Daughter’s memory inspires generous donations
Print Edition
Over the past two decades Liu Wenzhen, an 83-year-old Changning District resident, has donated a veritable fortune to promoting rural education.
According to Liu, she and her husband embarked on their philanthropic journey as a way to honor their late daughter, Xu Qin, a young woman who once dreamt of becoming a rural school teacher.
Back in 1988, Xu donated her first month’s salary to a student in East China’s Anhui Province who was unable to pay for schooling. Xu continued to contribute money periodically to education initiatives until her untimely death in a car crash in 1993.
Following her death, Xu’s parents donated several tens of thousands of yuan — a vast sum in those days — to Project Hope, a public service project run by the China Youth Development Foundation. Among other worthy causes, the national project helps pay for rural school construction and tuition fees for needy students.
According to Liu, her donation to the project gave 34 students in Zhijiang County, in central China’s Hunan Province, enough money to return to school after they had dropped out for financial reasons.
Not long after this outpouring of generosity, the local Party secretary of Zhijiang came to Shanghai along with 20 local students to thank Liu in person and ask for further assistance building a school. Liu agreed.
During the two years following this meeting, Liu and her husband saved 100,000 yuan (US$16,000 at today’s rates) from the vegetarian restaurant they ran at the time. By 1995, this money was being used to build a new school in Zhijiang, one named after Liu’s daughter.
Many local students wrote letters to Liu after the Zhijiang Shanghai Xuqin Hope School was completed. She read every single letter, she said.
But the contributions didn’t stop there. In 1999, Liu and her husband — who passed away in 2006 — founded the Xuqin Scholarship for Shanghai Jianqing Experimental School.
In 2009, Liu donated another 30,000 yuan to build a Project Hope school in the Yimeng Mountain area of East China’s Shandong Province.
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