Five Project Hope schools have been set up in rural areas of central China's Henan Province with a donation of 1.8 million yuan (US$216,900) from a group of Hong Kong policemen.
The most recently finished is a three-storey primary school at Chenggang village, Caiyuan town of Tangyin county, where the noted national hero Yue Fei (1103-1142), of the Southern Song Dynasty, was born and raised. Yue Fei has been nationally regarded as a paragon of patriotism.
According to local sources, the three-story primary school, which cost 300,000 yuan (US$36,000), is capable of accommodating 18 classes of pupils from needy areas around Chenggang village.
Moreover, Cai Jianxiang, head of the HK police donors, who had came specially to Chenggang for a solemn ceremony to mark the school's completion, said that two more Project Hope schools were also planned this year for Jiujiang county, in east China's Jiangxi Province, and Huangmei county, in the central Hubei Province.
Project Hope was launched by the China Youth and Children's Development Foundation in 1989, mainly to help dropouts in needy rural areas return to school by raising money from society.
By the end of last year, 8,890 Project Hope primary schools had been built, and 2.47 million dropouts in poor rural areas had returned to school.
(Xinhua News Agency August 4, 2002)
