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Too much charity work reeks of self-praise, quackery as more anti-graft efforts needed
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IN the run-up to the new school year that began on Monday, my 11-year-old son had been busy rushing through his homework.
Part of this was a requirement to document each day a shanshi (charitable deed). Apparently this single assignment so taxed his resources that his entries included such trifles as “putting a dying fish back into a river” or “pushing a snail crawling on the way in the park back to the wayside” (so that it would not be crushed by pedestrians).
Still there was a considerable balance and, in his despair he even included good deeds he had done in his dreams.
I did not blame him. It reminded me of the ordeal I had experienced when I was my son’s age, in confronting a similar assignment. It dawned on me that a good deed is best done spontaneously, as in this incident I met with last Thursday, at about 5:30pm, when I got off a Metro Line 2 train at the Century Avenue station.
Just when the train heading the other direction (toward Hongqiao Airport) was about to close its doors, there was a sudden commotion.
An elderly woman, in her scramble to get aboard the train, slipped and got one of her legs stuck in the gap between the train gate and the platform.
Some passengers immediately gathered and tried to push the side of the car in the hope of easing the leg out. Of these was a sturdily built Western gentleman who planted himself solidly between the side of the train car and the safety screen on the platform, right next to the gate. He weighed so much against the car with his shoulders while exerting such a force against the screen that the screen began to tilt threateningly.
Thanks to the joint effort, the woman succeeded in extricating her leg from the gap.
When a good deed is done with great fanfare, often there is a whiff of suspicion about its motivation. An example is the famous Chen Guangbiao, periodically posing for pictures with stacks of cash he is about to dole out to the needy in Taiwan, and more recently in the US.
Whether he really made 2 billion yuan (US$161 million) in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake can be investigated, but there is always a disturbingly theatrical element about his charitable moves that is simply incompatible with the time-honored precept about “doing a good deed without being identified.”
These aggressive good deed doers give a false impression that a good deed can be improvised anytime, anywhere, as the need arises. In reality, maximum discretion is called for.
For instance, if you witness an elderly citizen accidentally falling, it is advised that your sympathies should not go beyond phoning a professional agency for help. That’s because there is fear, by no means groundless, that the elderly citizens might later blame you for knocking him/her down, and might sue you for damages.
Cleanup effort
Ironically, while our citizens are becoming wary of giving a helping hand, our privileged civil servants are sometimes eager to advertise their readiness to do good deeds, so eager that sometimes they overshoot themselves.
A young woman blogged on August 30 that while climbing a mountain that day with friends in Xinyu, Jiangxi Province, she came across a man picking up littered items there, who turned out to be no less a personage than Liu Jie, the local Party secretary. You can imagine the surprise of the blogger when you know how inaccessible a Party secretary can be, sequestered as they are by their perks, their entourage, and their limousines.
But a subsequent investigation into this happy incident by the South Metropolitan News on September 1 suggested that the encounter might well have been a carefully choreographed publicity stunt. The investigation found that only six minutes after the encounter was blogged, the encounter began to get bruited around on the official weibo sponsored by the local publicity department. Further scrutiny revealed that the woman who blogged about this encounter had actually served as an intern at the publicity department, where her task was compose blogs.
But even if the Party secretary genuinely picked up rubbish there, it is not a move deserving of excessive praise. As someone commented online, for a handsomely paid Party secretary to pick up rubbish might suggest another kind of abuse of power.
Since this June, Su Rong, vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, was being probed for grave violation of discipline and law. He is the highest ranking official to be probed since November 2012.
According to reports, Su is suspected, among other charges, of brokering a land deal in Xinyu that had resulted in a loss of 1 billion yuan in state assets.
Apparently, the Party secretary could serve the people more by investing his time and energy cleaning up local officialdom, rather than picking up litter.
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