About China Youth Development Foundation

China Youth Development Foundation

The China Youth Development Foundation, also rendered the China Youth Development Fund, is a national public foundation founded in Beijing in March 1989 and registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs. It is best known as the creator of Project Hope, launched in October 1989, which became the most famous charity programme in modern China: by 2021 Project Hope had raised roughly 20 billion yuan, aided more than six million students and built over 20,000 Hope primary schools, and by October 2024 the nationwide totals stood at 21,141 Hope primary schools built and more than 7.5 million students from financially disadvantaged families funded. The foundation works through a network of provincial youth development foundations within the All-China Youth Federation and Communist Youth League system. It is a foundation that runs programmes for young people — not a news organisation — and should be distinguished from China Youth Daily and China Youth magazine, which are Youth League media outlets with similar names.

Founding in 1989

The foundation was founded in Beijing in March 1989 by Communist Youth League official Xu Yongguang and colleagues, and its Candid foundation profile records that it was founded by the All-China Youth Federation; its parent organisation is the Communist Youth League. It was among the earliest non-profit organisations established in reform-era China, appearing at a moment when the country's modern philanthropic sector was only just being rebuilt. Its stated mission is to help young people build capacity and improve the environment for their growth by providing aid services, giving a voice to the interests of young people and carrying out social advocacy. Its fields of work, as summarised in its reference profiles, cover youth development through education, science and technology, culture, physical education, health and environmental protection. Within months of its founding, the young foundation made the decision that would define it: to attack the problem of rural children dropping out of school for poverty.

Project Hope: The Idea

On 30 October 1989 the Communist Youth League and the China Youth Development Foundation formally established Project Hope. The programme raised funds from across society to provide long-term financial assistance to primary school pupils in China's impoverished areas who were of good character and academic standing but had dropped out of school because of family poverty, helping them return to school and complete their primary education. It built Hope primary schools in impoverished areas, purchased teaching aids, stationery and books for rural schools, and created special scholarships for outstanding students from poor areas to fund their further studies through to university graduation. The first Hope primary school opened in Anhui Province in 1989. The concept was simple, concrete and photographable — a named school, a sponsored child — and it caught the public imagination on a scale no Chinese charity had achieved before: a study by the National Research Center for Science and Technology for Development found that 93.9 per cent of residents over sixteen in twenty-nine provincial capitals had heard of Project Hope, and 63.5 per cent had contributed to it in some form.

Growth Through the 1990s and 2000s

Project Hope's expansion can be followed through its published milestones. By the end of 2004 it had raised over 5.6 billion yuan, financed the education of more than 3.4 million poor rural students and built 15,940 Hope primary schools — about 2.5 per cent of all rural primary schools in China — while funding some 14,000 rural primary schools to build libraries and establishing more than 150 distance-learning centres. By the end of 2005 the cumulative figures had passed 12,559 schools built in contemporary reporting of that stage, over 3 billion yuan in donations and some 2.9 million children helped back to school, with over 13,000 Hope library kits presented to village schools and more than 30,000 village primary school teachers trained. Deng Xiaoping twice donated to Project Hope under a pseudonym meaning an ordinary Communist Party member, a gesture widely publicised as a mark of the programme's national standing. Around eighty per cent of Hope schools and aided students were located in China's less developed central and western regions.

Beyond Schools: Libraries, Kitchens, Teachers and Health

As the programme matured, it widened from school buildings and grants into the full ecology of rural schooling. By 2013, Project Hope had cumulatively raised 9.757 billion yuan, aided over 4.9 million financially challenged students and built 18,335 Hope primary schools and about 20,604 mini libraries, alongside 5,959 Happy Sports playgrounds, 924 Happy Music classrooms, 320 Happy Art classrooms, 926 computer labs, 565 sets of Happy Cinema projection equipment and 2,850 Hope kitchens. It had trained nearly 80,000 rural primary school teachers and built five Hope communities, twenty-two Hope hospitals and 507 Hope clinics. The foundation created a Stars of Hope Award Fund to support top Project Hope students in further study and a Hope Primary School Teacher-Training Fund to sharpen teachers' skills, and it honours long-serving rural teachers with the Project Hope Gardener award. Corporate partnerships became a significant funding channel: Procter & Gamble, for example, donated more than 240 million yuan between 1996 and 2005 and built one hundred Hope primary schools across twenty-seven provinces, then launched a second hundred-school project with partners; Motorola contributed more than 33 million yuan from 1995. In April 2005 the foundation and the China Basketball Association jointly launched a programme using donations to build CBA Hope schools and basketball courts.

Thirty Years of Project Hope

Project Hope's thirtieth anniversary in 2019 brought official recognition at the highest level. President Xi Jinping sent a message marking the anniversary, stressing continued efforts to develop the programme, improve basic education infrastructure and help dropout children in poor areas return to school. Over thirty years, Xi noted, Project Hope had helped millions of young people from poor families realise their dream of schooling and grow into pillars of society, playing an important role in poverty relief, education, youth growth and social ethos. By September 2019 the programme had received over 15.2 billion yuan in donations, aided nearly six million students in financial difficulty and built 20,195 primary schools. The figures continued to climb into the 2020s: approximately 20 billion yuan raised, more than six million students supported and more than 20,000 schools built by 2021, and 21,141 Hope primary schools with over 7.5 million students funded by the end of October 2024.

Professionalisation and Early Controversies

The foundation's history is also a landmark case in the professionalisation of Chinese philanthropy. Project Hope's very success — huge public donations flowing to a young organisation — forced early questions about auditing, brand discipline and the proper use of funds, and the foundation responded by building audited fundraising, tighter control over the Project Hope name and licensing, and more formal grant-making; it has been described as undertaking China's first grant-making programme in education with support from international organisations. Scholars at Harvard, Tsinghua and other institutions have studied the foundation and Project Hope as the pivotal episode in the rebirth of Chinese philanthropy after 1978: the moment when mass public giving to a non-state programme became normal, and when a Chinese foundation first had to learn, in public, the disciplines of transparency and brand management that mature charities require. The CYDF has itself hosted conferences examining the development of non-profit organisations in China and the lessons Project Hope offered that development.

Structure and Wider Portfolio

The foundation operates as the national centre of a system: its Candid profile records a network of thirty-eight local youth development foundations, through which Project Hope and other programmes are implemented province by province under the Youth League and All-China Youth Federation umbrella. Beyond Project Hope, the foundation's wider portfolio covers youth health, environmental protection, culture and emergency relief, reflecting its mission to improve the whole environment in which young people grow rather than schooling alone. Its registered status as a national public foundation at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, its Beijing headquarters and its five-star standing in the Chinese charity world make it one of the small group of national foundations — alongside bodies such as the China Foundation for Rural Development, founded the same year — that defined the first generation of modern Chinese public fundraising.

Significance

The China Youth Development Foundation matters out of proportion even to its large numbers. Before Project Hope, organised mass charity barely existed in the People's Republic; after it, the image of the Hope primary school — a solid new schoolhouse in a poor mountain village, paid for by millions of small donations — had become a fixture of Chinese public life, recognised by more than nine in ten urban residents. The foundation demonstrated that a Chinese public foundation could raise billions of yuan, administer tens of thousands of projects through a provincial network, attract sustained corporate partnership and survive the scrutiny that pioneering attracted. Its work also tracked China's own development: as absolute poverty and school dropout fell, Project Hope evolved from rescue grants toward teacher training, libraries, kitchens, sports and digital classrooms. For the history of Chinese civil society, the foundation founded in March 1989 and its programme launched that October remain the foundational story — which is why Project Hope is still counted, school by school and student by student, more than thirty-five years on.