Governing “Charitable Big Data”: How Chinese Internet Philanthropy is Transforming State-Business-NGO Relations under Authoritarianism

China has experienced an “internet philanthropy” boom over the past decade, turning online donations into a crucial source of revenue for the non-profit sector. This development aligns with the party-state’s “internet+” strategy but has mainly been driven by corporate technology platform providers championing the use of “charitable big data” as a catch-all solution for the sector’s governance problems. Taking Tencent’s market-leading fundraising platform as an example, this paper critically examines how the rise of internet philanthropy has transformed non-profit governance at a time of authoritarian hardening against advocacy-oriented civil society actors. Based on the mixed-method analysis of policy documents, interviews, as well as over 100,000 fundraising projects, it shows that platform providers’ promises regarding technology-enabled governance and “philanthropy for everyone” are fraught with contradictions. The setup of mandatory “Internet Fundraising Information Platforms” (IFIP), stipulated in the 2016 Charity Law, has increased fundraising transparency but also consolidated corporate oligopolies, allowing China’s ICT giants to extend their own agendas to the non-profit sector. While massively increasing the circle of donors as well as potential beneficiaries, the IFIP system has reinforced the “charitisation” of Chinese civil society and exacerbated fundraising inequality in favour of a few organisations, most of which have a strong governmental background.