A magnitude 7 earthquake hit China's Sichuan province this morning (last night US time). Initial reports were at least 150 people were killed and over 3000 injured, and massive damages to properties.
Donations from all over China are pouring in to various charities, but China's biggest charity, Red Cross Society of China, has received very little of that. Unofficial update on Chinese microblog weibo indicates that Chinese Red Cross so far has received about 30 thousand yuan of donations, compared to about 20 million yuan received by the One Foundation, a charity set up by Kongfu actor Jet Li.
Red Cross Society of China has become synonymous with corruption in China.
During the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, Red Cross Society of China received billions of yuan of donations, much of it was not accounted for. People suspect that most of the money actually wound up in Chinese government's bank accounts. Meanwhile, volunteers who continued to work in the disaster areas after the quake received little financial support, as indicated by this revealing paragraph in an otherwise glowing propaganda piece:
Liu has spent more than 100,000 yuan out of his own pocket to carry on his counseling work in Dujiangyan. He said the volunteers left not due to lack of love for the victims, but because there wasn’t a well-conducted volunteer system. Those volunteers came more pricked by passion than by belief, so they were likely to be discouraged facing the dysfunctional volunteer mechanism.
The demise of the Chinese Red Cross was brought by a scandal involving a young 20 year old girl, who claimed to be a senior executive of the Red Cross, and
showed off her Maserati and Hermès handbags on the internet. This caused a firestorm on Chinese internet. Despite Red Cross denial, no one believed them.
After the earthquake last night, Chinese Red Cross put out a weibo (microblog, Chinese version of twitter) to describe its response. It was immediately met with thousands of negative comments. The flood of criticism was so harsh that the Red Cross had to delete its weibo. Today, as the rescue effort is ongoing in Sichuan, people are not donating to the Red Cross Society of China. Their money are going elsewhere.
To avoid your donations be taken away by the Chinese government, donate to charities that actually send people to the disaster areas. Some Hong Kong and Australia charities had done this after Wenchuan quake. Sichuan Quake Relief is a nonprofit organization set up in 2008 to help rebuild Sichuan after the Wenchuan quake.