People power

For Red Cross China, the decision to go abroad came in 2011, when China officially overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy.

According to Zhang, membership countries of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are broadly divided into two categories. Donors such as countries in northern Europe are partnership national societies, while receivers, such as Nepal and China, are operational national societies.

"When China became the second-largest economy in the world, we knew that we could not be a receiver forever. We needed to step forward and offer our help to other countries," she says.

Strong government support is another major driver. President Xi Jinping has in his keynote address to the 2nd China-Africa People's Forum indicated that a new type of China-Africa strategic partnership is being promoted, in which cultural and people-to-people exchanges are the key.

Li from the Chinese-African People's Friendship Association says there is a growing emphasis from the Chinese government on people-to-people exchanges being the foundation for strong China-Africa ties.

"China-Africa cooperation is mainly on the government-to-government level. To further develop strong ties with Africa, it is important to make more African people know and understand China," Li says.

She adds that when the term "people-to-people exchange" first came up in 2006 at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, it was only a one-line sentence in the official speech. But the content regarding people-to-people exchanges has been growing in keynote speeches by Chinese officials ever since.

You Jianhua, secretary-general of China NGO Network for International Exchanges and the organizer of the People's Forum, says unlike many other countries, the relationship between the Chinese government and NGOs is friendly.

"With strong government support, going to Africa is now recognized as the first step for Chinese NGOs to go abroad," says You, who recently organized a team of Chinese NGOs to build water wells in Africa.

"We can tell the trend from the increasing number of NGOs who took part in China-Africa People's Forum," he says. The forum, held alongside the ministerial conference of FOCAC since 2012, attracted around 300 delegates from NGOs in China and Africa last year.

However, putting economic development and government support aside is the pubic dispute on whether China's NGOs should go to other countries to offer help as there is more effort to be done in the country's own backyard.

Wu Peng, director of the International Development Department of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, says when his organization raised funds for the hurricane in the US in 2005, 80 percent of netizens criticized the cause online, asking "why don't you help your own people first".

China Youth Development Foundation came in for similar criticism when its China-Africa Project Hope, a project to build schools for African children, was made public in 2011.

The charity project, which is funded by World Eminent Chinese Business Association, a Beijing-based group of rich Chinese entrepreneurs, and run by CYDF, aims to bring better education opportunities to poor children in rural areas in Africa.

"Strong public criticism has made some of our partners think twice about donations. They had no idea that doing good deeds could cause such a bad public response," says Tu Meng, secretary-general of CYDF.

However, Tu still firmly believes that the timing to help Africa is right.

He says that it is true that GDP per capita in China is still low but "charity projects are the spillover effects of public wealth".

China's private donations exceeded 10 billion yuan for the first time in 2006, and jumped to 103.2 billion yuan in 2010, according to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

"Not all the NGOs in China are ready to go abroad, but I think the top ones, which have the ambition to grow themselves into international organizations are ready to step onto foreign shores," Tu says.