Sanya hosts Jack Ma Foundation awards for education

A total of 101 rural teachers and 20 rural headmasters from across China received the Jack Ma Foundation's annual awards for their contributions to education at a hotel in the coastal city Sanya, Hainan province in mid-January.

The awards were created by Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, in 2015. He himself was a graduate of Hangzhou Normal University and taught at Hangzhou Dianzi University for six years before he founded his online business empire.

China could do without Alibaba or Jack Ma, but it cannot do without rural teachers, he said at the award ceremony. "Without your efforts, villages in our country would run down," he told the audience.