The givers
Some individuals like billionaire real estate developer Xu Jiayin serve as examples of that potential.
Xu, chairman of the Evergrande Real Estate Group, gave $68 million to charity in 2013, making him the biggest philanthropist in China, according to Forbes 2013 China Philanthropy List.
Other notable names on the list include: Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group Corp, China's largest entertainment group ($42 million, third overall); Ma Huateng, founder and CEO of Tencent Holdings Ltd ($23 million, sixth overall); and Jack Ma co-founder of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd ($8 million, 29th overall).
In August, Ma's Alibaba is expected to launch its IPO, the value of which may hit at least $120 billion, according to market observers.
The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Alibaba is setting up "one of Asia's largest philanthropic trusts". The fund will be backed by stock options that represent about 2 percent of the company's current value, and would focus on areas like health care, education and the environment, Ma told the newspaper.
Alibaba's trust is "by far the largest endowment of its kind in China," and it could even rival the one named after Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate, the Journal reported.
The 86-year-old Li is the richest man in Asia, occupying the 11th spot with a worth of $36 billion, according to the latest Forbes annual list of global billionaires.
Over the past four decades, the Li Ka Shing Foundation (LKSF) has raised more than $1.8 billion, almost 90 percent in support of education reform initiatives and medical services in the Greater China region.
His foundation's main goals are to promote positive and sustainable education reform, support research and development in the healthcare field, and encourage and help instill a modern culture of philanthropy in China.
In 2006, Li said that traditional Asian values "encourage and even demand that wealth and means pass through lineage," but he said it was his hope that his foundation could help persuade people in Asia to "transcend this traditional belief".
But because there is no inheritance tax in China, some entrepreneurs are not shy about keeping their money within their immediate families, said Dien S Yuen, managing director of Kordant Philanthropy Advisors, a San Francisco-based global philanthropy research and advisory firm.
"China is in what I call the 'accumulation of wealth stage,' and they are still building their businesses and growing, which I think is one of the reasons you're not seeing an outburst of philanthropy," Yuen said in an interview with China Daily.
Yuen said she expects philanthropy in China will grow to be more standardized in the future, but without an "enabling environment" to foster the proper infrastructure, she said individuals will continue to abstain from giving because of the attention and potential backlash that goes hand-in-hand with high profile philanthropy.
"After you've made all this money as a businessman, you're expected to give back and help the people who moved you to this position," Yuen said. "So the tricky part or one of the bigger issues is how much do you give?
"A lot of people have been giving and I think they're just very private about it, almost anonymous," she said. "And they take extra precautions in being anonymous probably because they don't want the public shame of 'you're worth $100 billion, so why did you only give $1 billion?' There's really never a magic number."
Whether there is a growing culture of Chinese philanthropy and if so, how it will take shape going forward was the topic of discussion in June among experts on foreign philanthropy at the Asia Society in New York.
Melissa Berman, president and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Inc (RPA), said at the event that the "robust non-profit sector" in the US has allowed citizens to develop trust in philanthropic organizations, a sentiment that she said has not yet emerged in China.
"Philanthropy is based on trust and confidence in the non-profit sector," she told China Daily in an interview. "So getting that non-profit sector accelerated and developed is really going to change the landscape of philanthropy in China."
Berman said that within the last decade legislation from the Chinese government has helped encourage the formation of private foundations. "That helps give [these organizations] legitimacy and will help build the infrastructure of trust in nonprofits, which will increase confidence in the whole idea of philanthropy," she said.
"Private foundations have been permissible for 10 years now and private philanthropy has been growing rapidly since the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan," she said.
Eileen R Heisman, president and CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust (NPT), wrote in a September 2013 article for Nonprofit Quarterly that "a watershed moment" in the philanthropic awareness among Chinese was in 2008 when close to 80,000 people were killed in the Sichuan earthquake.
In that year, annual donation totals in China reached nearly $16 billion - three times more than the previous year, and individual donations in China accounted for 54 percent of the total in 2008.
"Philanthropy can be very contagious in different ways," Heisman said in an interview with China Daily. "The underlying philosophy of philanthropy is compassion and there's definitely a strong sense of compassion among the people in China."
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