Hope Project founder speaks out on charity

SHANGHAI - Hope Project has been making a difference in the lives of students from impoverished families for 20 years. It has been one of the country's most successful charities and has attracted millions of Chinese people since the 1990s.

During the late 1980s, more than 1 million primary students didn't attend school because their families could not afford the tuition, which was then only about 50 yuan a year, less than $8.

Xu Yongguang, an aficionado of old Chinese poems, was one of the founding members of Hope Project in 1989. He spent two months in the villages in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region to gain a thorough understanding of the children in the remote areas and their education levels.