Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 1, 2024

The Multiple Cultural Sources of Volunteerism in Contemporary China—A Life History Study

(Abstract)

Ji Yingying

On the periphery of institutional systems yet at the heart of community public life, community volunteers play a crucial role in the generation and maintenance of primary-level social order. By adopting life history methods to investigate the community volunteers’ inner world, this article first proposes a typology of community actors, identifying four types: contributors, amateurs, dissidents, and neutrals, with the former two constituting the broad category of “community volunteers.” The analysis of the diverse cultural origins of active community actors helps find that the interactive effects of jia (home) consciousness, individual consciousness, and danwei (workplace) consciousness are the fundamental drivers for community volunteers’ engagement in public life. Community actors carry multiple forms of cultural spirit through their life practices, thus making the community an intermediate structure between jia and guo (state). This exploration not only provides a new framework for understanding contemporary Chinese urban community volunteers and community governance, but also reveals the historical consciousness and emotional structures precipitated by macro-level societal transformation at the level of individual actors and displays the differences between the distinct historical trajectories of primary-level governance modernization in China and the West.