Major events can and do play an important role in the development of volunteering in China. This article employs organizational neo-institutionalism as a lens to examine and interpret the meanings of major events for the development of Chinese volunteerism. We consider the Wenchuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics as “Field-Configuring Events” that influenced the process of institutionalizing volunteering. The article’s findings highlight that these major events shaped the public’s culture and cognition of volunteering and the network-governance structure of volunteering, thereby opening a window of opportunity for volunteerism policy decision-making.

The rise of social forces in humanitarian assistance and risk governance is becoming increasingly apparent in the international humanitarian community. Yet relatively little is known about the evolution of volunteering policy in non-Western cases. This article summarizes the evolution of Chinese policy on volunteerism from 1978 to 2019 based on bibliometric analysis. Given the scarcity of such policy evolution mapping in China, the article analyzes volunteering-related policies based on a framework of ‘policy issuing networks, policy foci, and policy tools’. The evolution of volunteering policy is divided into five stages based on policy-issuing frequency, background, and content. The article identifies the core policy-issuing agencies in volunteering policy processes using network analysis, extracts the core policy foci using frequency statistics and cluster analysis, and analyzes policy tool applications using semantic analysis. This produces three main findings. First, the policy issuance network has undergone a process from ‘predominance to decentralization to clustering’, with core ‘pillars’ as issuing agencies. Second, policies have promoted volunteering in diversified policy areas and by a broad range of social actors. Third, policies leave autonomy to society by applying more symbolic and incentive tools, but in the face of national strategies, issuing agencies are inclined to adopt authoritative, system-changing, and capacity-building tools.

This article maps out and examines the composition, content and characteristics of the PRC's policies on voluntary services for people with disabilities, categorizing policies as “core,” “middle” and “peripheral” and examining their common characteristics. By examining this set of policies it also reveals something of the existing problems of China's sectoral, and sometimes segmented, policies more generally.