A beggar has turned out to be the most popular donor for earthquake relief, while China’s biggest builder is the most unpopular.

The unkempt beggar first put five yuan in the government’s donation box in Nanjing, then turned up again to deposit 100 yuan. When this was reported in the press, people sought him out to give him more alms in appreciation. But the beggar simply went back and donated all these earnings too — a princely 340 yuan.

Rivalling him is a shoeshine woman from Hunan, who kept depositing 20 yuan at intervals till she had donated 120 yuan, the day’s earnings.

Chinese commentators sometimes criticize the lack of charitable impulses in well-off Chinese, but the Sichuan earthquake has made everyone, rich or poor, want to donate — and not just money. While there’s a rush to adopt earthquake orphans, some people have decided to adopt the orphaned elderly whose grown-up children perished. Many youngsters have just dropped everything and set off to the affected region to do whatever they can. These are grown-up ‘little emperors’ and ‘empresses’, who’ve never been denied anything. Even children have spontaneously emptied their piggy banks. And this time Hong Kong, so slow to react in January when blizzards crippled life in south-west China, has also opened its considerable purse, as has Taiwan. Everything is geared towards earthquake relief. At Macau’s dragon-boat races last week, a three-pataka sausage sold for 15 patakas — for earthquake relief.

Loving it

Such is the fervour to share in the grief that McDonald’s found itself at the receiving end of public wrath for what may have been an unintentional gaffe. At the start of the three days of national mourning, a week after the earthquake, when newspapers dropped colour from their pages, a bright red McDonald’s flyer inside some newspapers provoked people to surround an outlet in Nanjing and drive out those inside. Immediately, McDonald’s issued a statement saying they had given instructions to withdraw the flyer, but it was too late. To make up, it upped its initial donation of one million yuan to 10 million.

In all this, came the audacious statement by Wang Shi, owner of Wangke, China’s biggest construction company, and winner of many corporate citizen awards. Under criticism for his donation of 2 milion yuan, whereas a few other tycoons on the mainland and in Hong Kong and Taiwan had contributed 100 million yuan each, Wang Shi explained that as China is a disaster prone country, charity should not become a burden on corporations or individuals. Hence Wangke employees were told to donate not more than 10 yuan each.

Wang Shi hadn’t accounted for the power of the Chinese internet. The backlash was so strong that within a week, he had apologized on Hong Kong TV and announced that Wangke would contribute to reconstruction in Sichuan to the tune of 100 million yuan.

Netizens have been acting like vigilantes, making lists (not always accurate) of MNCs that have been slow to donate, organizing demonstrations outside their premises in Sichuan, (including KFC and McDonald’s), thereby forcing them to up their donations. Indeed, at one charity gala, representatives of corporations stood on stage with placards announcing their donation amounts, rather like schoolboys displaying their work. They have also complained to the government about this witch-hunt. Conversely, netizens have been rooting for Chinese companies that have made generous donations.

Will all this money reach the victims? In an official acknowledgement of the people’s scepticism, a new law was enacted that makes corruption in earthquake relief a crime.