2 senior Berkeley professors of law recently wrote a piece http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss3/art4/  suggesting Americans’ low contributions to charity can perhaps be nursed to more respectable health by creating a public registry where details of donations to charity are detailed for all to see. It was suggested that such publicity would encourage more generosity and discourage miserly behavior.  It is refreshing to have such clear, simple, unadulterated and intuitively correct propositions by law academics. Overseas Chinese guilds have for generations practiced such a public registry system. I remember staring at huge wall panels on which row after row of donors’ names and the amounts donated are all carved with gold calligraphy. Such public displays of donations have or course been instrumental in funding causes which would otherwise not have taken off at all. Chinese schools and Chinese hospitals have for years been beneficiaries of such largesse harvested largely through a public registry tool. Chinese funerals are another example. Almost all such funerals I have attended have cash registers at the front where cash contributions are collected and at the end of the 3 or 4 day wake, the family would announce the amounts to be donated to various Chinese schools or associations. Each one of these cash contributions is painstakingly recorded and such records are kept for generations. I also recall going to my grandfather’s Hokkien Association or his HuiAnn Association annual do. Go to any such Chinese guild and association functions and you would have public auctions of items where local tycoons would outwardly and ceremoniously attempt to outbid some other competing local tycoons to buy a tv or fan, to raise funds for the hosts. Leaving aside the fact that these bidders are often in a mode of drunken bravado, these “public auctions” can reap a small fortune for the guild or association. The idea of course is the concept of “face”. It has been said to be an Asian trait but I have always suspected it is universal. Everyone (ie all races) is conscious of attracting accolades or avoiding embarrassment. Heck even in my church in Klang, the monthly and special offerings are published in full. The official rationale is accountability but I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that it is a Chinese church and it is saddled with a lot of traditional Chinese practices, including keeping public registries of donations. It may not be biblical (do not let your right hand know what your left hand does) but it tends to work. As a Christian I should obey God’s words and not seek to have my charity be public knowledge but I have to acknowledge the efficacy of keeping such acts public. Of course it boosts the coffers of public charity.