UCLA International Institute, March 15, 2021 — The UCLA Asia Pacific Center and Long US-China Institute of UC Irvine will co-host the “International Symposium on Global Chinese Philanthropy” on March 19–20, 2021.

The virtual symposium will start with an opening session in the late afternoon on Friday, March 19, followed by four research sessions and a roundtable discussion that will begin Friday evening and continue all day Saturday (all times Pacific Daylight Time). Attendance is free, but all participants must preregister. A detailed symposium agenda, along with paper abstracts and speaker bios, can be found here.

The online symposium will feature presentations by Chinese philanthropists as well as researchers from the U.S., Asia, Europe and Africa. Collectively, they will examine the burgeoning field of global Chinese philanthropy and its role in the Chinese homeland, the greater Chinese diaspora and countries of Chinese migrant resettlement around the world. The symposium will focus in particular on times of crisis, with one session devoted to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Asia Pacific Center is thrilled to organize this symposium, which will take a multidisciplinary dive into Chinese philanthropy worldwide,” said sociologist Min Zhou, director of the Asia Pacific Center and UCLA’s Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.–China Relations and Communications. “As an academic partner of the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative, we are taking the lead in stimulating further research on global Chinese philanthropy while promoting its development as a scholarly field.”

The opening session will feature a presentation by Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, on the extraordinary contributions of Chinese Americans to American society, and an interview with celebrated Chinese American philanthropist Shirley Wang, founder and CEO of Plastpro Inc. and former president of the UCLA Foundation. In addition, the symposium will launch a special issue of the China Nonprofit Review on “Promoting Research on Global Chinese Philanthropy.”

Four sessions of research presentations will consider an array of issues related to Chinese and diasporic Chinese donors and their impacts, including the environment and goals of philanthropy in different regions, comparative philanthropy in China and Chinese diasporas, global Chinese entrepreneurship and philanthropy, and methodological issues such as research design, data collection and digital archives.

The numerous cosponsors of the symposium are a testament to the breadth and impact of Chinese philanthropy and include think tanks and academic research centers across East and Southeast Asia. All members of the Global Chinese Philanthropy Research Collaborative, they include: the Huamin Research Center, Rutgers University; China and Beyond Forum; Center for Chinese Entrepreneur Studies, Tsinghua University, China; Academy of Overseas Chinese Studies, Jinan University, China; Sociology Department, Zhejiang University, China; Contemporary China Research Cluster, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong; Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Social and Policy Studies, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia.

The symposium is supported by the Long Family Foundation and Xiangli Chen China and Beyond Forum of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.