Producing aixin: Organized gifting, NGOs and neoliberal virtue in China

Aixin (loving heart) is a phrase frequently used in everyday speech in contemporary China to explain motivations for voluntary work, NGO services, donations, self-sacrifices and compassion. It is framed as a desirable virtue valued by both Chinese state and the general public. This thesis explores the "loving heart virtue" neither as a unique cultural phenomenon nor as a pure moral structure, but first as a type of social consciousness and then as a set of practices that is integral and indispensable to the neoliberal experiment in China since 1980s. Neoliberal market reform, without a doubt, produces rational, utilitarian, and instrumentalist subjects. But meanwhile, I argue that under specific circumstances neoliberalization may also produce compassionate, and altruistic self at the center of its social and moral universe.