Charity work in China still young, Gates, Buffet say

US billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett said small-scale philanthropy is “more admirable” than its large-scale form during their China trip last week.

“I particularly admire people who are engaged in small-scale philanthropy,” investment baron Buffett said at a press conference.

Buffett and Gates, who have already persuaded 40 wealthy US individuals to hand over more than half of their fortunes, spoke out a closed-door charity banquet with China’s wealthy last Wednesday night. Some media considered the meeting a touchstone to test the philanthropist attitudes of Chinese billionaires.

But the two men published an open letter saying they did not want to push wealthy Chinese to give away their wealth, but only wanted to listen to their views on philanthropy.

They said the Chinese super-rich have “no reluctance” to talk about philanthropy.

“About 25 to 30 people among the guests talked about philanthropy. We talked about our own experiences in the US,” Buffett said.

Gates noted that most of China’s billionaires were the first generation in their family to accumulate wealth. They were not very familiar with charity work, which is still at an early stage in China.

“Now, rich people in China are thinking about their children and society, how to arrange and organize their fortunes, and how to spend it. That is a timely question,” he said.

Buffett was also aware that wealthy Chinese are worried their motives for donating to charity may be misunderstood.

He also said they have privacy concerns – will their names appear in newspapers? How will the public react?

“Do I really want my name in the paper and everybody talking about it? We hear that in both countries. We encourage people in the US to come forward. We tell them that [the public] is probably going to know about it anyway, and the example that people set does affect how their children behave later on, it affects how their community behaves,” Buffett said.

Both Gates and Buffett believed exchanges among philanthropists were important in China to promote charity.

Rupert Hoogewerf, who studies China’s wealthy and compiles the Shanghai-based Hurun Rich List, told Xinhua that charity organizations in China need to be more transparent and that charities in China need more government support, like tax incentives.

The Hurun Report Inc. issued the Hurun Rich List 2010 – China’s equivalent to the Forbes list. At the top of the list was Zong Qinghou, the founder of the Hangzhou Wahaha Group. With a personal fortune of $12 billion (82 billion yuan), Zong is the richest man on the Chinese mainland.

“The spring of China’s charity cause has arrived. It is not yet summer,” Hoogewerf said.

He explained that although some wealthy Chinese have made considerable individual charitable donations, none has established mature charity projects.

“Only after charity funds are well distributed will the summer of Chinese charity arrive,” he said.

Hoogewerf said rich families can shoulder more social responsibility through charity work, which can also help reduce anger over the widening gap between the rich and poor.

Now that Gates and Buffett have passed the China test, they said their next stop may be India, where the number of dollar-millionaires grew by 50 percent last year, according to one new wealth report. Forbes’ top 100 Indians are almost as rich as the top 400 Chinese.

(Agencies)

Buffet’s leson in charity for China – Can Buffet and Gates persuade China’s rich to give back?

By Huang Daohen

While China’s billionaires are busy investing their money to pave the way for their companies to become multinationals, American billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have announced that they will come to China next month to ask the country’s rich to donate at least half of their wealth, according to AFP.

Without a backdrop of philanthropist heritage in China, many doubt that Buffett and Gates’ trip for a more charitable China will have a positive effect.

The move comes after the release of a list of 40 rich donors who pledged to give more than half of their fortune to charity. In June, Buffett and Gates launched a project called “The Giving Pledge,” calling the wealthiest individuals and families in the US to give away the majority of their wealth.

Wealthy individuals – including CNN founder Ted Turner and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg – have signed the pledge, AFP said.
In a press briefing earlier this month, Buffett said he will meet with a large group of wealthy Chinese people. “That’s just to explain it to people in those countries and maybe give a little bit of our experience. And if they wish to take what we think is a good idea and run with it, we’ll be cheering,” AFP quoted Buffet as saying.

According to Forbes magazine, China has the second highest number of billionaires in the world, after the US. This year’s list included 117 Chinese, with 64 from mainland, 25 from Hong Kong and 18 from Taiwan.

However, due to cultural differences between China and the US, many doubt the two Americans will persuade anyone.

School for the blind next project for former Microsoft executive

By Zhao Hongyi

Nigel Burton, former vice president of Microsoft Greater China, has swapped life in the corporate world for one in the remote west. Two months ago, he left the software giant to help set up a school for the blind in Guizhou Province.

Life in the software industry

UK-born Nigel Burton, 46, joined Microsoft in 1989, becoming the company’s 30th employee in Britain. Before that, he was CEO of Dialogue Software, a British company that develops applications for Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Burton moved to China in 2005 to head Microsoft Greater China’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Group. When Microsoft founder Bill Gates visited Beijing in April 2007, Burton was chosen to host Gates’ lecture at Peking University.

But on April this year, Burton decided to take his life on a new course: he resigned from Microsoft to offer his talents to a school for disadvantaged students near Guizhou’s capital of Guiyang. He said Gates’ charity work inspired him to walk along the same path.

Burton’s Microsoft colleagues think he is very brave to make such a jump in lifestyles, but he’s too busy chasing sponsorships and donations to worry about this.

“My colleagues are quite happy with my resignation because I didn’t join Google,” Burton joked during our interview. 

Despite five years in the country, he does not speak Chinese and only knows “Ni hao!” But he thinks there is hope yet for his language skills. “This time I’ll have plenty of time to learn Chinese in Guizhou,” he said.