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Tens of millions of dollars were reportedly raised to help Wuhan, a city in central China with 11 million people, recover from the coronavirus outbreak earlier this year. However, charities in China are not widely trusted.
Now, Chinese banking and digital payment giants have built blockchain-based platforms to address the communication problems between charities and affected communities, as well as the lack of transparency in the current donation distribution system, according to Monday. by CoinDesk Japan.
Alibaba, parent of AliPay, released the technical framework and industry standards for blockchain platforms for charities in September. It plans to increase transparency by tracking donations on the company’s corporate blockchain and make it easier for people to make donations via its authentication feature.
Tencent has also made an effort to register donations to a nationwide charity campaign on its TUSI corporate blockchain. The annual campaign, held on September 9 each year, raised more than $ 3 billion from more than 43 million individuals and 14,000 businesses in 2019, CoinDesk Japan reported.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), one of the top four state-owned commercial banks in China, has included blockchain use cases for charities in a 2020 white paper on adopting the technology in the financial services industry.
“While recovering from the coronavirus outbreak, ICBC launched and promoted blockchain platforms to track donations,” the bank said in the white paper. “The Red Cross branch in Guangxi and the Zhuhai Charity headquarters are currently on our platform and we will gradually invite more organizations across the country.”
These moves echo the State Council’s call to use emerging technologies, including blockchain, to improve the charity system in China and restore public trust in Chinese charities.
The Chinese Red Cross, one of the country’s largest charities, has been criticized for failing to provide supplies to hospitals battling the coronavirus in February. A state media streamed a man in a suit and tie loading a box of face masks into a truck with characters saying “Government Official Vehicles” next to a Red Cross warehouse.
Another scandal caused more lasting damage to the Red Cross’s reputation. A woman named Guo Meimei claimed she worked for the Red Cross and angered Chinese netizens by showing her lavish lifestyle on social media in 2011. Unsubstantiated rumors said she had contacts with a senior Chinese Cross official Rossa and abused some funds in the charity. The organization had received tens of millions of dollars in donations in the wake of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.
In its proposed policy in 2016, the Chinese Red Cross Foundation said it would set up an independent third-party institution to control and oversee the management of its supplies and donations, according to a document on the State Council’s official website.
