, but I just want to finish the lecture. Sorry. So and probably that's the reason why you made this intervention, because the Renai Foundation was seen as a window to an approach to charity for Buddhists. But it stopped. And what you see here are images of what the Renai Foundation advertised. And like Suji, who does eight different food step or eight different activities in philanthropy, Renai Foundation offered eight different paths, if you like, to provide service to the population, but something slightly different and not as far reaching. So in other words, they don't run hospitals. They don't operate at the same scale of service. They do have an important role for laypeople. So it's not about monastics. It's laypeople who are Buddhist devotees and that are willing to contribute to society. So the clothing donation that I mentioned before, the Joe distribution and this kind of campaign for environmental protection. But what I wanted to show you is this, is that there was an attempt in the Renai Foundation to become institutionalized and not as a religious organization. So yes, not as a Buddhist organization, but as a charity. What does that tell us? That tells us that and that's the reality today. So these two last images are really what today Renai Foundation is advertising. They do advertise that they have donors and they have donors and they also have some specific budget for specific service that they are offering. And the most important one being for scholarships. You have also Loving Family, which is support for, it's part of poverty alleviation. And then Penpal's here, Xinjiang, sorry for the translation, but that's about psychological counseling. Not really something professional, but simply for people who are in situations of distress. They advertise also who are their donors. And what I want to emphasize here is that there's an attempt to really establish different branches and to really develop activities throughout the country. And that's probably one of the reasons why it's difficult to them to continue their activities because that's a level of institutionalization which is outside and beyond the kind of institutionalization that is allowed for the Buddhist association. So I'm getting near the end of the slide now. So I just want to emphasize that the development of Buddhist philanthropy is a bit at a standstill now because of COVID. COVID has meant a lot of disruption for public interactions. But still when the situation returned to some sort of a normalcy, and again when the political situation become clearer, it's going to be interesting to see to what extent this will continue. So in other words, this part here is a little bit speculative. There are reasons why the government would like that to continue, but at the same time, there are real obstacles. And I would like to focus on that in concluding. There are limited human resources that allow for a continuation of Buddhist philanthropy. And also there's still some hesitation, and you can understand, from the Buddhist community to continue. And there's also the continued reluctance of the Communist Party to let that continue. So I'm going to conclude now about the challenges that are faced by Buddhist charities if they want to continue. So they have to benefit from a clearer institutional framework. So I mentioned to you, there is an opinion that encouraged them to serve the society. But an opinion is not a law. So an opinion say, you could do this, but we cannot tell you if it's legal. So in other words, there are still lots of obstacles to surmount. Then to what extent merit societies, because many of the charities that I showed you would have names as foundation, which is to collect money. When you say merit society, it shows a little bit more ambition because it's not only to do fundraising, but it's also there's something more to it. There's a mission of educate people in what is Buddhism in practice? What does that mean in terms of its activities? And also, of course, the more that Buddhist charities are institutionalized, that means they need more accountability. They need more supervision from the government. So in other words, there's this contradiction here, or difficulty, which is if they want to continue to develop, they must accept greater state supervision. And I will leave that at this because the rest is, I guess, going to be part of the question and answer period. So thank you very much.