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As an observation from the total figures, figures h and i, Taiwan has managed to bring down its MSW production over 2001-2015 by 13.27%, an impressive decrease of 1.029 kilograms per capita per day to 0.844 kilograms per capita per day. This is the result of effective communication, mandatory recycling, and the earlier mentioned PAYT system in both Taipei and New Taipei City.
4.2 The Tzu Chi Foundation
The Taiwanese Tzu Chi (慈濟) compassion and relief foundation was founded in the 1960s on the east coast of Taiwan, in Hualien. According to stories, it started with a Buddhist nun, now often referred to as the Venerable Master Cheng Yen, who became a Buddhist and lived in Hualien after her father’s death. Several stories are told as to how she came to initiate the Tzu Chi Foundation. The dominant story seems to be one where she observed, as described in Ho (2009), an aboriginal woman being rejected help in a hospital because she could not afford the safety deposit of US$200. After this, she and her fellow nuns decided to start saving and donating small amounts of grocery money on a daily basis: around 0.02 USD a day. This practice spread through and across the Taiwanese counties and eventually led to establishment of the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation in 1966.
Over the years, the organization grew and grew. The author mentioned earlier, Gary Ho (2009), describes how the organization developed from a few hardworking nuns and housewives supporting less fortunate families, into providing relief efforts starting from the 1970s, into the organization that in 2009 had around ten million members and one million volunteers worldwide, and is known as an influential body with a yearly income of several hundreds of millions in USD (Ho 2009). Along the road, the organization has expanded into a multitude of countries; remarkably also into countries that are predominantly of religions other than Buddhism, and even into the CCP-ruled mainland since 1991.
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4.2.1 Beliefs and values
The organization is obviously heavily inspired by Buddhist values and brings together lay Buddhists. Teachings of Master Cheng Yen, that guide members of all the organization, are heavily inspired by the idea of Bodhisattva and Mahayana Buddhism. Self-sacrifice and guidance on the way to enlightenment are crucial values within this. As a part of the Tzu Chi organization, Cheng Yen also leads a group of nuns and monks that desire to dedicate themselves to Buddhism (Ho 2009).
Despite this religious nature, Tzu Chi is still most often viewed as an NGO, despite some definitions explicitly excluding religious organizations when talking about NGOs. This can be justified through three reasons. Firstly, the Tzu Chi communicates, more than religion, values deriving from its religious core, which is an important nuance. As a result, its aim is not necessarily to convert or recruit new Buddhists. Secondly, the organization itself is open to members of any religion as long as they uphold these values; in some other countries, the members and volunteers are for example mostly Muslim. Thirdly, in its disaster and relief operations, volunteers are explicitly instructed not to attempt to convert people to Buddhism, a point that quite likely has helped a great deal when Tzu Chi first moved into China in 1991.
At the core of the organization’s ideology are three goals, set by the Venerable Cheng Yen and related to Buddhist teachings: to purify people’s hearts; to bring peace into the world, and to end disaster. Its approach is very much centered around Cheng Yen’s- and by now some of the Tzu Chi members’- charisma, which is used to inspire movements within communities. This bottom-up approach relates to the belief that it is key to dedicate oneself to helping nature and people laboriously.
Cheng Yen’s charisma has been the topic of extensive analysis by Huang (2009). She defines this ‘charisma’ as “a quality that appears in the interaction between a magnetic person and others, one that often has a far-reaching impact on those who are engaged in it.” (Huang 2009, p. 38) Promotion of this charisma, she points out, has led to glorification, such as the members of the Tzu Chi Foundation referring to the Venerable
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Cheng Yen as shangren (上人) or ‘the supreme person.’ However, the charisma is not used with the goal of success, but rather with the goal of ‘the experience.’
4.2.2 Organizational structure
Most Tzu Chi Foundation volunteers operate on a fairly self-governing basis, often starting projects in their own communities, but let themselves be led by the principles outlined by Venerable Cheng Yen and supported by the nearby liaison office (Mohamed 2012b). These liaison offices are by now present in around fifty countries and activities are global; most liaison offices are established in a similar way as projects are started, first as something spontaneous and informal, but later officially recognized by the main office in Hualien (Huang 2001).
The organization is in effect an umbrella organization, with the Venerable Cheng Yen at the top; her philosophy and charismatic leadership is at the core of the organization’s decisions (Huang 2001; Huang 2009). Many examples and anecdotes given throughout the literature and in Tzu Chi’s own magazine Tzu Chi Quarterly describe how people donated their own plots of land and money, and put in labor, out of respect and praise for Venerable Cheng Yen’s purposes and personal example (e.g. see Huang 2001; Huang 2009; Ho 2009). This is what seems to make the organization very strong in motivating grassroots movements, which is part of what the organization and specifically the Venerable Cheng Yen aim for.
Halfway through the 1980s, as a result of rapid growth, the Tzu Chi Foundation started to institutionalize and custom-make its own managerial system, resulting in a system where a managerial system, led by several layers of managers with Venerable Chen at the top, overlooks operations of the different mission offices; at the time of designing this system, these missions concerned were education, culture, medical help and charity (Huang 2001).
Since then, the number of missions has increased to eight as the organization mentions on its website, adding on to the previous four with international relief, bone marrow donation, environmental protection and community volunteering.
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As a result of aforementioned transformations, the Tzu Chi umbrella organization became a combination of two organizations: the Tzu Chi Merit Society, which is the volunteering organization, and the Tzu Chi Foundation, which is the non-profit organization that hires staff in its mission offices The way in which the Merit Organization and the Foundation interact seems to be different; there is no clear hierarchy or structure between the two, as Huang notes (2009). Of the foundation, the CEO is Cheng Yen, who as a result takes final decisions on the organization’s actions with three vice-CEOs heading the three mission offices Cultural, Medical and Educational (Huang 2009). The last publication observing the organization structure was however from 2009; the missions have changed as mentioned earlier and as a result, the organizational charts may have transformed as well.
The non-profit Foundation however would be nothing without the contribution from the volunteers of the Merit Organization. Tzu Chi volunteers coordinate their activities with the corresponding mission center. Within the Merit Organization, amongst the volunteers, there are differentiated levels in the hierarchy, depending on seniority and money and time contributed to the organization’s activities. A comprehensive overview of roles and positions in the Merit Organization is provided by Huang (2009).
An important group to point out here are commissioners, who stand higher than volunteers in the Merit Organization, and are thus a desirable position. Commissioners typically wear the Tzu Chi uniform, consisting of a navy-blue polo shirt and white pants.
They are the religious followers, expected to provide an exemplary role, and typically key in establishing a local Tzu Chi branch (Huang 2009).
Despite its now considerable size, the organization refrains from having formal ties with politics; its philosophy dictates that its members should focus on more direct, on-the-ground help (Laliberté 2004). The latter it often provides through emergency aid after disasters, but also through more structural projects such as its recycling activities and setting up of schools, hospitals and living facilities in areas that are in need of these.
Nevertheless, the Tzu Chi Foundation does cooperate with governments to achieve its goals, but while doing so “neither (flatters) nor (criticizes) the authorities.” (Laliberté 2004)
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Nevertheless, when the organization reached a scale on which it nearly had a ‘monopoly on philanthropy’ in the 1990s, it garnered a lot of critique from around society for its monetary means and multi-million dollar fundraisings. Critique supposedly focused not so much on the organization’s actual spending, but rather about the size of its wallet. This resulted in the organization becoming much more opaque about its financing, whereas previously transparency about the size and destination about the Foundation’s funds were stressed (Huang 2001).
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5 Case description: Tzu Chi’s recycling
This chapter will outline the information gathered from interviews, external media sources, and Tzu Chi’s own sources, to put together a narrative of Tzu Chi’s recycling of plastics and paper in Taiwan. The next chapter will then analyze this case using the theory provided in the literature review section of this thesis. The case is constructed using outside literature, media reports, 27 reports from the Tzu Chi Quarterly, statistics from 20 of the Foundation’s annual reports and four interviews. These are used initially as evidence and for understanding of the case; in Appendix 2, a coding table is furthermore provided to show relevant quotes and citations that back aspects of the case..
To provide more background than regular referencing, this table also shows the edition of the Tzu Chi Quarterly or interview the quote was in, the author and translator of the piece, and finally the quote itself. This as such allows for scrutinizing by other researchers.