[Bright**].
Recently, the legislature passed a decision to amend the Charity Law, which focuses on improving the measures for promoting charity, standardizing charitable activities under normal conditions and emergencies, and striving to improve the modernization level of charitable governance. The data from the "China Public Donation Study" released by the National School of Development of Peking University also showed that in the past year, as high as 80Nine percent of the public surveyed said they had participated in donations. All these show that China's charitable donations have a good social, technical and legal foundation.
The development of philanthropy is an important form of giving play to the role of the third distribution. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to improve the distribution system, "build a coordinated system of primary distribution, redistribution and third distribution", and "guide and support enterprises, social organizations and individuals who are willing and able to actively participate in public welfare and charity". As a key link in the development of philanthropy, charitable donations play an important role in solidly promoting common prosperity and enhancing national soft power and social cohesion. Not only that, charitable donations regulate wealth distribution through the social voluntary mechanism, which is conducive to ensuring the bottom line of people's livelihood and promoting the formation of a consumer society, and is also an important measure to optimize the governance system and build a new development pattern.
In recent years, charitable donations in China have developed rapidly. From an individual point of view, the public's awareness of donation has been continuously improved, the donation participation rate has increased rapidly, the donation content has become more diverse, and the sense of donation has been enhanced. From a social point of view, the scale of charitable donations continues to grow, and service organizations continue to grow. According to the "2022 Statistical Communiqué on the Development of Civil Affairs", there are regular social donation workstations, points and charity supermarkets across the country150,000; In terms of disaster prevention and mitigation, in 2023, North China, Huanghuai, Northeast China and other places will be hit by torrential rains and floods, and all sectors of society will donate more than 1.6 billion yuan in disaster relief funds and materials, making positive contributions to flood prevention and disaster relief.
Looking to the future, China's charitable donations should also adhere to the problem-oriented approach and strive to solve some problems and deficiencies faced in the process of development. In recent years, although the total amount of charitable donations in China has increased, the total scale is still small, the per capita donation amount is low, and the social donation culture is not strong. In addition, there is still a certain degree of "absence" and "dislocation" in the incentives for charitable donations in China, such as the low deduction limit standard for charitable donations, the difficulty of deferring the deduction of donations in the current year, and the tax incentives for charitable donations ignore non-cash donations, which affects the enthusiasm of the public to donate.
At present, the development requirements of common prosperity and the rapid increase in the participation rate of charitable donations provide broad prospects for the high-quality development of charitable donations in China, and the revision of the Charity Law provides a solid legal foundation for the high-quality development of charitable donations in China. To better promote the development of charitable donations, we can focus on three aspects. The first is to create a culture where everyone participates in philanthropy. The focus is on the early cultivation of philanthropic values, strengthening the cultivation of philanthropic culture on campus, and combining philanthropic culture with general and professional education. Strengthen the guidance of the mass media, pay attention to the publicity of typical charity figures and cases around them, and guide the public to form a correct view of charity. Improve systems for the protection of the rights of charitable donors, clarifying the right to voluntariness, the right to know, the right to withdraw, and the right to privacy protection, and clear channels for relief for charitable donors. The second is to increase the intensity of preferential policies. The focus is on implementing detailed rules in accordance with existing laws and regulations, expanding the scope of pre-tax deduction qualifications for public welfare donations, appropriately lowering the threshold for charitable organizations to obtain pre-tax deduction qualifications, and simplifying the tax refund and non-local recognition processes. The third is to solidly promote the openness, transparency, and rational use of charitable donations, clarify the punishment measures for charitable organizations violating information disclosure, and guide charitable organizations to establish expert committees to help determine the charitable purpose of donors, screen executors and beneficiaries, strengthen the tracking and supervision of charitable donation funds, and improve the performance of charitable donations.
Authors: Wang Weijin and Fu Wei are researchers at the Institute of Public Management and Human Resources of the Development Research Center and associate researchers at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, respectively