Chinese online charity platforms attracted 1 billion donators

Beijing. June 12. Silkroadnews - The PRC law on charity was adopted in September 2016. Since then more than 1 billion people have made donations through online charity platforms, the Ministry of Civil Affairs says, People’s Daily reports.
As noted in the report by the China Philanthropy Research Institute, in 2017, 12 information platforms approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs gathered more than 2.59 billion yuan ($405 million) in donations, while the charity platform managed by the Internet giant Tencent gathered more than 1,6 billion yuan.
As of this month in China, there are 20 such online platforms.
“Compared with conventional charity patterns, online charity is more convenient, accessible, efficient and transparent,” Zhao Wenpin, associate professor of the Party School of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai, is quoted saying.
As of the end of May, the Tencent platform has received about 3.6 billion yuan in funds from 160 million people, which were directed to 41,546 projects managed by 5,506 charity organizations.
However, the article also notes, since individuals are also allowed to publish information to collect donations through these platforms, the reliability of some of them is difficult to verify.
Zhao urged such platforms to cooperate in disclosing information and make more efforts to verify the reliability of the data posted.