Genealogies of NGO-ness: The Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement in Contemporary Taiwan

Genealogies of NGO-ness:

The Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement in Contemporary Taiwan

C. Julia Huang

I was invited to the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation office in Bei-jing not long ago to give an informal general introduction about the Bud-dhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation of Taiwan. My friend, who invited me and chaired the meeting, introduced me and the subject of my talk to his staff with the following words: “I was told by many Taiwan friends that one must understand Ciji in order to understand Taiwan” (yao liaojie Taiwan yiding yao xian liaojie ciji).

Indeed, since around 1990 the religious philanthropic organization known as Ciji has been a phenomenon that has both influenced and characterized Taiwan. The largest volunteer association in Taiwan, it claims over four million members worldwide, with approximately two million of those in Taiwan and the rest mainly within the Chinese — and more specifically, Taiwanese — diaspora. Ciji’s foundation controls enormous assets, operating

positions 17:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-2009-006Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press

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as an umbrella nonprofit that runs its own TV station, Western hospitals, and secular university. Moreover, Ciji has been so active in the global arena that its efforts in international disaster relief have earned the foundation United Nations’ recognition as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and its leader, the Venerable Cheng Yen (Zhengyan), has earned an array of international awards,1 as well as praise for her role as the “Taiwanese Mother Teresa.”2

Ciji’s success comes at a time when a growing number of groups, known generally by the term NGOs, have created what has been called a “political space” around the globe and across Taiwan.3 Not only does the profusion of NGOs constitute a global “association revolution,”4 but also the “global infatuation with NGOs”5 itself illustrates the pros and cons of globaliza-tion.6 Meanwhile, the sociopolitical transformation of postwar Taiwan has been marked, among other things, by the changing landscape of NGOs since martial law ended in 1987. For example, the number of registered national social organizations (quanguoxing shehui tuanti) increased from just over eight hundred in 1988 to over two thousand in 1996, and to nearly four thousand in 2000.7 This newly expanded NGO sector has also become increasingly active, pluralist,8 and transnational.9

It is worth noting that Ciji has been practicing humanitarian services as a lawful civil association in Taiwan since the 1960s — nearly four decades before it “came out” as an NGO and before the term NGO and its counter-part NPO (nonprofit organization), became common in Taiwan. In his model of transnational flows, Arjun Appadurai uses the term ideoscape to describe the “diaspora” of a set of related “ideas, terms, images” from the West, such as welfare, freedom, and, of course, democracy.10 I would add the term NGO to the list of ideoscapes. Since deterritorialization is simul-taneously a reterritorialization, when the key term NGO travels around the world, it creates local and idiosyncratic examples of itself.11 Or, although not explicitly captured in the deterritorialization/reterritorialization binary, a global catch-up idea like NGOs may find a local subject to be its incarna-tion. In either process of symbiosis, the global term and the local subject may be reified or confounded.

To use a very different example, consider the idea that long-existing male-male sexuality in South Africa, identified as “gay” by the processes of mod-

Huang | Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement 349

ernization, should be reexamined as two identities against the intersection of local and global contexts.12 In a similar way, Ciji as a grassroots group of fewer than forty women and as an NGO on the global stage should be examined as two identities, globally and against the genealogy and history of NGOs in Taiwan. The identity of Ciji in the ideoscape of NGOs needs to be repatriated: how Ciji has been situated in the public sphere in Taiwan and globally is patently intertwined with the formation of a new modern Taiwanese cultural identity. This article will substantiate this thesis.

The anecdote at the beginning of the article introduces the idea that the salience of Ciji lies deeper than size and kudos: there is something intrin-sically “Taiwan” in Ciji. Although many theorists approach the study of an NGO by looking at the process through which it emerges and becomes legitimate,13 this article will examine the cultural dimensions of NGO-ness by focusing on the positioning of Ciji in Taiwan’s public sphere from its grassroots to its globalization. As Virginia Cornue has suggested, to exam-ine NGO-ness is “to suggest that organizational structures, forms, relations, and operational methods of . . . NGOs in general are . . . sets of practices through which individuals enact relations and through which varying logics in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense are reinforced.”14 The analysis of Ciji practice will follow Robert Weller’s theories regarding civil association in Taiwan and China and the relationship between NGOs and the governments of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.15 In so analyzing, this article will address some of the issues in the ideoscape of the NGO: What does the Ciji experience tell us about the relationship between the NGO and democracy, and between the NGO and the state? To what extent might a prominent grassroots NGO be a representation of its society and perhaps obviate the application of the Western term NGO? What do people see about Taiwan in Ciji? Does Ciji foster a certain Taiwanese cultural identity? This essay seeks to argue that the making of Ciji’s NGO-ness over the last four decades constitutes a non-Western articulation of what is defined as an NGO: it includes a process of freeing Taiwan’s civil society and of crafting a Taiwanese cultural identity in modernization that is poised to absorb capitalism and democracy while simultaneously being patently local and willfully global.


Grassroots Charitable Women and the Regime of Civil Morality

The genesis of Ciji from an “out-of-the-way” place in 1960s Taiwan is exemplary of gender, religion, and charismatic leadership.16 Zhengyan’s conception of doing something for society was triggered by two events. One was a pool of blood on the floor of a clinic from an Aboriginal woman who didn’t receive treatment for her miscarriage because, according to Ciji literature, she lacked money for treatment.17 The other was an interfaith conversation Zhengyan had with three missionary Catholic nuns about whose religion contributes to society.18 The former compelled Zhengyan to think of a way to save more lives from poverty while the latter compelled her to think about how to organize and tap into the great number of anonymous Buddhist charity donors. On a spring day in 1966, in the remote mountains of Hualian in eastern Taiwan, Zhengyan asked a handful of tearful female lay followers, who begged her not to leave them, to help her realize the goal of helping the poor by founding a group.

This founding of Ciji enabled Zhengyan to combine her monastic order with the laity to create her humanitarian mission. Although local and low-profile in its first decade, its appeal was already distinctive. The economic autonomy of this monastic order was in contrast to conventional Buddhist livelihoods in Taiwan, and its concrete goal of raising supplemental medi-cal fees for the poor further distinguished it from traditional ad hoc and spiritual charitable practices. In this first phase, Ciji nevertheless remained local and grassroots. Because of its reputation for clear bookkeeping and concrete contributions to welfare, it received many awards, including one from the Hualian Xian (Hualian county) magistrate. However, resources were mainly drawn from the money and volunteer energy of its followers, with cooperation from other local Buddhist charitable groups.19

As H. H. Michael Hsiao notes, from the 1950s to 1970s, Taiwan had “no genuine NGO sector that could have engaged in any legitimate or genuine state-civil society dialogue or exchange.” There were only local associations, highly controlled by the ruling Guomindang (GMD), rich and powerful people’s foundations, and “transplanted” Western philanthropic organizations and middle-class social clubs.20 Ciji did not belong to any of these groups. In fact, it could be argued that it is precisely because Ciji did


not take the usual route of NGOs that it was able to survive the GMD’s authoritarianism.

Ciji embodied “civility” under the regime of civil morality, in which the dominant scheme of power/knowledge appeals to a truth that civil participation, expressed in the form of moral conducts, is evaluated as part and parcel of national loyalty and cultural citizenship.21 As Weller has noted, the GMD’s efforts to harness “the image of a ‘civil’ society to [its] not-so-civil state” can be traced back to the New Life Movement, which was resurrected in Taiwan from its failure in Nanchang.22 Weller has also shown how, in the 1950s and 1960s, the GMD state attempted a top-down regime of civil morality by discouraging such popular religious ceremonies as Universal Salvation, promoting instead a model of frugality that viewed money for ceremonies as funds that could be better used to help people on the mainland, Taiwan’s economy, the needy at home, or local construction.23 In 1976, the Ministry of Interior Affairs instituted a reward code for religious contributions to society.24 Since then, Ciji has received the first prize from the Taiwan provincial government in honor of its social contribution — for xingban gongyi cishan shiye (running public good works and philanthropy) — and has been endorsed as the country’s model temple each year. These awards positioned Ciji within the conventional domains of religion and charity, portraying it as a traditional do-good organization that exemplified the proper conduct of religious people under the regime of civil morality. Ciji was left outside the state’s corporatism, poised to pursue its career of gongyi cishan (public good and philanthropy), the two local terms that, two decades later, have been most frequently used to describe NGOs in Taiwan.25

Engaging the State

While perpetuating its model temple reputation under GMD authoritarian-ism, Ciji further engaged Taiwan’s state by actively soliciting public land for building the first Buddhist general hospital in Taiwan’s history. At the same time, Ciji crafted a conduit for a nascent civil society under authoritarian-ism by channeling the social capital usually earmarked for building temples toward building hospitals.


By the late 1970s, Zhengyan felt compelled to build a hospital after she suffered a heart attack following fourteen years of devoting herself to the Ciji mission.26 This health warning forced her to think about building Ciji as an institution and finding regular funds for the mission.27 In May 1979, to the dismay of her followers, Zhengyan revealed her goal of building a general hospital in Hualian and proceeded to seek public land and raise funds.28

For a year and a half, Zhengyan pursued seven different parcels of public land in Hualian, but without success. A turning point came in October 1980 when the chairman of the Taiwan provincial government, Lin Yang-gang, and the president, Jiang Jingguo, each visited Zhengyan in Hualian. Lin had long been paying attention to Ciji29 and Jiang, according to a post-humous article, had known about Zhengyan and Ciji for a long time and had, as premier of the Executive Yuan (Ministry), praised Zhengyan’s con-tribution as the model for all civil servants.30 This visit marked the dawn of Zhengyan’s dream of building a hospital. With the state’s endorsement, the local government finally began to attempt to resolve the land problem.31

A second turning point again involved a high-ranking official.32 In May 1981, Lin announced at the annual ceremony of social welfare award bestowing — in which Ciji was again one of the recipients of the award for model temple contributions to social welfare — that the government had assigned an approximately eight-hectare riverside parcel of land in western Hualian City to the Ciji hospital and that its legal transfer was underway.33 On February 5, 1983, the provincial chairman Li Denghui and the Vener-able Chen-hua (Zhenhua) performed the groundbreaking for the Ciji Gen-eral Hospital.34 But the hospital was never constructed on this site.

To everyone’s disappointment, two months after celebrating the ground-breaking, the military told Zhengyan to halt construction and return the land for defense purposes. With this crisis came a third turning point fea-turing, yet again, a high-ranking civilian. Li assigned to Ciji hospital an 8.9 – hectare plot of land that was the site of an experimental farm of the Provincial Hualian Agricultural School, while he and Lin (now the min-ister of the Interior) each negotiated with the military to release alternative land for the school’s farm. Li’s endorsement had clout. Despite minor resis-tance from the school’s principal, legal procedures at different levels went


smoothly.35 The groundbreaking ceremony took place on April 24, 1984, featuring the president of the Judicial Yuan and the Venerable Yinshun. Two years after the second groundbreaking, and seven years after Zhengyan first revealed her dream, the Ciji General Hospital was finally constructed on this latest promised land.

The acquisition of land for the Ciji hospital shows how important a role the state played in determining the success of an NGO at that time in Tai-wan. Moreover, the ups and downs in the process show how highly central-ized the political structure was; the first push came from the central author-ity, the president, and although the failure of the initial groundbreaking demonstrated the differentiated power between the military and civilians, the problem was nevertheless solved by the central authority. The NGO, Ciji, had to depend on favors from the central power to pursue its goal.

But why would those within that power structure, especially the late president Jiang, be willing to support Ciji? There are two possible answers to this question. One is pragmatism. Ciji’s proposal for welfare reform demanded no policy change from the state, but rather asked for partial aid for their self-sponsored plan. The location of the proposed hospital was also in one of the most marginalized areas of the country. For such a centralized government, granting a piece of public land meant nearly zero cost, consid-ering its enormous holdings, especially along the mountainous eastern coast where most of the lands were public. In short, Ciji’s plan appealed to the state as more of a contribution than a cost.

This pragmatic appeal becomes particularly clear when one looks at how little money the state spent on social welfare at that time. Until the rapid sociopolitical changes of the 1980s, social welfare was never a priority for the GMD regime, which saw its retreat to Taiwan as temporary and as prepara-tion for its future liberation of mainland China. The total social spending in the central government’s annual budget in the 1950s and 1960s accounted for less than 5 percent of its expenditures and then slowly increased to slightly above 15 percent throughout the successful economic development of the 1980s.36 Yet the amount in 1989 was only 4.2 percent of the gross domes-tic product (GDP). This was not even one-fourth of the welfare expendi-tures of any member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and was less than half of the welfare expenditures


of Japan.37 In this light, Ciji’s proposed hospital was nearly a free gift to the state, enabling it to improve its welfare at an extremely low cost.

There is another reason why the state was willing to help. As powerful an authoritarian regime as it was, it could have simply ignored a humanitarian concern for the ordinary citizen and not bothered to convert its land from warfare to welfare. Here, the regime of civil morality upheld Ciji, which had established its reputation in its first phase and was considered a model temple by the time it proposed to build a hospital. This project would pro-mote a two-fold positive model: of social contribution for religious practice and of volunteerism for the society as a whole. In fact, when construction was halted after the first groundbreaking, Lin had tried to persuade Gen-eral Changzhi Song with a “bureaucratic talk”: “People have showed their willingness to contribute to the society. We, the government, should encour-age.”38 In the practical model Ciji projected, the state saw its own future long-term gain.

Nevertheless, acquiring land provided a necessary but insufficient condi-tion for the realization of the Ciji hospital. Besides some donations made by the provincial government and by individual political figures, and despite the fact that the amount of money Ciji saved purchasing the land at its low-est value rather than market price — a price that merely equaled the con-struction cost — the Hualian hospital was not built with the government’s money. Donations increased slowly in the first few years after 1979. By its first groundbreaking in 1983, Ciji had raised only about NT$30 million to meet a total construction cost of NT$800 million. Donations significantly increased between the first and the second groundbreaking, however, and skyrocketed after the second groundbreaking when press coverage on Ciji intensified. In other words, Ciji’s appeal for its hospital did not have positive financial ramifications until the plan actually had a prospect of succeeding. It was not until the construction was in process after the second ground-breaking that donations from different parts of the country and in vari-ous forms — gold, jewelry, money — finally began to flow. In other words, Ciji’s public momentum came very much in tandem with the government’s support.

What was the role of the mass media? Although people in Taiwan in the 1990s often thought of Ciji as a savvy media player, archives of news coverage


of Ciji in the press show that the mass media did not initiate contributions to Ciji’s first national push. Although Ciji made its pleas for its first hospital as early as autumn 1979 in its Ciji Yuekan (Tzu Chi Monthly), the public press did not give any coverage to this appeal until Lin and Jiang visited in 1980.39 Although Ciji literature in retrospect attributes the successful fundraising mostly to the attention received from high-ranking officials and the press, a closer look at the news stories shows that Ciji did not receive wide attention from the press until the first groundbreaking in 1983. The amount of Ciji’s news coverage in general for each year averaged less than a story a year between 1966 and 1980: there were no stories until 1972, remained below 10 a year until 1982, and suddenly reached 73 in 1983, followed by 106 in 1986, the year the Ciji Hualian Hospital was completed.40 Moreover, prior to the Lin and Jiang visits, news coverage about Ciji tended to be perfunctory cov-erage of awards ceremonies with no mention of the hospital. Although Jiang once instructed the Government Information Office to give more coverage to Ciji and Zhengyan, the particular issue of the hospital was kept low-key until the land acquisition problem was resolved in 1982.

However crucial the government’s endorsement was initally, Ciji eventu-ally raised funds from the public for its first hospital and its subsequent rapid growth. Inasmuch as Ciji made its appeal as simple and straightforward as “building the hospital to save more humans’ lives,” the eventual completion of the hospital, as it was based on individual donations, can be said to have embodied a collective moral effort by the greater society. Two issues are involved in this embodiment of the Taiwan collective: one is a backdrop of changing state-NGO relations under liberation, and the other, the cultural identity of the Taiwanese collective that emerged in the mobilization.

As Hsiao has noted, during the same period, from 1980 to 1987, Tai-wan witnessed “the mobilization of civil society as represented by the rise of social movements and civil protests.”41 Ciji’s negotiations for the state’s support of its cause were in some ways similar to the methods used by these new social movements and NGOs. Yet, in contrast to many of its contem-poraries, which were, in Hsiao’s words, “very contentious in nature, and demanding various concessions from government,” Ciji remained positioned under the regime of civil morality. Although the successful mobilization of money from the emerging civil society resonates with the “localization


and indigenization of NGO initiatives,” which Hsiao says characterizes that period of change in Taiwan’s NGO landscape, the case of Ciji can also be read as a “local and indigenous process,” which has more to do with the making of the Taiwanese collective identity.42

A famous story described in Ciji literature underlines the linkage between the hospital and the Taiwan collective. In 1981, during the most difficult time in Ciji fundraising, a Japanese citizen offered to donate US$200 mil-lion (about NT$8 billion at that time) for the hospital construction, “in order to show his gratitude toward the Nationalist Yidebaoyuan [a virtue for a grievance, as the opposite of “an eye for an eye”] and because he is a Bud-dhist.”43 To her followers’ astonishment, Zhengyan declined this generous offer, “in part because of the dignity of the nationhood [minzu zizun].”44 As she explained it: “I am a Chinese citizen . . . after eight years of war with the Japanese . . . it’s very hard for me to accept help from a Japanese . . . if the hospital is built on government’s land and with Japanese money . . . how could we have a say in the hospital?”45; also: “we invite all benevolent people under heaven to the land of merit [ futian yifang yao tianxia shanshi], there should be more people to do good than just one person.”46 (All translations here are mine.)

Zhengyan’s political identity has continued to be ambiguous throughout recent controversies over relief to mainland China, as discussed below. Con-sidering the political situation in 1981 as well as the importance of Zheng-yan’s war memories from her childhood (as revealed in her hagiography), it is not surprising that she refers to a Chinese identity rather than a Taiwan-ese one. What is clear from this story is that Zhengyan already had the idea in her mind that the hospital was not simply a project to be accomplished, but was also a platform for grassroots collectivity.

Many devotees in southern Taiwan in the late 1990s still remembered Ciji’s initial appeal: there was a nun in Hualian who was building a hos-pital instead of a temple. The contrast between temple and hospital indi-cated a shift in the cultural idea of practicing NGO-ness, one that upheld Ciji’s mobilization in pursuit of concrete welfare based on local and indig-enous religious resources. The hospital cause alone was not sufficient for wide mobilization, as the continued minority status of welfare-contributing Christians in Taiwan may suggest.47 Ciji’s hospital cause struck a chord


because it provided a path to embody bodhisattva by saving more people’s lives.

Was the hospital then a collective redemption for Taiwan? In many ways, Ciji resonates with the “redemptive societies” as analyzed by Prasenjit Duara.48 But it should also be seen against the backdrop of Taiwan’s capital-ist development. Canteng Jiang, a Buddhist historian in Taiwan, argues that Ciji’s Hualian hospital project appealed directly to the guilt-ridden Han Tai-wanese, especially those who lived in western Taiwan. He maintains that Ciji provided the majority of Taiwanese, especially those who have benefited from economic development, a chance to repay people on the eastern coast, who had been largely left behind by the national development policy.49 This harkens back to the tragedy of the Aboriginal woman who had the miscarriage — the event that triggered Zhengyan to found Ciji. Indeed, from the perspec-tive that the hospital was built in lieu of a temple and that it provides a way to be bodhisattva, it is arguable that the monetary donations to the Ciji Hualian hospital were a way for guilt-ridden Han Taiwanese to repay debts they owed to the Aborigines on the eastern coast; however, this view is inad-equate for explaining the ensuing modernization of Ciji’s NGO-ness.

The Ascendance of a Buddhist NGO

The late 1980s marks a watershed in both Ciji’s development and Taiwan’s political history. In 1986, President Jiang declared from his deathbed the startling news that nearly four decades of martial law would finally end the following year. In the years before the order was enacted, a tsunami of social discontent built up under the authoritarian era. Nearly every sector of society expressed their grievances through social protests, with hundreds of incidents occurring between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s.50 The first real opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was founded in 1986 (and won the presidency in the year 2000). The ranting and raving in the Parliament and the Legislative Yuan not only provided CNN with frequent scenes of rambunctious lawmaking, but also, along with other social pressures, culminated in the 1992 election of national representatives, a long-awaited second election since the founding of the Republic of China in 1911. Parallel to the political transformation, the “Taiwan miracle” of


economic development unfolded into unprecedented expressions of the cul-ture of money: a meteoric surge and then a plunge in the stock market, nationwide gambling that involved “amoral” religious oracles,51 and popu-lar burlesques celebrating all sorts of rites from weddings to funerals. At the same time, the crime rate rose and numerous social problems became pronounced. A common saying at the time stated that “Taiwan was being drowned by money” (tai oan tsin im kha bat, in Minnan).52

In such a collective milieu of anomie — the result of too many values competing during the same period of structural transition — Ciji’s practi-cal humanitarianism held tremendous moral appeal, and Zhengyan came to be considered the moral and religious savior of the era. It was amid this intense sociopolitical change, in 1986, that Ciji opened its hospital on the quiet and scenic eastern coast. Following this celebrated “Ciji miracle,” Ciji’s total membership increased from just over one hundred thousand in 1986, to over a million in 1990, doubled that in 1992, and doubled it again in 1994. The hospital opening therefore marked the prelude to a transformation of the Ciji organization, culminating in the birth of a supersized and moral NGO. While Ciji had a moral certainty from its outset, the particular tim-ing of its success points to its role as the conscience of Taiwanese society. Its moral presentation in the early 1990s was wider in scale and more organized than the more generic presentation of moral values that characterized it during its early grassroots period.

One of the major accomplishments of Ciji’s model practice, which partic-ularly referenced Zhengyan’s leadership, was the series of national and later international awards bestowed on her. While earlier awards had acknowl-edged the “model temple” and the “good person,” the new awards Zheng-yan received included the highest national award from Taiwan’s govern-ment (huaxia yideng jiangzhang); the 1996 highest award for contributions to diplomatic affairs (waijiao yideng jiangzhang); and the award for a leader of a “harmonious social movement” (shehui yundong hefengjiang). Interna-tional awards followed, including the 1991 Roman Magsaysay award from the Philippine government (an Asian version of the Nobel Peace Prize) and the 1993 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In addition to recognition through awards and honors, both Ciji’s public-ity director and the government began to promote the image of Ciji as the


savior of civil morality in an era dominated by an amoral social atmosphere. For example, Wang Duanzheng, the head of Ciji publicity and publications and also Zhengyan’s brother from her lay identity, identified Ciji in 1993 as the “clear stream in society” (shehui qingliu); in another statement he said Ciji would bring a benign influence to society, which had been infected by a bad atmosphere (buliang fengqi) of religious money frauds. The same year, celebrating Ciji’s anniversary, the head of the Ministry of Interior Affairs announced to the press his invitation to Zhengyan to lead the ministry’s new series devoted to “correcting the bad social atmosphere.”

At the same time, Zhengyan was reintroduced to society as a moral leader through a series of large-scale speeches around the island. These speeches were sponsored and organized by the government in conjunction with Ciji and other nonprofit foundations.53 These speeches not only increased Ciji’s publicity in the national arena, but also firmly established Ciji’s role and Zhengyan’s leadership as pillars of civil morality functioning in the public sphere between the state and family.54 The speeches, whether Zhengyan’s sermons in the early years of the series or the commissioners’ confessions in later years, were less religious preaching than moral lecturing. They taught people how to be good, how to live a good life in the modern world, and, above all, how to be good citizens.

Former President Li once praised Ciji, saying it “purifies people’s minds and leads to a harmonious society” ( jinghua renxin, xianghe shehui), and called Ciji the “most touching chapter” (zui ganren de yizhang) in Taiwan’s development. On January 1, 1998, at the opening ceremony of the Ciji Da’ai TV channel at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Zhengyan led thou-sands of followers in the square in taking the vow of the year: “purify peo-ple’s minds, harmonious society, no more disaster in the world” ( jinghua renxin, xianghe shehui, tianxia wu zainan). The first two reflected former President Li’s words.

Clearly, a regime of civil morality continues to uphold Ciji amid Tai-wan’s rapid political, social, and economic change. Yet with the rise of civil society, the regime of civil morality works from the bottom up rather than from the top down, as it did under martial law. This change bespeaks a certain Taiwanese cultural identity in the currents of roving commodities and burgeoning democracy. Weller rightly argues for a split market culture


wherein Ciji, and other Buddhist revivals, stand on one end of the spectrum, and on the other stands the money-seeking ghost worship — both have roots in tradition, and both are reflexes of the market itself.55 I would add that Ciji’s appeal to the Taiwanese women and men during this period of rapid economic and political change lies in its ability to provide a model of civility for those seeking to regain a sense of order and control in an increasingly disorienting modernity.

Meteoric membership growth and rapid institutionalization have had sig-nificant consequences for the organization itself. One of the major changes is gender representation. Until the hospital’s opening, Ciji was predomi-nately a women’s group, or “a kingdom of housewives,” as Taiwan’s mass media used to call it. While women continue to comprise 70 percent of the membership, the organization’s success in the 1990s resulted in increased male participation and accelerated institutionalization. The two trends con-verged with an emphasis on precepts. With the forming of a male auxil-iary, Cichengdui (Compassion Faith Corps), Zhengyan instituted the Ten Ciji Precepts which consist of the traditional five Buddhist precepts and five more especially designed for modern life — buckling up, gentle speaking and abiding by filial piety, no betel nuts chewing, no gambling or opportun-ist investment in the stock market, and no participation in demonstrations or political campaigns. The ten precepts initially were meant to discipline male devotees, and soon became mandatory for Ciji’s increasingly hetero geneous following. In other words, practicing Ciji in the 1990s meant not only con-tributing time and money for its causes, but also leading a new lifestyle: ascetic, disciplined, and avoiding exciting politics and money games. Since the New Life Movement, the micropolitics of the ten precepts has become the latest modern reincarnation of the regime of civil morality; discipline, in a Foucaultian sense, was indicative of civil morality in 1990s Taiwan and of collectivity in Ciji’s case, as was the avoidance of money games and political demonstrations vis-à-vis concurrent rapid economic and political change.

Doing Good and Doing Well? Criticisms and Backlash

Along with its increasingly high profile, Ciji experienced a rapid expansion of its mission and tremendous fundraising success; the result was enhanced


prosperity and grandeur as it emerged as a super-NGO in Taiwan in the 1990s — it was both doing good and doing well.56 In addition to the five million members it claimed worldwide and the US$0.6 billion in funds it claimed nationwide, the total budget for all of Ciji’s ongoing projects as of 1998 — not including the second Ciji hospital — was NT$24 billion (about US$800 million).57

Although Ciji’s moral certainty had led to support from both the govern-ment and society, it has been quite another thing for morality to work in tandem with democracy. During the same years that Ciji increased in gran-deur, the rapid sociopolitical change and economic success in postmartial law Taiwan have resulted in a proliferation of nonprofit foundations as well as social welfare NGOs. As Weller points out, such a profusion of NGOs is mainly a result of legal changes, of lifting of martial law, and hence of democracy.58 As Hsiao indicates, the NGO landscape in Taiwan has also gone through a transformation from social movements to foundations and membership associations.59 Ciji benefited from these legal changes in that it finally registered as the first Buddhist — and the first religious — nationwide legal entity in 1994. At the same time, Ciji’s new identity as a nonprofit foundation suffered from comparisons with its more traditional and older identity of Merit Society (Gongde Hui). Wittingly or unwittingly, Ciji, as a do-good organization, joined the new Taiwan’s NGO landscape, which was filled with secular, local and international service-providing, and advocacy groups subscribing to a certain modern — and Western — NGO-ness. The fact that most NGOs are relatively autonomous financially means that they mostly depend on donations from the public.60 Amid increasing competition for donations, Ciji’s enormous assets became a conspicuous target.

The do-good image Ciji held over from its previous phase still prevails among people in Taiwan. This image has its good and bad elements. On the one hand, Ciji is considered the primary helper of society. For example, a 1999 popular primetime TV series about the misery of a poor, single mother adds a new character, a Ciji devotee in lieu of a social worker, who helps the des-titute family. On the other hand, people tend to think charity is, in its most traditional sense, what Ciji does. Religious people say that Ciji followers do good and know little of Buddhist scriptures. Social welfare people say Ciji is a traditional charity and must be replaced in time by modern social welfare.


By 1994, people had begun to speak out against Ciji’s size. After a large-scale art and jewelry benefit auction that was reported to have raised about US$10 million, journalists and activists began to call Ciji a “money vacuum” and a “religious monopoly of social welfare.”61 While it was not the only religious — or Buddhist — group to hold multimillion-dollar fund-raising events, Ciji was the most successful and hence the most conspicuous.62 As a result, in 1993 Ciji curtailed its tradition of revealing the exact amounts of annual donations received as well as many other statistics, such as its total membership. As a Ciji Foundation staff member said: “People only look at how much money we have. No one cares how much we have done.”63 This is in conflict with the Ciji practice that had been one of the most crucial in building its reputation in its early phases: clear and open bookkeeping. For example, during my first visit to the Still Thoughts Abode in 1993, there was a large board in the main hall that showed clear and detailed incomes and expenses. By 1994 the board had been permanently removed, a sign of the tremendous pressure felt by the organization.

Ciji was a “problem” in the context of rising social welfare consciousness in the late 1990s. As a Ciji researcher, I was often personally confronted by the Ciji problem. One example occurred at a two-day conference on social welfare movements held at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, in 1998. Despite the variety of social welfare movements presented at the conference, Ciji, though not the subject of my paper per se, was the most talked about topic. Practitioners and students of social welfare movements went to great lengths, sometimes emotionally, to discuss the “problem” of Ciji receiving the lion’s share of society’s resources for social welfare. A man in the audi-ence adamantly called attention to the important role of Zhengyan’s brother, Wang, in controlling Ciji, and how “inhumane” Ciji was in that it only delivered relief to one specific village in its disaster relief to mainland China. A young student worried: “Is there any way to stop Ciji from taking so much money and stubbornly putting it in the traditional charity?” Nevertheless, there was no criticism of Zhengyan herself. All comments were about Ciji as a whole. The Ciji issue occupied nearly the entire general discussion session at the end of the conference, until the moderator took over the microphone and asked: “Is there any question or comment that is not about Ciji?”

Pro-Ciji people are similarly vocal. For example, once in 1999 when I


was talking with a friend of mine at a teahouse in Taipei about what I had learned concerning how people criticize Ciji, a man who sat in the opposite corner of the teahouse suddenly stood up, pointed at me, and made a scene: “You must understand Ciji! I am not a Ciji person myself but I have a friend who is a Ciji commissioner. I can introduce you to my friend for you to get a better understanding of Ciji!”

The Ciji issue was exacerbated when the conspicuous Ciji “monopoly” encountered an uproar inspired by Taiwanese nationalism. Ciji International Relief began its fund-raising efforts for flood victims in China in 1991. Such an initiative was a big step in Ciji’s internationalization, while, at the same time, it was a catalyst for its domestic unpopularity. Ciji devotees in Jiayi in southwestern Taiwan consistently told me that they had never encountered any difficulty in proselytizing for Ciji, since its practice is “doing good,” with one exception: the relief to China. People in Taiwan began to accuse Ciji of “having so much money that it began to help our enemy [that is, Bei-jing].” Whether this antagonism was against China or against Ciji’s size was unclear, since devotees in Taipei also described the hostility they encoun-tered when fund-raising for the earthquake victims of Turkey in 1999.

Moreover, Ciji devotees responded to the suggestion that their organiza-tion is “too big” as something beyond question. A typical answer is echoed in the response given to the press by Wang, Zhengyan’s brother and the vice-CEO in charge of the cultural mission: “It is a good group. Why should people be afraid of a good group becoming too big?”64 According to the secretariat office of the premier of the Executive Yuan, Ciji’s representative assumed special privileges in dealing with the state. They always called to meet the minister’s secretariat on short notice, often from a mobile phone while they were driving only minutes away from the Executive Yuan. And these representatives reiterated that “we are doing good (women shi zuo shanshi)” when they negotiated — often effectively — with the minister’s secretariat for their request.65

Morality combined with nondemocratic possession of massive resources often makes outsiders, especially intellectuals, uncomfortable. As a senior journalist at Lianhe bao (United Daily News) — one of Taiwan’s largest news-papers — said emotionally: “Ciji does not open its decision-making to the outside. We can’t do anything about it. And what really gets you is that Ciji


always appears with such strong morality. They are doing good. What can you say about people who do good? They do good, and if you criticize them, then you are the bad guy.”66

The Ciji problem is a common problem for NGOs: they claim to rep-resent the common good, but their methods are not democratic.67 How-ever, for the purpose of this article, one needs to look closely to distinguish between issues unique to Ciji and ones common to NGOs and democracy.

One of the controversies concerns accountability, which should be handled as a legal issue. Indeed, this issue concerns not only Ciji and other religious foundations, but also such reputable and more intellectually oriented NGOs such as the Consumers’ Rights Foundation.68 The issue of conspicuous size concerns Ciji specifically, but it is beyond the realm of legal solutions. The law in Taiwan, and perhaps in most democratic countries, requires minimum thresholds for membership associations’ assets and in funds for foundations (associations and foundations are referred to as NGOs in other countries and in common usage, rather than legal terms, in Taiwan), but no upper limits are set, nor is there any kind of antitrust law for NGOs.

Overlapping the size issue are the cultural and historical aspects of the controversies. In a nutshell, Ciji is grassroots organization writ large — one that became so large so fast that it outgrew the normalizing power of Taiwan’s civil society, which has just begun to mature. The relationship between Ciji and civil society is dialectical: Ciji pioneered civil society; there could be no Ciji miracle without the rise of civil society. Yet, we saw that the strong and pluralist NGO sector brought about by a maturing civil society eventually turned against Ciji. Is democracy friend or foe? In some ways, the controversies of Ciji and democracy may parallel the recent debates over faith-based welfare services in the United States.69

An infamous civil lawsuit, known as the “pool of blood” (yitanxie) defa-mation case, against Zhengyan in 2003 seems to be a climax in the backlash against Ciji. The “pool of blood” refers to the genesis of Ciji. The family of the doctor who was said to have turned the Aboriginal woman away for insufficient funds sued Zhengyan after a devotee revealed the identity of the doctor in 2001. Zhengyan lost the civil lawsuit and was ordered to pay NT$1.01 million to the doctor’s family. To everyone’s surprise, Zhengyan decided not to appeal: “The wound won’t heal if we continue to appeal.” It


was said that the family would later donate the payment from Zhengyan back to the Ciji Foundation. This lawsuit made headlines at that time. Fam-ily and kinsmen of the poor Aboriginal woman, who supported Zhengyan, tearfully recounted the tragedy and by extension the miserable living con-ditions of the Aboriginal people. Former patients of the doctor, almost all of them Han Chinese, testified that the doctor often treated them for free. The evidence showed that the woman visited the clinic and left without receiving treatment, but it was unclear what drove her out of the clinic. The doctor’s family believed the whole “tragedy” was fictional.70 Both critics and supporters of Ciji were still speaking of this case with strong emotion as late as 2005.

The case was handled strictly as a legal matter. It reminds me of the Amadou Diallo case in New York City in 1999, in which four white plain-clothes policemen were charged with killing an unarmed West African man — with forty-one bullets — in the vestibule of a Bronx apartment building, when the latter reached his hand into his pocket. Similar to the due process of law in New York, in the “pool of blood” case the issue of eth-nicity was not raised. Perhaps the stakes were too high: like “the elephant in the middle of courtroom that no one wants to talk about”?71

The “pool of blood” lawsuit summarizes much of the Ciji issue: it is less a legal issue than a case of history retold in a modern setting and through a variety of mass media. It is a rerun of a series of sociocultural memories referencing a now-savvy NGO that everyone in Taiwan can relate to in one way or another. What is unique in the Ciji issue is the continued, hyped attention it receives from the public sphere in Taiwan. What lies at the core of this attention is perhaps the idea that Ciji’s brief history captures the Tai-wanese imagination in its processes of modernization. Ciji espouses modern NGO-ness while Taiwanese civil society “frees” itself from political and economic constraints. People in Taiwan like to talk about Ciji in the same way Clifford Geertz interprets the Balinese and their cockfights: the cock-fight is a “deep play” of Balinese culture, and people come to cockfights to look at a representation of themselves, “saying something of something.” As Geertz puts it, “societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them.”72 In my view, Ciji has come to be the access point in Taiwanese cultural identity.


The Nexus of the Global and the Local

The September 21 earthquake in 1999, which killed over two thousand people and collapsed over forty thousand houses across Taiwan, marked another turning point for Ciji. Its volunteers’ efficient and devoted relief work for the victims, including those who were trapped in the most remote areas, outshone the government’s efforts and impressed the society. The vitriolic criticism against Ciji’s international relief works disappeared as its thousands of volunteers embodied the organization as a pillar of Taiwan’s civil society.

The about-face that Taiwanese society showed to Ciji after the earth-quake marks the unique position held by this NGO in Taiwan’s public sphere in the late twentieth century: a nexus of the local and the global. Much of Ciji’s development in the 1990s had focused on broadening its geographical arena through overseas expansion, by proselytization within the Taiwanese diaspora, and by means of its international outreach across ethnic and political borders. By the year 2000, the Ciji diaspora had more or less become a “face of globalization,”73 like Christian evangelicalism74 and like the Sai Baba movement from India.75 Unlike these movements, however, Ciji’s transcultural practice resulted more in the shaping of the religious diaspora within the overseas Taiwanese and Chinese communi-ties than in the creation of a vibrant mixture of cultures, or creolization.76 Meanwhile, its cross-border charitable work won its leader an increasing list of international awards. Its growing network among its overseas branches and among international NGOs indicates that Ciji might be moving in the direction of a transnational advocacy network,77 although Ciji’s focus tends to remain within the bounds of traditional charity rather than advocating for such “modern” issues as human rights.78

While becoming increasingly global, Ciji continues to be a quintessen-tial local concern for Taiwan. Many social scientists continue to view Ciji as a monopoly that claims more than its share of social welfare donations. Despite Zhengyan’s adamant reiteration of her apolitical stance, the press never ceases to be interested in her position in Taiwan’s political spectrum. Ciji’s border-crossing practices are in part a realization of the bodhisattva’s universal ideal of relieving all beings from suffering, regardless of ethnicity


or nationality, and in part a result of the fact that Taiwanese transnationalism straddles two or more countries. Such deterritorialization of a grassroots NGO places the government’s diplomatic predicament in sharp relief. Rather than being antagonistic or even repressive toward this NGO, the government — both the GMD and the DPP since 2000 — has attempted to recapture Ciji by collaborating with, if not riding on the coattails of, its outreach beyond borders. For example, President Chen of the DPP offered Ciji as an example of Taiwan’s global engagement despite Taiwan’s lack of membership within the United Nations.79

Conclusion

Ciji is everywhere in late-capitalist Taiwan. Taiwan’s Chang Kai-shek inter-national airport appears as a “hyperspace” filled with signs of wealth and politically correct messages manifested through commercials for skin-care products and weight-loss programs, as well as ethnic Aboriginal attrac-tions.80 A traveler, after navigating the immigration process and the enthu-siastic salespersons in the twenty-four-hour duty-free shops, feels a moment of relaxation at the baggage claim area upon realizing that the carts are free of charge. Among the commercials printed on the carts is Ciji’s “Great Love Entering South Asia” fund-raising advertisement for the tsunami cause, fea-turing volunteers, in uniforms of blue polo shirts and white pants, carrying relief goods. Entering the “global city” of Taipei, one sees buses displaying ads for Motorola and Benetton, as well as the same ads for Ciji’s tsunami-relief efforts.81 Both devotees and outsiders tune in to Ciji TV for its prime-time Taiwanese soap opera, indulging in the narratives of ordinary people finding identities in Ciji, or just enjoying a break from the repetitive news and analyst shows modeled on CNN and Larry King. The reality is that it would be difficult to find a local who does not know of Ciji.

This article looks at Ciji as it has evolved within, and along with, Tai-wan’s public sphere. It shows that the positioning of Ciji’s NGO-ness is itself a process of freeing Taiwan’s civil society and crafting a Taiwanese cultural identity in market value and democracy, while being simultaneously local and cosmopolitan — a binary distinction of world culture like that pos-ited by Ulf Hannerz.82 As Taiwan was experiencing modernization, Ciji


itself changed from a grassroots organization to a large and global NGO with branches within the Taiwanese diaspora and with UN recognition. At the same time, the regime of civil morality for Taiwanese NGO-ness, as experienced by Ciji, shifted from model temple to welfare infrastruc-ture, to micropolitics of civility, and to deterritorialization and globalism. By the year 2000, Ciji had become a nexus of the local and the global. As Weller argues, Ciji’s organized charity is one of Taiwan’s religious responses to capitalism and the island’s status of nonnation/nonstatehood.83 How-ever, both government and society are attempting to reterritorialize Ciji, even as its practice expands globally. The hype surrounding Ciji palpably captures the Taiwanese imagination: the career of Ciji’s NGO-ness, from grassroots to globalization against a shifting backdrop from the regime of civil morality to a public sphere, has proceeded hand-in-hand with the crafting of Taiwanese cultural identity in modernization and the positioning of Taiwan on a global stage. In Appadurai’s words, the “deterritorialized, diasporac, and transnational,”84 world as presented by Ciji seems to have, in turn, facilitated what he calls the “production of locality” for Taiwan — “as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community.”85 The more active Ciji is on the global stage, the more it clarifies the locality of Taiwan and the more irony it casts on Taiwan’s ambiguous nation-statehood on the territorialized world map. Ciji highlights a “cultural intimacy” of Taiwan.86 Above all, how Ciji and Taiwan stand is a critique of the salience of modern nation-states.87

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 meeting of the American Anthro-pological Association, the 2005 ICAS4 (the Fourth International Convention of Asian Scholars) meeting, seminars at the Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya and at Taiwan Normal University, and the 2006 meeting of the Association for Asian Stud-ies. I thank the organizers of these panels for inviting me: Jocelyn H. DeHaas, Peter van der Veer, Hou Kok Chung, Tsung-yi Michelle Huang, and Kim D. Reimann. I am also grateful for the invaluable input of Amy Borovoy, Thomas Gold, Christopher Lupke, and Robert P. Weller, who read the draft and gave me their insightful suggestions. My thanks also go to Yü-chen Li, Hong-zen Wang, and Emile Yeo for sharing with me crucial information,


and to Prasenjit Duara, André Laliberté, and Mayfair Yang for their helpful comments. I am grateful to the two anonymous positions readers for their thoughtful suggestions for sharpening my arguments. Kuang-ting Chuang helped me with data updates during revi-sion, and Dianna Downing helped to make my English readable; I thank them both. Part of the research for this article was supported by grants from the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 93 – 2412 – H-007 – 004; NSC95 – 2412 – H-007 – 003) and part of the revision was supported by a writing grant from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.

1. An up-to-date list of international awards given to Zhengyan can be found on the Tzu Chi Foundation Web site, www.tzuchi.org/global/about/founder/awards.html.

2. In a Le Figaro report on the rising power of Buddhist nuns in Taiwan, the journalist Francois Hauter describes Zhengyan as exemplary, calling her “the Taiwanese Mother Teresa.” See Zhongyang ribao (Central Daily), January 5, 2002.

3. See William F. Fisher, “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 439 – 64.

4. For use of the term association revolution, see Lester Salamon, “The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector,” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994): 109 – 22.

5. For use of the term global infatuation with NGOs, see Robert P. Weller, “Civil Associations and Autonomy under Three Regimes: The Boundaries of State and Society in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China,” in Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing Between Family and State, ed. Robert P. Weller (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76 – 94.

6. See Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 36 – 48.

7. Yu-yuan Kuan, “International Relief and Taiwan’s Social Development: A Historical Analysis of the Role Played by Non-governmental Organizations,” Social Policy and Social Work 6 (2002): 156 – 58.

8. For a discussion of pluralism, see H. H. Michael Hsiao, “NGOs, the State, and Democracy under Globalization,” in Weller, Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change, 42 – 57.

9. For a discussion of transnationalism, see Jie Chen, “Burgeoning Transnationalism of Taiwan’s Social Movement NGOs,” Journal of Contemporary China 29 (2001): 613 – 44.

10. Ideoscapes are “concatenations of images, but they are often directly political, and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it.” Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 36.

11. See Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, “A World in Motion,” in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 1 – 36.


12. See Donald L. Donham, “Freeing South Africa: The ‘Modernization’ of Male-Male Sexuality in Soweto,” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 3 – 21.

13. See, for example, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

14. Virginia Cornue, “Practicing NGOness and Relating Women’s Space Publicly: The Women’s Hotline and the State,” in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 75.

15. Robert P. Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); Weller, Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change.

16. See Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

17. The recounting of this event later resulted in a lawsuit against Zhengyan in 2003; see below.

18. For details of the creation of Ciji, see Chien-yu Julia Huang and Robert P. Weller, “Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 379 – 96; C. Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

19. From the outset, Ciji demanded, whenever possible, that all donors complement financial contributions with volunteer work. I thank one of the positions readers for reminding me to emphasize this distinct practice of Ciji.

20. Hsiao, “NGOs, the State, and Democracy,” 42 – 43.21. The word regime is used in Michel Foucault’s sense, and in Aihwa Ong’s application in

the Chinese case, as schemes of power/knowledge that appeal to a certain truth. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 110 – 36.

22. Weller, Alternate Civilities, 44 – 45.23. Robert P. Weller, “Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The Failure of State Control over Religious

Interpretation in Taiwan,” American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 46 – 61.24. The institution of the reward code in 1976 was followed by the regulation of religious ritual

expenses to promote frugal ethics in 1978.25. See, for example, H. H. Michael Hsiao, ed., Feiyingli bumen zuzhi yu yunzuo (The

Organization and Operation of the Nonprofit Sector) (Taipei: Juliu, 2000).26. For an analysis of the hagiography of Zhengyan, see Huang, Charisma and Compassion,

chap. 1.27. Huijian Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie (The Venerable Zhengyan’s World of Ciji) (Taipei:

Ciji Wenhua Chubanshe, 1988 [1983]), 35 – 36.28. Ciji Nianjian 1966 – 1992 (Tzu Chi Yearbook 1966 – 1992) (Taipei: Ciji Wenhua Chubanshe,

1993), 8.


29. Ibid.30. Wuji Tang, “Chujiaren de xinyuan, jingguo xiansheng zhongshi; zhujian ciji yiyuan, yize

changliu renjian” (“Mr. Jiang Jingguo Respects the Wish of a Monastic; Help Building Compassion Relief Hospital, Benefit Future Generations”), Lianhebao (United Daily News), January 17, 1988.

31. “Xiejian ciji zonghe yiyuan, wu xianzhang zuo paiyuan midi” (“Help Building Compas-sion Relief General Hospital, Magistrate Wu Sent Delegate to Search for Land Yesterday”), Gengsheng ribao (Keng Sheng Daily News), October 21, 1980. Ciji Nianjian 1966 – 1992, 8.

32. See, for example, Ciji yuekan (Tzu Chi Monthly) 169 (1980): 4 – 5, and 176 (1981): 21; Geng-sheng ribao (Keng Sheng Daily News), November 30, 1980, and February 20, 1981.

33. Ciji Yuekan 176 (1981): 21.34. Taiwan is one of the two provinces — the other is Fujian Province — of the Republic of

China. The head of provincial government is the provincial chairman (shengzhuxi) assigned by the central government. Between 1994 and 1998, the office was changed to the election-based provincial governor (shengzhang). Li Denghui later became the vice president to Jiang Jingguo and succeeded as president when Jiang died. The Venerable Zhenhua (1921 – ) was born in mainland China and has been living in Taiwan since 1948. A prominent monk, he was a close friend of late Venerable Yinshun, and was the president of the Fuyan Buddhist Seminary (Fuyan foxueyuan), one of the most established Buddhist colleges in Taiwan. His autobiography, “Random Talks about My Mendicant Life,” has been translated into English by Denis Mair, ed. Chün-fang Yü, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 13 (1980 and 1981) and 14 (1982). Yü-chen Li, personal communication.

35. For a brief narration of this crisis and its solution, see Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 39 – 41.

36. See Wenhui Zheng, Woguo shehui fuli zhichu zhi yanjiu (Study of Taiwan’s Social Welfare Expenditure) (Taipei: Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission, Executive Yuan, 1990), and John F. Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (Boulder, CO: West-view, 1996), 76.

37. Zheng, Woguo shehui fuli zhichu zhi yanjiu, 19.38. Chen, Zhengyan fashi de ciji shijie, 40.39. Ciji Nianjian 1966 – 1992, 631.40. Calculations based on the news database at the Tzu Chi Foundation.41. Hsiao, “NGOs, the State, and Democracy,” 43.42. Ibid., 43 – 44. I thank one of positions readers for pointing out this Ciji distinction from

Hsiao’s observation of the trend.43. Duanzheng Wang, ed., Xinlian wanrui (Ten Thousand Lotuses of the Heart) (Hualian: Fojiao

Ciji Cishan Shiye Jijinhui, 1997), 35.44. Ibid.45. Ciji Nianjian 1966 – 1992, 20.


46. Wang, Xinlian wanrui, 35. The same quote came up again in Ciji’s recent global development.

47. C. Julia Huang, “Sacred or Profane? The Compassion Relief Movement’s Transnationalism in Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and the United States,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 2 (2003): 225.

48. Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900 – 1945,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1030 – 51.

49. Canteng Jiang, Taiwan dangdai fojiao (Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism) (Taipei: Nantian Chubanshe, 1997), 28 – 33.

50. They included the students’ petition for changing the university law and farmers’ riots against the government’s unequal trade agreement with the United States.

51. Robert P. Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen (London: Macmillan, 1994).

52. Minnan, also known as hoklo, is the Chinese language widely spoken among the Taiwanese whose ancestors migrated to Taiwan prior to 1945.

53. Tzu Chi Foundation Web site, taipei.tzuchi.org.tw/databank/table/table5.htm (accessed March 27, 2009).

54. This publicity was in addition to the increased publicity provided by Ciji through its own literature and publications, including Ciji Yuekan (Tzu Chi Monthly) and Ciji Daolü (Tzu Chi Bi-weekly), both with a distribution of six hundred thousand, and Zhengyan’s book Jingsi yu (Still Thoughts) (more than 200th edition by 1999). Ciji also produced radio programs, TV programs, and later, in 1998, Ciji Da’ai TV channel.

55. Weller, Alternate Civilities, 100 – 102.56. See Lynn D. Robinson, “Doing Good and Doing Well: Shareholder Activism, Responsible

Investment, and Mainline Protestantism,” in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, ed. Robert Withnow and John H. Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 343 – 63.

57. This figure was provided by the head of the Ciji Construction Department at a meeting I participated in on September 24, 1998.

58. Weller, “Civil Associations and Autonomy,” 10.59. Hsiao, “NGOs, the State, and Democracy,” 44.60. Ibid., 50.61. “Money vacuum” and “religious monopoly of social welfare” are terms I often heard at con-

ferences, for example, the 1998 conference described in the next paragraph, and recently in a colloquium on “Religion in a Pluralist Society” held at the National Cheng Chi University, Taiwan, in 2003. Criticism of “money vacuum” is quoted in Ciji literature on its TV channel Web site, www.newdaai.tv/?view=detail&id=47938 (accessed March 26, 2009).

62. Jinrong Xie, “Linahuachi li kaiman yi duoduo jinse de lianhua” (“Golden Lotuses Blossom”), Journalist 367 (1994): 66 – 75.


63. Ibid., 67.64. Interview with Ms. Xunzhi Wu of the secretariat of the Tzu Chi Foundation on July 27,

1998, in Hualian City, Taiwan.65. The issue at stake was Ciji’s request for another piece of public land in Hualian.66. Mr. Lin (pseudonym), personal communication in July 1999.67. Weller, “Civil Associations and Autonomy,”11.68. Chin-fen Chang and Henghao Zhang, “Feizhengfu zuzhi de zhidu xinren: shehuixue de

guandian” (“The Institutional Trust of NGOs: Sociological Perspectives”) (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Taiwan Sociological Association, Taipei, Taiwan, November 27 – 28, 2003).

69. Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). I thank Amy Borovoy for pointing out this comparison to me. This comparison should take into account that Ciji is a local/domestic medical welfare association for the poor and an international relief organization for disaster victims. It does not make demands of, or inquire into, religious affiliations of its beneficiaries. I thank one of the anonymous readers for pointing out this qualifier.

70. “Tzu Chi Founder Not to Appeal Case,” Taipei Times, September 18, 2003, www.taipeitimes .com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/09/18/2003068259.

71. Jeffrey Toobin, “The Unasked Question: Why the Diallo Case Missed the Point,” New Yorker, March 6, 2000, 38.

72. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 453.

73. Huang, “ ‘Sacred or Profane?’ ”; see also C. Julia Huang, “The Compassion Relief Diaspora,” in Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization, ed. Linda Learman (Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawaii Press, 2005), 185 – 209.

74. Peter L. Berger, “Four Faces of Global Culture,” National Interest 49 (1997): 23 – 29.75. Tulasi Srinivas, “ ‘Tryst with Destiny’: The Indian Case of Cultural Globalization,” in

Many Globalizations, ed. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89 – 116.

76. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (New York: Routledge, 1996).

77. For the term transnational advocacy network, see Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, chap. 1.

78. For the list of successful issues for transnational advocacy, see ibid., 11.79. See, for example, Ciji Yuekan (Tzu Chi Monthly), 439 (2003), Tzu Chi Foundation Web site,

taipei.tzuchi.org.tw/monthly/439/439c11 – 22.HTM (accessed March 26, 2009).80. For the term hyperspace, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 44.81. For the term global city, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo


(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); also Anru Lee, “Heteroglossia and the Subway: Reading Taipei’s MRT in the Context of Global Cities” (paper presented at the joint meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Ethnological Society, San Diego, April 10, 2005).

82. Hannerz, Transnational Connections, 102 – 11.83. Robert P. Weller, “Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-

State in Taiwan,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 477 – 98.84. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 188.85. Ibid., 189.86. The term cultural intimacy refers to “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity

that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next moment reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation.” Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

87. See, for example, Horng-luen Wang, “Rethinking the Global and the National: Reflections on National Imaginations in Taiwan,” Theory, Culture, and Society 17 (2000): 93 – 117.

Genealogies of NGO-ness: The Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement in

Contemporary Taiwan

C. Julia Huang

Is the concept of the NGO, or nongovernmental organization, a global catchall? This

article tries to respond to the globalization of the concept of NGO by tracing the

historical and local development of a Taiwanese grassroots Buddhist organization, the

Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation, in the public sphere of Taiwan since the late 1960s,

and particularly the controversies surrounding the group’s rapid growth during

Taiwan’s democratization since the late 1980s. The development of the Buddhist group

from an unknown grassroots to a global United Nations NGO, as the article will show,

attests to the plural genealogies of NGO-ness. In addition, the article argues that the

genealogy of Ciji illustrates the nuanced relationship between society and the Taiwan

“state,” and that Ciji embodies the shifting cultural “state” of civil society in Taiwan.

The concept of the “regime of civil morality” will be introduced for the understanding

of the cultural politics of NGO-ness.

Genealogies of NGO-ness: The Cultural Politics of a Global Buddhist Movement in Contemporary Taiwan

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