"My Heart's Anna"

Pál Nyíri

doi:10.17356/ieejsp.v5i3.515

Abstract

In Europe, youth volunteers are a small segment of a growing and increasingly diverse Chinese presence. Currently limited to Eastern Europe, including a handful in European Union member states such as Hungary and Poland, Chinese volunteers may later participate in domestic volunteering projects in Western Europe as well. As elsewhere, volunteering is linked to other ways of mobility. Studying abroad can be a stimulus to volunteering and vice versa; volunteering is typically accompanied by experiences of sightseeing and nature tourism that are shared with other young Chinese (tourists, students and expatriates). Yet it also represents a potentially new, more compassionate modality of engaging with the unfamiliar. This is significant against the background of the rapidly changing power relations between Europe and China, analyses of which often portray Europe as a hapless target of Chinese greed or manipulation.

Highlights

I am Ao Xuan, third-year tourism management student, currently applying for internships in South America and Africa (...) I am thinking, too, of doing a gap year before going to the U.S for graduate study. (...) In 2013, I visited 6 countries, 40 cities, very ordinary, nothing over the top
In the year I applied to be an overseas volunteer in Kenya, East Africa, for a month
Volunteering emerges from the confluence of state discourse; a popular view of a ‘moral void’ in contemporary China propagated by intellectuals and the media; the impulse of a new, affluent urban youth to fill that void and ‘do good;’ and the increasing expectation by employers that job applicants show evidence of meaningful social engagement

Summary

Introduction

I am Ao Xuan, third-year tourism management student, currently applying for internships in South America and Africa (...) I am thinking, too, of doing a gap year before going to the U.S for graduate study. (...) In 2013, I visited 6 countries, 40 cities, very ordinary, nothing over the top. She informs her readers that she chose to teach English in Guatemala Her posts are an example of new ways in which young Chinese weave volunteering and travel in poorer countries into their self-making as global citizens, which include ambitions to study and work in or just experience Western countries. Volunteering emerges from the confluence of state discourse; a popular view of a ‘moral void’ in contemporary China propagated by intellectuals and the media; the impulse of a new, affluent urban youth to fill that void and ‘do good;’ and the increasing expectation by employers that job applicants show evidence of meaningful social engagement This situation displays close parallels to the ‘humanitarianization of the public sphere’ in Europe and the U.S (Muehlebach, 2012; Grewal, 2014). In China, volunteering projects stretch over a range from the completely state-driven (such as at international sports events) to the encouraged (most service delivery projects), the tolerated (work with rural migrant children, HIV patients and other ‘sensitive’ groups) and occasionally the persecuted when a group is seen as overly independent (such as the rural network of Liren school libraries, forced to close in 2014)

The origins of overseas volunteering

A Chinese Peace Corps?

What motivates Chinese volunteers abroad?

Findings

Volunteers’ stories