About China Soong Ching Ling Foundation

China Soong Ching Ling Foundation

The China Soong Ching Ling Foundation is a national people's organisation and public foundation in Beijing named for Soong Ching-ling — Madame Sun Yat-sen — the widow of Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, and herself an honorary chairwoman of the People's Republic of China. Established on 29 May 1982, the first anniversary of Soong's death, the foundation carries forward the causes with which she was identified for half a century: international friendship and peace, exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and with Hong Kong and Macao, and the welfare, education, science and health of children and young people. It is headquartered at 82 Dong'anmen Street in Dongcheng District, Beijing, with Soong Ching-ling's former residence at Houhai as its historic base, and it works under the leadership of the United Front Work Department. It should not be confused with the Former Residence museum itself, which preserves Soong's home as a memorial site; the foundation is an operating grant-making and programme organisation, not a museum.

Soong Ching-ling and the Causes She Left Behind

To understand the foundation, one must start with its namesake. Soong Ching-ling (1893–1981) married Sun Yat-sen in 1915 and, after his death, became a major political figure in her own right. After 1949 she served as a vice chairperson of the People's Republic of China and was long in charge of the People's Relief Administration of China and the Red Cross Society of China. Deng Xiaoping's funeral address for her in 1981, quoted in later foundation histories, recorded that she had always been concerned with women's work in the new China and cared passionately for the lives of young people and children. She was named Honorary Chairwoman of the People's Republic of China shortly before her death on 29 May 1981, and was remembered as a mother of public welfare for her decades of work for the poor, for women and for children. Those themes — welfare, women and children, peace and international friendship — became the charter themes of the foundation created in her name a year later.

Founding in 1982 and the First Charter

The foundation was established in Beijing on 29 May 1982 by China's cabinet on the initiative and with the support of senior leaders including Deng Xiaoping, who served as its honorary chairman from May 1982 until his death in February 1997. Its original name was longer and narrower: the Children's Science Park Foundation in Memory of National Honorary Chairman Soong Ching Ling, chartered to build a children's science park in her memory. During the preparatory work, the organisers concluded that the name's limitations should be removed, and the draft charter was submitted to the Communist Party Secretariat, where it was approved by leaders including Xi Zhongxun and Hu Qili. The organisation thus began life with a broader remit than a single building project: to unite and carry forward the charitable and friendship work associated with Soong Ching-ling across China. Its first chair was Kang Keqing, who served from May 1982 to April 1992.

Taking the Present Name in 2005

For more than two decades the foundation operated under variants of its commemorative name before simplifying it. In September 2005 it took its present name, the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation. The change reflected what the organisation had already become: a national foundation whose work extended well beyond the children's science park idea into international exchange, cross-Strait relations, youth science education and public welfare generally. The foundation's stated aims, as summarised in partner profiles, are to uphold Soong Ching Ling's dedication to international friendship and world peace, to strengthen exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and advance reunification, and to promote the wellbeing and development of children and youth.

Children, Youth and Science Education

Work for children and young people is the foundation's best-known field. Its lineage of projects includes the Soong Ching Ling Science and Technology Museum for Children and, from 2001, the China Soong Ching Ling Youth Science and Technology Exchange Centre, established by the foundation to give young people hands-on experience of science and invention. The foundation runs scholarship programmes and science, technology, engineering and mathematics initiatives, including work specifically directed at girls: in April 2023, for example, it partnered with Otis Worldwide on a programme offering scholarships to outstanding female STEM-focused university students and STEM innovation activities for youth, a partnership the company framed around the foundation's forty-year history of developing youth programmes and supporting women. Sports, health, culture and arts programmes for young people round out a portfolio deliberately modelled on Soong Ching-ling's own lifelong concern with children's welfare and education.

International Friendship and Cross-Strait Exchange

The second pillar of the foundation's work is exchange. Soong Ching-ling was a prominent figure in China's people-to-people diplomacy, and the foundation continues that role: it hosts and partners with foreign foundations and friendship organisations, receives international delegations at its Beijing headquarters, and enters cooperation agreements on education and development programmes, such as its 2024 agreement with Armenia's My Step Foundation, whose executive director met the foundation's vice-chairperson Shen Beili in Beijing to agree cooperation across several programmes. Its mandate also covers exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and with Hong Kong and Macao — a natural field for an organisation named for Sun Yat-sen's widow, a figure revered on both sides of the Strait — and Xi Jinping's letter for the foundation's fortieth anniversary singled out exactly this work, crediting it with enhancing international friendship and expanding cross-Strait and Hong Kong and Macao exchanges alongside youth development.

The Fortieth Anniversary in 2022

The foundation marked forty years in 2022 with a ceremony in Beijing attended by Wang Yang, then chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter extending congratulations to all members of the foundation and greetings to people inside and outside China who had contributed to its cause. Xi wrote that over the past forty years, under the leadership of the Party, the foundation had inherited and carried on the lofty ideals of Madame Soong Ching Ling and had played a significant role in enhancing international friendship, expanding cross-Strait exchanges and exchanges with Hong Kong and Macao, and promoting youth development. Li Bin, then chairperson of the foundation, addressed the ceremony. The anniversary confirmed the foundation's standing as one of China's most senior national foundations, personally associated at its founding with Deng Xiaoping and continuing to receive attention at the highest level of the state.

Leadership and Structure

The foundation's leadership history traces a line of senior public figures. Deng Xiaoping was honorary chairman from 1982 to 1997. Its chairs have included Kang Keqing, the founding chair; Huang Hua, the former foreign minister; Hu Qili; and Li Bin, who chaired the foundation during its fortieth anniversary year. From 2024 its leadership has been situated under the United Front Work Department, which is listed as its parent organisation, aligning the foundation with the other national people's organisations that conduct friendship and exchange work. Its organisational structure, published in reference profiles, includes the council and secretariat that administer its funds, its youth science and technology exchange institutions, and its network of partner organisations in China and abroad.

The Foundation and the Former Residence

Because the foundation grew up around Soong Ching-ling's memory, it is sometimes confused with the memorial institutions that preserve her homes. The distinction matters. The Former Residence of Soong Ching-ling at Houhai in Beijing — the mansion she obtained in 1963 and where she lived and worked for the rest of her life, receiving many dignitaries — is a memorial and museum site. The China Soong Ching Ling Foundation, by contrast, is an active national foundation headquartered on Dong'anmen Street: it raises and deploys funds, runs youth science and scholarship programmes, signs international cooperation agreements and organises exchange activity. The residence is its historic base and symbolic anchor; the foundation is the working organisation that carries Soong's public-welfare and friendship causes into contemporary programmes. A separate Hong Kong body, the Hong Kong Rosamond Foundation, carries her charitable name there, and the China Welfare Institute she founded in an earlier era separately established the Soong Ching Ling School in Shanghai in 2008 — a constellation of related but distinct institutions, of which the Beijing foundation is the national centre.

Legacy and Continuing Work

Four decades after its founding, the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation occupies a distinctive place among China's national foundations. Few charitable organisations anywhere are so directly the creation of a state's senior leadership in memory of a single person, and fewer still retain that person's causes — children, peace, friendship and unity — as their literal programme headings forty years on. From its origins in a proposed children's science park, it has become a broad platform for youth science education, scholarships including STEM support for girls, international foundation partnerships and cross-Strait exchange, while its anniversaries continue to draw congratulatory letters from China's president. In that sense the foundation is both a working charity and a piece of living institutional memory: the organisational form taken by Soong Ching-ling's public life after her death in 1981.