On a late afternoon in August 2006, Saomai, the ‘King of Typhoons’, made landfall in Haicheng County, Wenzhou, on China's southeast coast, displacing over 15,000 people and bringing complete darkness to the region. Saomai was the most powerful typhoon on record to hit China in half a century. Partly as a response to this record-breaking disaster, in July 2007 Liang Sicheng1 and two of his friends mobilised a team of 128 taxi drivers and formed the first county-wide search and rescue volunteer team in Haicheng County. Not long after, this grassroots volunteer team participated in the government-led relocation of over 130,000 people to temporary shelters right before the strong typhoon Wipha made landfall in Haicheng in September 2007. In 2008, Sicheng registered the team with the local Ministry of Civil Affairs as a social organisation, United Rescue, which became one of the first grassroots search and rescue (minjian jiuyuan) organisations officially registered in mainland China. Given that disaster relief efforts had mainly been a central task of the various levels of government since the Maoist era in the People's Republic of China (Liu et al 2012), this citizen-organised volunteer team was a pioneer and was experimenting with creative ways to sustain this novel form of social organisation prior to the central government formally granting it legitimacy. Soon, United Rescue established branch volunteer teams in local towns and expanded their volunteering services to a wide range of projects responding to a wide range of needs of local people. In response to a local typhoon in 2019, 143 volunteer organisations participated in the search and rescue disaster relief in Wenzhou. From just one in 2007 to 143 in 2019, the tremendous growth of grassroots search and rescue organisations in Wenzhou reflects a broader shift in China's disaster relief scene in the past two decades from state monopoly to growing social participation. This article explores what underlies the growth and the day-to-day operations of grassroots search and rescue volunteerism in contemporary China.
In some respects, the spectacular rise of grassroots search and rescue volunteerism in contemporary China can be contextualised in the global rise of ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ – ‘small scale acts of helping fellow humans more or less indiscriminately” that include “locally situated yet universalistic claims” (Brković 2023: 5). This volunteerism includes the ‘citizen aid’ discussed in other contexts that emphasises ‘small-scale civil society actors’ responding to local needs (Fechter and Schwittay 2019: 1770). In the growing field of anthropology of humanitarianism, the grassroots, vernacular, volunteer and everyday forms of humanitarianism are often contrasted with formalised humanitarianism in the forms of international organisations that took shape in the 1980s (Brković 2016; McGee and Pelham 2018; Richey 2018; Sandri 2018). This article joins the recent attempts of anthropologists and historians to de-centre and pluralise the humanitarianism that has so far been dominated by the paradigms of Northern-led and highly institutionalised international regimes (e.g. Brković 2023; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015; Li 2021).
While the language of humanitarianism has often been used today in association with human-rights-based efforts to alleviate the suffering of civilians in conflict zones, Craig Calhoun (2008) reminds us that such a specific contemporary designation of humanitarianism in the English language is a product of the post-Second World War's rise of ‘complex emergencies’ during the twentieth century (Calhoun 2008: 82–85). As Calhoun notes, the discourse of ‘complex emergencies’ that has complemented the post-war growth of Northern-led international humanitarian agencies targeted at civilians in conflict situations naturalises the results of human actions – ‘of colonialism, the end of the Cold War, and oil’ (2008: 85). Such ‘emergency imaginaries’, Calhoun continues, ‘represent as sudden, unpredictable, and short-term what are commonly gradually developing, predictable, and enduring clusters of events and interactions’ and hence justify Northern humanitarian imperatives and interventions (2008: 86). As Didier Fassin (2011: 6) puts it, ‘injustice is articulated as suffering’ in this new humanitarian governance in the global North. However, as historians and anthropologists point out, ‘humanitarianism’, just like charity and philanthropy, have multiple, local and transnational genealogies in non-Western contexts (Capotescu 2020; Fassin 2023; Fuller 2015; Li 2021). These alternative notions and forms of humanitarianism may operate on very different vernacular imaginaries from the Western liberal notions of universal humanity and Northern ‘emergency imaginaries’ and hence may disrupt the global structures of racial and civilisational hierarchies inherent to post-war, Northern-led transnational humanitarianism and open up the possibility of imagining alternative paradigms of humanitarianism in a shifting world order, one that goes beyond the entrapment of neoliberal capitalism, dystopian violence and dualistic hierarchies between those who have and those who have not (Capotescu 2020; Li 2021).2
My examination of the Chinese case uses ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ as an analytical term that is entangled with a myriad of vernacular concepts of ‘universal humanity’ and practices of charity, philanthropy and volunteerism (Brković 2023). For this article, I have chosen vernacular humanitarianism instead of other analytical terms anthropologists use (such as charity or philanthropy) so as to foreground the ethical imperatives and practices of helping to relieve human suffering, broadly defined.3 The exploration draws on my long-term fieldwork on grassroots volunteerism and charity in southeast China (2013, 2015–2017, 2018, 2020). Unlike conventional organisation-based research, my ethnographic research was undertaken at the scale of a county, in Haicheng County, Wenzhou, which has approximately 1.2 million people. I followed the volunteers not only on their volunteering trips and in their organisations but also to their homes and workplaces, as well as participated in their leisure-time activities such as late-night dinners and karaoke. Such place-based (versus organisation-based) research allowed me to gain insights into the entanglement of their desires and imaginaries with local sociality and politics beyond the space and time of volunteering. As Liisa Malkki's (2015) ethnography on Finnish humanitarianism powerfully shows, even explicitly ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘universal’ values and practices such as humanitarianism are supported by diverse motives particular to local sociality and politics.
Over the course of my long-term fieldwork in Wenzhou, I witnessed several new search and rescue volunteer teams being established and registered with the local government. Soon, county-wide and province-wide ‘grassroots search and rescue drills’ were being organised in which numerous teams of volunteers, dressed in diverse uniforms and holding banners with various names and badges, competed and cooperated in drills on the seas and in the mountains (Figure 1). These spectacular drill scenes seemed to mark a testimony to Wenzhou's status as an officially recognised ‘seven-star philanthropic city’ in China. At the same time, however, in their late-night dinners and tea socials, the earlier organisation founders and managers would complain about an overflow of humanitarian sentiment. ‘There are more people who desire to help than those in need of help’, they told me. This refers to an over-concentration of resources on the two most popular forms of charity and volunteerism: search and rescue volunteerism and ‘the traditional three’ types of home visits (care for children, the elderly and the disabled). In fact, the ‘surplus’ of resources mobilised in these two fields of local ‘needs’ (both immediate and long term) were evidenced by the occasional spectacles when more than ten volunteer teams would gather for an incident and block access by the ambulance and the police – the official and the most legitimate rescuers – or when five volunteer teams would arrive at an orphanage or home for the elderly in the same day. Given that there was not an obvious ‘lack’ in this already saturated market of helping that had led to the formation of new search and rescue organisations, I was thus puzzled by what underlay people's desire to establish new search and rescue organisations.
A county-wide grassroots search and rescue drill. The sign on the left reads: ‘Typhoon relief search and rescue drill: search and rescue skills competition’ (photo provided by an interlocutor).
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
A county-wide grassroots search and rescue drill. The sign on the left reads: ‘Typhoon relief search and rescue drill: search and rescue skills competition’ (photo provided by an interlocutor).
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
A county-wide grassroots search and rescue drill. The sign on the left reads: ‘Typhoon relief search and rescue drill: search and rescue skills competition’ (photo provided by an interlocutor).
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
This puzzle led me to explore vernacular humanitarianism through the lens of volunteers’ imaginary practices and their desire to help with an empirical focus on search and rescue volunteerism. My analytical lens drew insights from David Graeber's (2007: 64) construction of ‘desires’ as distinguishable from ‘needs’ in that desires are not rooted in a ‘lack’ but are rooted in ‘imagination’ and ‘tends to direct itself towards some kind of social relation’ and social recognition. It also drew insights from Malkki's ethnography on Finnish volunteers’ ‘need to help’ and how such needs generate volunteers’ ‘imaginary projections’ towards the suffering other (Malkki 2015: 203–205). Such an analytical shift from the ‘politics of humanitarianism’ (e.g., Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2011) to volunteers’ needs and imaginary practices, as Malkki's ethnography powerfully shows, would allow us to rescue the plural political potentials of humanitarianism from cynicism regarding the major paradigms of Northern-led, highly institutionalised humanitarianism. Whereas Finnish and American middle-class volunteers’ need for connections, sociality and reaffirmation of class identity is central to their motivations in humanitarian work (Malkki 2015; Dunn 2017), I argue that the overflowing desire to help among Chinese volunteers is entangled with the volunteers’ imaginaries of emergency and of a soldier-like persona that generate socialities and materialities surrounding the growth and day-to-day operations of aid.
As I have elaborated elsewhere (Fengjiang 2022), such overflowing desires to help are a product of a particular political economic moment in the last two decades at the conjuncture of economic restructuring and the opening of space for social participation. Such desires are gendered in that they are especially strong among working men in their thirties to forties who find themselves being increasingly marginalised by local social and economic development. Establishing and participating in volunteering and charitable activities allow them to remake the value of their work in new social arenas that they co-create (Fengjiang 2022). This article goes a step further to investigate volunteers’ imaginary practices and their generative potential. It first discusses how the desire to help is fruitful in understanding vernacular humanitarianism in China. It then explores vernacular imaginaries of emergency and how they generate soldier imaginaries, material base camps and drills that in turn reproduce and sustain volunteers’ desires to commit.
The Desire to Help as a Fruitful Lens
In academic literature and post-Mao official discourse, Chinese humanitarianism is often represented as based on a ‘state-centric’ model, where the state is seen as the primary legitimate and responsible agent for relieving human suffering (Hirono 2013; Krebs 2014). Given the lasting impact of the Confucian notions of the state's responsibility to care for people's lives and of state–society unity, state-led disaster relief and welfare provisions have been at the centre of how governing authorities gain legitimacy in China (Hirono 2013; Krebs 2014). Furthermore, the contemporary official discourse of humanitarianism also draws on Maoist revolutionary socialist humanitarianism that foregrounds Party mobilisation and the post-Mao state's programme of ‘people-oriented’ ‘comprehensive development’ that will ultimately unify the state and its people (Luo 2006: 21), which foregrounds the effects of actions rather than the rights-based principles behind the actions. This official discourse of humanitarianism also shapes the way the state approaches humanitarian aid to other countries, where natural disasters, stability and development take priority rather than military interventions in conflict situations, and the state has operated at the state-to-state level with little cooperation with civil society until very recently (Adhikari 2021; Hirono 2013).4 Indeed, such ‘state-centric’ official discourses also have had a lasting impact on popular imaginaries in which the majority of ordinary Chinese today view the state (as in guojia) as a primary legitimate moral agent responsible for welfare provision and assistance in emergencies (Xiang 2010) despite their cynicism towards local government (as in difang zhengfu) (Steinmüller 2010).
The contemporary growth of grassroots search and rescue volunteerism pushes us to rethink the state-centric model of humanitarianism in China. As Jacinta O'Hagan and Miwa Hirono (2014) point out, the state-centric representation of East Asian humanitarianism in academic literature has often overlooked the grassroots form of humanitarianism that complicates this model. Indeed, China has a long history of mutual aid societies and local charitable giving to those in need, both in times of disasters and emergencies and in normal times, with participation by both elites and ordinary people in different period of history (e.g. Fuller 2015; Leung 2011; Reeves 2018; Smith 2009). However, as the historian Reeves (2018: 285) notes in reference to Chinese vernacular humanitarianism at the turn of the twentieth century, these local, especially non-Western, humanitarian and charitable actions have often been overlooked or deliberately erased by international actors to justify the intrusion of Northern ‘philanthro-imperialists’ into China, both in the past and in the present.5 According to Reeves (2018: 279), Western and Japanese media's representation of the Chinese people as ‘lacking in charitable impulses or traditions’ has served to portray Western and Japanese empires as morally superior and more ‘civilised’ than the Chinese people.
Such historical insight is particularly relevant to the discussion of contemporary vernacular humanitarianism when non-Western local traditions of humanitarianism are still constantly overlooked or dismissed as politically suspicious to elevate the significance of international Northern-led humanitarian efforts versus the local people or Southern-led transnational humanitarian efforts in a racial and civilisational hierarchy (e.g. O'Hagan and Hirono 2014; Li 2021). As Reeves (2018: 257) remarks, the ‘state-centric’ model of Chinese humanitarianism in Euro-American academic and media representations not only justifies Northern mistrust of Chinese grassroots humanitarian actions and development involvement in the Global South but is also ‘myopic’ given the rich vernacular charitable traditions in China's history. This model also has a profound impact on local perceptions of their charitable traditions (Reeves 2018), which are described in some popular and scholarly discourses as having a ‘lack’ of compassion and moral imaginaries towards the stranger (Yan 2021). Foregrounding the important role of language in recounting these vernacular humanitarian traditions, Reeves (2018: 279) calls for celebrating local relief initiatives to ‘empower local resiliency’ and to counteract the cultural imperialism that is intrinsic to many international regimes of global giving. Through my bottom–up ethnographic exploration of search and rescue volunteerism in contemporary China, I hope to contribute to this endeavour.
The contemporary rise in social participation in emergency governance can be partly attributed to the Party-state's mediation and cultivation of a voluntary sector. Indeed, the Party-state has played an important role in legitimating a ‘non-state public sector’ through the discourse of ‘social management’ (shehui guanli) since the early 2000s, which promotes a particular kind of ‘community’ (shequ)-based ‘social organisations’ (shehui zuzhi; the Chinese equivalent of NGOs) that complement the visions of the Party-state in pursuit of a ‘harmonious society’ (Pieke 2012: 155). On the other hand, grassroots actors, like the volunteers with United Rescue, have also played an important role in inducing such a shift. Even in the late 1990s, regardless of the flourishing discussions by the media and by scholars on civil society and public–private cooperation in providing welfare, the state policy towards the grassroots provision of social services remained highly sceptical.
Like United Rescue, which I mentioned in the opening paragraph, many grassroots humanitarian networks and actions predated the state's policy shifts, and it was often the grassroots actors who were seeking to collaborate with governmental departments and negotiating with local governmental actors for official access to sites, rather than the other way around (see also Liu and Wu 2018). It was in fact partly in response to the growing number and variety of (unregistered) social organisations that the Party-state started to encourage developing regulatory and management frameworks to meet the growing demands of social participation in local governance. It was not until 2013 that the State Council issued guidelines for local governments purchasing public services from private companies and social organisations that would significantly loosen the registration criteria for grassroots organisations. At the same time, the Party-state discourse of “social management” is reframed as “social governance” (shehui zhili) (Li 2015). In this context, the shift from state-centric to growing social participation in emergency governance in the past decades should be understood as a product of dynamic, mutually constituting processes of state–social–individual assemblages rather than state masterminding. In this Chinese context, the lens of vernacular imaginaries and desires is particularly fruitful for articulating how people act across various social and cultural spheres that go beyond the dichotomous paradigms of state-centric interpellation and individual compassion/resistance.
While transnational humanitarianism is often buttressed by the imagination of ‘distant suffering’ in civilisational and economic hierarchies (Ticktin 2012), Chinese volunteers often identify with the recipients of their aid who share the same social identity as fellow ‘ordinary people’ (putong laobaixing), thus negating a gendered, class and civilisational hierarchy. Such identification of a shared class and social background based on fellow human feelings (renqing) is not only saturated by ideologies of socialist humanitarianism but is also tied to regional experiences of economic development. Indeed, unlike the older forms of humanitarianism in pre-Mao history where local elites and government actors were the main players (Leung 2001; Smith 2009), the major organisers in grassroots search and rescue volunteerism in southeast China are primarily working men, including waged workers and self-employed workers and entrepreneurs. In Wenzhou, most of the search and rescue volunteers were born in the 1970s and the 1980s, grew up in relatively poor rural villages, received five to twelve years’ education and were physically highly mobile in their waged work and entrepreneurial pursuits in other parts of China. They were the generation who grew up participating in the miraculous economic development of Wenzhou from a poverty-stricken region to one of the wealthiest regions of China. They also experienced a relatively egalitarian class structure compared with other regional development models following the 1980s economic reform from a socialist planned economy to a late socialist marketised economy (Zhang 2007).6
This article focuses on search and rescue volunteerism in Wenzhou, where men are the main organisers and frontline volunteers. While women also participate in all forms of vernacular humanitarianism as organisers and volunteers, it is rare to find women volunteers on the frontline of search and rescue and on duty in the 24/7 base camps where volunteers are ready to take calls and immediately respond. When disasters and public health-related emergencies occur, women volunteers are also active in organising logistics from home or at the organisation's offices and providing frontline medical support, while men volunteers are often active in frontline search and rescue as well as transporting people and goods, the kind of work that requires more manual labour and involves higher risk.
Almost all the volunteers have a narrative of a seminal ‘profound’ experience that engendered their ongoing desire to commit to volunteering. Many of them see their first spontaneous volunteering experience as ‘the most meaningful thing I have done in my life’. These seminal, spontaneous volunteering trips to the sites of disasters are sometimes not shared on social media. These altruistic, anonymous volunteering acts are often described as ‘profound’ and life-changing and become seminal to the volunteers’ subsequent engagement in this particular type of volunteerism. After these seminal experiences, some established their own search and rescue teams or organisations and came to see their actions as one specific kind of service for the ‘common good’ (gongyi) and their organisations as gongyi organisations. Many have then started to use vernacular idioms to narrate their work that express a universalistic logic of compassion, such as renqing (human feelings), fengxian (dedication) and bo ai (universal love), which are saturated by both socialist morality and a diverse local religious notion of goodness derived mainly from Buddhism, popular religion, Confucianism and Christianity. By employing a broader notion of zuo gongyi (literal meaning: common good), zuo haoshi or xingshan (literal meaning: doing good deeds), most volunteers embrace their volunteer work as initially having been driven by an ‘emotional impulse’ (ganxing de) and later sustained by both that impulse and rational accountability that breaks down the classic sociological divisions between impulsive giving to individuals and rationalised enterprise towards institutional changes (cf. Bornstein 2009).
The volunteers’ ‘profound’ experiences, retold among group social gatherings at late-night dinners, also serve as narratives that sustain their commitment to helping others in a community. It is noteworthy that such a ‘community’ does not precisely match either the territorised neighbourhood-based ‘community’ (shequ) promoted by the Party-state or the organisational principles such as lineage and religion that have been revived in the post-Mao era in Wenzhou (cf. Yang 2020).7 As I have elaborated elsewhere, it is their shared anxieties and aspirations in a particular political economic moment that have brought them together in a seemingly novel form of association (Fengjiang 2022). In this sense, these search and rescue teams and organisations are not just an additional reserve army of volunteer labour ready to respond to local emergencies. They are also moral communities where volunteers are able to receive social recognition for their moral sentiments, empathy and genuineness of their desire to help strangers – the kind of recognition that is sometimes lacking in their normal work.
Vernacular Imaginaries of Emergency
Given that natural disasters in Wenzhou, mainly typhoons, flooding and mudslides, only occur in particular seasons, mostly during the summer season from May to September, volunteers respond to all types of local emergencies when they receive calls from local citizens. Searching for and rescuing a missing person, alive or dead, often becomes the main task of these volunteers, who are particularly enthusiastic about search and rescue. In these missions of searching for missing persons, volunteers go and search in mountains, lakes and the sea, often spontaneously and without organisation, for a whole day or for two consecutive days. Sometimes, it is only a dead body that is being searched for and is found. On many occasions, full days of searching result in failure, and several search and rescue teams repeatedly search the same area without coordination, operating in a form of improvised ‘adhocracy’ that is also found in vernacular humanitarianism elsewhere (e.g. Dunn 2012, 2017; Sandri 2018). When I went out on these unplanned, improvised, tedious and often unsuccessful search trips with volunteers, I was often struck by their enthusiasm and persistent emphasis on their commitment to these searches.
This seemingly more mundane kind of search and rescue in fact entails imaginary projections about a broader range of emergencies than the kind of ‘complex emergencies’ that underlie the post-war growth of humanitarian agencies (Calhoun 2008). It is also not as readily graspable as the typical kind of emergencies that are quantified and visualised by scientific predictions and reports, such as those released in the typhoon season by local governmental departments. In a place where typhoon disasters are seasonal occurrences and mundane forms of emergencies have accompanied drastic political and economic transformations since the Maoist era, ordinary people have normalised ‘emergencies’ as immanent in daily life, sudden yet reasonable occurrences that are to be prepared for rather than viewed as an ‘exception’ to global order (cf. Calhoun 2008: 87–88).
The mundane form of emergencies may be a drowned person, or a person about to commit suicide (or who has already committed suicide) by jumping into a river or the sea, or a person who is missing (usually an older person or a child who went missing in the mountains and is searched for over consecutive days and nights). The volunteers’ acts of searching may seem trivial or of little social significance, but the image is ‘real’ in the sense that it is powerful in inducing the desire to help and motiving repeated actions (Malkki 2015: 203–205). A missing person, whether alive or dead, is an affecting figure that impels volunteers to action when they see the news or receive the call. When this figure is reported to them, it becomes a temporal occupation, if not a duty, in their lives both materially and symbolically. Such a call for action legitimises and reproduces their desire to help and to continue to prepare to help in the long run.
In these mundane forms of emergencies, volunteers see finding a dead body as no less important as rescuing a person alive. The urgency lies in the fact that the person is missing. In fact, search and rescue volunteers probably help to retrieve more dead bodies than rescue living individuals. The equal importance placed on retrieving the dead body or the living person has to do with local notions of death. A ‘missing’ person creates a big disruption in local social life and is viewed as a threat to the cosmological and social order (Bruun 2003: 5). Thus, a person, alive or dead, who has gone missing must be found and retrieved in their wholeness. A ‘missing’ person is a sign that something must have displeased the supernatural forces, and thus the person must be found. The source of the displeasure of the supernatural forces could be an immoral or an amoral act (i.e. an act not related to morality) that brought about the disruption. In the local cosmological framing, the successful retrieval of a missing person, whether alive or dead, is equally rewarding and contributes to the merit of the rescuers.
Due to the importance of retrieving bodies after death, there are also professional companies and individuals who provide professional paid services for retrieving bodies from the sea and rivers. Thus, some villagers and relatives of the dead persons are baffled by the fact that volunteers are willing to provide free labour for the same service. There is a popular belief that the free labour in such service will accumulate merit, whereas similar paid labour does not accumulate merit. Such a notion of merit-making as justification for charitable deeds can be found in a wide range of contexts in Chinese societies (e.g. Fan and Whitehead 2004; Oxfeld 2010: 158–161; Weller and Huang 1998; Weller et al 2017). The good deeds in this life are either held to accumulate merit for one's personal otherworldly reward or for the betterment of one's descendants’ fates in the cosmological order. Having said that, the notions of merit-making and merit accumulation are only part of the story in this case and do not always feature in search and rescue volunteers’ actions. Volunteers’ motivations to provide free labour in such endeavours should not be reduced to merit-making as ultimately there are many diverse ways to earn merit in the local cosmology that would allow volunteers to spend much less time and energy and receive more merit with little risk.
In fact, I would argue that such vernacular emergency imaginaries as a norm of daily life are based on a broad conception of human mutuality as expressed in the vernacular notion of ‘human feelings’ (renqing). Many volunteers have stated that it is the rare yet profound experiences of successfully finding a missing person, alive or dead, that sustains them during other unfruitful and tedious trips. Many volunteers have experienced the sensation of finding a missing person; they have witnessed the moment themselves or heard their close teammates narrate the experience. These experiences were often described to me as ‘this happiness you never understand until you experience it’ and were characterised by a sense that ‘no words can describe it’. Such extraordinary emotional gratification is akin to a profound sense of achievement, which is viewed as desirable and to be celebrated. Hence, many volunteers post their success within moments of finding a missing person (or body) or completing a successful rescue to their WeChat friends’ circles (the Chinese version of Whatsapp), which then gathers many ‘likes’ from their social circle.
Furthermore, volunteers often stressed to me that their experiences of ‘profoundness’ from their humanitarian actions were not merely ‘self-gratifying’ (ziwo gandong) but were also about their being able to offer ‘real’ (zhenshi de) help that was a form of ‘pure’ (chun) gongyi versus ‘fake’ (jia) gongyi, which is about performativity. These ambiguous and unknown spaces of search and rescue triggered a sense of excitement and achievement when the volunteers managed to navigate and conquer them with their local knowledge about weather, landscape, logistics and means of access. Indeed, many search and rescue volunteers are fond of travelling. Some regularly participate in outdoor adventurous travel by climbing mountains on wild and undesignated routes. Their experiences as private entrepreneurs and workers allow them to quickly identify and meet the ‘real’ needs of the people they are helping on many occasions. They hence embrace their local knowledge as a form of expertise in search and rescue work that is not always available to governmental efforts. Such emergency imaginaries, to some extent, justify their desire to help and constitute a sense of being able to help as a recognised member of society. The following section further explores how volunteers’ emergency imaginaries and the image of soldiers generate materiality and symbolism underlying search and rescue volunteerism.
Soldiers, Camps and Drills
Another potent image that fuels volunteers’ imaginaries of emergency and reinforces their desire to help is the image of the solider or of the soldier-like persona. For those who are committed search and rescue volunteers, the soldier figure is an embodiment of official and social recognition and of a person with altruistic virtues who is capable of ‘serving the people’, thus triggering the volunteers’ desire to mimic and embody the image of the soldier as part of the self. While the image of the soldier in the Chinese context has often been linked to state-building and nationalism in the twentieth century (e.g. Yan 2019), the vernacular imaginaries of the soldier in the contemporary context are entangled with popular imaginaries of being able to protect and serve people as a contributing member of ‘society’ (shehui) rather than of the nation (guojia). This cannot be reduced to a nationalistic logic of sacrifice.
To begin with, all search and rescue organisations have a physical ‘base camp’, which is often well equipped and guarded by on-duty volunteers and offers a legitimate space for socialising among themselves. As the earliest search and rescue organisation in the region, United Rescue received material sponsorship from the local Civil Defence Office and acquired space inside the Civil Defence Office building as their base, exempt from rent. When their organisation expanded, they acquired a larger space in an urbanised village government building. Some more recent organisations’ base camps are built along barren shorelines or on village land, often inside or next to village government buildings. The space for these bases is often offered by village cadres through personal connections with the organisation's founders for exempted or reduced rent, with the mutual agreement that these organisations will not only offer search and rescue assistance but also a wide range of other welfare-related services under the name of gongyi.
For experienced businesspersons and skilled workers, setting up a search and rescue organisation and building up a material base for it can be a fairly straightforward process, just like setting up a new brand for their business in the county. Several months into my fieldwork, a man named Lu Qiang told me that he aspired to establish ‘the best’ search and rescue volunteer organisation in Haicheng. Lu Qiang was a thirty-eight-year-old self-employed commercial photographer whom I knew from his involvement in charity projects he had set up with a friend for left-behind children. Lu Qiang's plans for setting up an organisation had materialised from scratch fairly quickly. In his narrative, the recruitment of volunteers, the renovation of the base and the organisation's official registration with the local ministry of civil affairs had all been achieved in a month. A couple of months later, Lu Qiang invited me for a visit to the new base for his recently established volunteer organisation, Wolf Rescue, on a rainy afternoon.
The transformation of the empty ground-floor space into a well-functioning base for volunteerism was carried out by volunteer members. Lu Qiang's newly established team included experienced carpenters, electricians, cement layers, plumbers and other skilled workers who donated their labour to the renovation work. All the appliances and furniture then in use at the base were acquired through in-group fundraising or in-group donations. Now, the newly renovated base had a large office, a lobby and a storage space for search and rescue equipment, volunteer uniforms, helmets, flags and banners. Displaying this equipment to team members and outsiders is important. They also built a small attic attached to the ground-floor office, which they renovated into a large bedroom where on-duty volunteers could take a rest. Allegedly, they had on-duty volunteers working shifts at the base twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, like many other organisations. Any guests to the base were led through the lobby and the storage/display room into the office, where they would be invited to take a seat around a large wooden tea table, with Lu Qiang taking the host's seat. Sitting at the table from noon until six in the evening, I watched Lu Qiang constantly delivering cups of tea to different people in the office. Men in their thirties, forties and fifties came in and went out, addressing each other with intimate nicknames as if they were brothers.
Furthermore, almost every search and rescue volunteer team I visited would claim that they were the ‘best’ and the most ‘genuine’ team, ready to ‘serve the people any time without repayment’. The narrative that the already existing teams were ‘not good enough!’ provided the newest team with the legitimacy for its desire to establish a better team. To support their claims, having a high proportion of volunteers who were soldiers or former servicemen as members of one's team was often quoted as a sign of professionalism. Indeed, many search and rescue volunteers did have past military service experience, the two-year service being the most common. Nevertheless, there was also a large proportion of volunteers who had once aspired to serve in the army but failed to pass the standards set for soldier recruitment and hence had no experience of military service.
In many respects, these male volunteers act like pseudo-soldiers; they desire to mimic and embody a soldier as this entails masculinity, official recognition and the altruistic virtue of being a good person. The prototype in official discourse is the figure of Lei Feng, a soldier in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) during Maoist socialism who was framed as a moral exemplar who devoted all his surplus labour to selflessly ‘serving the people’. Many search and rescue teams have designed their team badges, uniforms and flags to closely resemble those of the PLA. Lu Qiang told me that he deliberately copied symbols from the badges used by the PLA when designing his team badge. The dark blue badge of Wolf Rescue has a white border made up of the same wheat and rice sheaves found in the national emblem and PLA badges (see Figure 2). In the national emblem, the wheat and rice sheaves symbolise agricultural workers, who represent the people. Yet, this is not what is symbolised in the search and rescue volunteer badges. Lu Qiang's logic was that the whole design of the national emblem was a potent symbol for fending off evil spirits, in the same way that the portraits of Presidents Mao, Deng or Xi were used in local rural households. Instead of the August First PLA emblem found at the centre of the PLA badge, a wolf head is at the centre of the Wolf Rescue team badge. The wolf head, according to Lu Qiang, is a potent local symbol for fending off local evil spirits. Similarly, another new organisation, Voyage Rescue, also copied the design of the PLA badge but instead used a symbol of a ship at the centre. Lu Qiang assured me of the ‘insurance’ effect of the Wolf Rescue badge that combined both the potency of a national emblem and a local cosmological symbol: ‘We don't have insurance for our volunteers; this [the emblem] is our insurance. With this emblem on the uniforms, we can't go wrong.’
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
From left to right: PLA badge, Wolf Rescue badge and Voyage Rescue badge.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 31, 1; 10.3167/saas.2023.310104
What is more, many volunteer teams wear a full uniform that resembles the type 07 combat and training military uniforms used by the PLA. They wear this uniform to team trainings and inter-team drills and competitions as well as to award ceremonies. In these trainings and drills, soldiers and recently retired soldiers act as coaches. At the same time, they also imitate many of the terms and styles that are commonly found in government reports, meetings and award ceremonies. These camps and drills further reproduce the imaginaries of emergency and thus strengthen the volunteers’ desire to help. They also offer sensational spectacles of masculinity, where the soldier persona is also the ultimate masculine ideal who is ‘able’ to contribute to society.
Although volunteers value their local knowledge and mimic soldier-like personas, they are still pseudo-soldiers who occupy an ambiguous state and are often dismissed or misrecognised by local governmental actors as legitimate agents to participate in certain disaster emergencies. For instance, during the unprecedented Henan flooding in July 2021, some governmental actors deliberately blocked the entrance of many grassroots volunteers to some village sites, which created tensions and ongoing debates around how government should recognise and coordinate with grassroots efforts in their responses to large-scale emergencies. Similarly, in March 2022, many grassroots search and rescue teams reached the site of the China Eastern 737 plane crash in Guangxi only to find that local governmental actors denied their legitimacy and professional expertise and did not allow them to participate in the search and rescue efforts.
On the other hand, the recent COVID-19 pandemic governance in China has granted volunteers unprecedented legitimacy to perform with a soldier-like persona. Appropriating the official discourse that frames the pandemic governance as a ‘battle’, creating a state of exception, grassroots search and rescue volunteers who were previously experimenting with various means to collaborate with governmental departments suddenly found themselves valued and needed by local governments to guard various checkpoints. These previously ‘surplus’ grassroots resources and their sometimes unrecognised local knowledge became a cherished source of help. For instance, at the height of Wenzhou's COVID-19 epidemic in February 2020, when there was a severe shortage of medical supplies, local and overseas Wenzhounese and local civil servants initiated a Rush to Help campaign that brought £2.4 million worth of medical supplies, including more than 10 million face masks, from about 100 countries to Wenzhou between 26 January and 25 February 2020 (Zeng 2020). Many of my interlocutors who were active search and rescue volunteers and private entrepreneurs at the time participated in channelling resources both from overseas and from other parts of China to Wenzhou.
Conclusions
In the anthropological critique of Northern-led institutionalised humanitarianism, the moral imperative of caring for the needy and saving lives is often revealed to be a biopolitical deployment of lives that reproduces differences and inhibits structural solutions to global injustice and inequality (e.g. Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2011). However, as Malkki (2015: 203–205) insightfully points out with reference to Finnish humanitarianism, such critiques are often based on a narrow definition of the political that dismisses humanitarian actions as ‘merely’ ‘ethical’ as opposed to ‘political’. What we see in the Chinese case presented in this article are vernacular imaginaries of emergency and a desire to help that generate socialities and materialities underlying search and rescue volunteerism. Some might disregard volunteers’ unfruitful search and rescue trips as unprofessional or as having no impact. Nevertheless, what often underlies the spontaneous and frequently not well-planned search and rescue trips is a strong impulsive commitment that constitutes what volunteers experience as profound and ‘real’ help. Although these networks are officially categorised as ‘social organisations’ and are small organisations compared with the international NGOs, they are able to mobilise a large number of local volunteers and raise a substantial amount of private donations from many local private citizen donors who contribute a small amount at a time. They also build many material bases that provide not only assistance in emergencies but also welfare-related services.
Ethnographic attention to this ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ allows us to see the political possibilities of alternative movements that are otherwise neglected when referencing humanitarianism (Fechter and Schwittay 2019; Brković 2023). This article shows that an analytical focus on people's imaginary practices and desire to help offers a fruitful lens to overcome the limits of state-centric, organisation-centric and individual-centric analyses of humanitarianism in China and allows us to capture the complexity of the state–social–individual assemblages that underlie the shifting vernacular humanitarian landscape in contemporary China.
On the one hand, vernacular imaginaries and the desire to help are saturated with socialist ideals of serving the people in ways that are complementary to state-led humanitarianism. On the other hand, instead of seeking political neutrality and independence, grassroots actors seek interactions and collaborations with governmental actors in emergency assistance and welfare provision in China. Although they primarily rely on private donations from local citizens and are entirely run by volunteers, most search and rescue organisations seek sponsorship and affinity with local governmental actors in order to secure the resources to sustain their everyday operations. Nonetheless, their actions, local knowledge and resources are not always officially recognised as valuable and trustworthy.
Ultimately, appropriating the governmental humanitarian agenda and seeking affinity with governmental actors are viewed by ordinary people as more practical and direct ways to participate in governance, address social issues and foster change in local society in China. A deeper understanding of people's diverse imaginaries and desires that generate plural constellations and political possibilities of humanitarianism that does not necessarily involve macro-level radical structural changes will allow us to capture the significance of the grassroots volunteering networks in China that are otherwise dismissed as insignificant or as merely governmental mobilisations.
Acknowledgement
My unreserved gratitude goes to my research interlocutors. Many thanks to Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmüller, Čarna Brković, Jan Grill, Anne-Meike Fechter, Andrea Muehlebach, Tess Altman, Ka Kin Cheuk, Zhang Li, Jonathan Mair, Stephan Feuchtwang, William Jankowiak, and Monalisa Adhikari, whose insightful comments have been invaluable to composing my arguments. I thank Valentina Zagaria, Kari Dahlgren, Doris Okenwa, Chiara Arnavas, Liisa Kohonen, Megnaa Mehtta, and colleagues at the LSE writing seminars as well as participants of this special issue for their critical input and encouragement on earlier drafts of this article. Lastly, special thanks go to the journal editors Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov and Lukas Ley and three anonymous reviewers for their generous input and constructive criticisms.
Notes
Names of places, organisations and people have been changed to protect the confidentiality of my research participants.
As Li (2021: 241) insightfully pointed out in relation to Arab humanitarians working in pan-Islamic NGOs in Bosnia, universalistic projects mediated by the idiom of humanitarianism may ‘operate from an orientation of solidarity’ rather than of intervention. Similarly, Southern faith-based organisations foreground the multiple notions of local communal obligations and service in their humanitarian practices (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015).
As Benthall (2017: 1–2) pointed out, there are culturally embedded distinctions between the terms ‘charity’, ‘philanthropy’ and ‘humanitarian actions’ in English. However, anthropological attempts to study this subject have generally gotten rid of the distinctions because these terms have no parallels in major non-European languages such as Arabic or Hindi – and, I would add, no parallels in Chinese.
A growing number of non-state actors from mainland China have initiated and participated in transnational humanitarian projects related to education and natural disaster relief to other Southern countries in the past decade. These grassroots humanitarian initiatives are also increasingly encouraged by the Chinese state as part of its promotion of its One Belt, One Road initiative goal of bolstering ‘people-to-people’ bonds through voluntary actions (Zhang 2017).
The erasure by scholars included tainting or expunging the written records of local charitable activities so that future generations of scholars and practitioners would continue to consult a ‘biased source’ and would have no access to records of local initiatives (Reeves 2018: 285).
I have elaborated on the economic transformation and recent restructuring elsewhere and will not go into detail on this here.
Despite the disruptions in Maoist high socialism where the Party was the sole organiser of local resources, various local organisational principles such as religion and lineage have been revived to form voluntary associations that mediate resource redistributions and local governance in what Yang terms ‘religious civil society’ (Yang 2020: 161).
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