Built to Last

As new U.S. foundations race to give it all away, Chinese philanthropists look to a more classic American style of giving: the Rockefellers'.

Photograph by Yu Fei

John D. Rockefeller never apologized for being a monopolist. In 1911, when Standard Oil was broken up into 34 smaller companies (including the predecessors of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and British Petroleum), the company controlled roughly 90 percent of the oil business in the United States. Rockefeller allowed the remaining 10 percent to exist because it created the illusion of competition. He and his syndicate (the term for what would become the modern corporation) were reviled in the muckraking press as an octopus with its tentacles everywhere, but he invented many now standard corporate best practices, such as vertical and horizontal integration and economies of scale.

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In 1913, when he started the Rockefeller Foundation, his personal wealth was equal to 2.5 percent of the country's gross domestic product. That's about $340 billion in today's dollars. By such calculations, Rockefeller was one of the richest men ever to walk the earth. But even before he had a fortune, he was unfailing in his charitable giving. (Tithing was a lifelong habit.) Still, with so much at his disposal, the demands of giving it away proved overwhelming, so he assembled experts and created the same large-scale efficiencies in his charitable enterprise that he established in business, in the process eradicating hookworm and yellow fever, founding the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University, funding the research of scores of future Nobel Prize winners, founding Peking Union Medical College, which brought Western medicine to China, and inventing things like matching grants and, well, modern philanthropy.

Last winter his great-grandson David Rockefeller Jr., David's wife Susan, and Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, went to Beijing to connect with potential philanthropists in China, which has been churning out billionaires at a greater rate than any other country. "They don't want our money," says Rodin, a former president of the University of Pennsylvania. "They want a partnership with our expertise."

American billionaires such as Bill Gates have started a fashion for giving away all their money in their own lifetimes, and many private foundations are now set up with a "sunset clause," a target date for spending that last dollar. The Rockefeller Foundation was built on the opposite premise: Under Rodin's leadership it has laid out plans, including the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, that will take it well into its second century.

David Rockefeller, one of approximately 150 heirs to the original fortune, points out one difference between his family and its Asian counterparts. "In China they have small families, so they're passing along the whole thing," he says. "It's not like they have six-child families, so that each generation gets a sixth, and then a sixth of a sixth." Perhaps sensing the long-term potential of such undiluted fortunes, the Chinese government has recently started allowing private charities to act in concert with government initiatives for improving the environment.

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During their trip to Beijing, David and Susan, both ardent environmentalists, appeared on a panel in front of a handpicked group of potential philanthropists. Ren Zhiqiang, who made his fortune in real estate, appeared with them. His account on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, has 15 million followers, and the government regularly shuts him down for his frankness. But he continues to speak. "I dream of blue sky for my kids," he says. "And I will do whatever it takes to stop the horrible levels of pollution."


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