to trust or to distrust

To trust or to distrust

Red Cross has played a significant role in international public service, and the Red Cross Society of China is also the largest public interest organization in China. Therefore, many Chinese people had willingly offered a donation through the Red Cross Society of China and we all believed that the Red Cross Society of China can put our donations into good use because most of us are not able to get to the disaster zones. On account of a 20-year old girl named GUO Meimei, however, situation has changed. GUO Meimei was the general manager of Red Cross Commerce, a subsidiary of the Red Cross Society of China. Netizens found that she has posted plenty of pictures in Sina Weibo (a web like Twitter) showing of her luxury lifestyle by Lamborghini, Maserati and expensive handbags. Netizens including me felt hurt because we had no idea about why a manager of a subsidiary of the Red Cross Society of China can be so rich. Also, we were questioning the whether GUO Meimei’s money came from the donations of public.

After the issue exposed, I still tried to make some excuses to for both GUO Meimei and the Red Cross Society of China because it is always my first choice of donations, whenever disasters happen and relief supplies are urgently needed. Later, the Red Cross Society of China made a statement indicated that there was no connection between the Red Cross Society of China and Red Cross Commerce, this awful communication seemed to be not so convincing because it did not provide any evidence. And according to model for trust by Robert F. Hurley, poor communication skill leads to distrust. Besides, when I was surfing on the internet, another incident which reported two month before caught my eye. It was a picture of an invoice that claimed to show Shanghai Luwan branch of Red Cross Society of China had spent 9859 yuan on a dinner, and it meant each person attended cost more than 500 yuan. I was extremely angry because money we donated should have been used in help those in need rather than fund an expensive dinner. In other words, the Red Cross Society of China destroyed our interests to make their own interests, since then, I cannot trust Red Cross Society of China anymore.

From this instance, I began to pay attention to the operation of the Red Cross Society of China, and I found that it cannot be trusted indeed due to the lack of internal transparency. Every year people donate a lot, but it never publicized how the donations are used. In addition, I began to find some other philanthropic organizations which I can trust to replace the Red Cross Society of China and be my choice to donate there. It is like the opposite or knowledge-based trust, the more information I gather about the operation of Red Cross Society of China and other philanthropic organizations, the more I distrust them. Furthermore, I began to think how to evaluate a person or an organization is worth trusting.