ABSTRACT
The children did not understand why the people from the city wanted to take pictures of them with expensive cameras. They were not used to people like this coming to their schools and paying attention to them. They certainly did not know that their photos would be used in posters, billboards, newspapers and magazines in cities all over China in the 1990s. Printed in dramatic black and white, the images were stark and arresting. They depicted the adorable, but grubby children in their decrepit schools, trying to study under miserable conditions (see Figure 4.1). The photos were accompanied by text describing a
crisis in rural education in China: high dropout rates, rising fees, crumbling facilities, insufficient supplies, and overburdened and underprepared teachers. But, the text went on, you could help. You could contribute money to Project Hope and sponsor a child or a school. Emotional pleas from child-sponsorship charities, featuring the photos of poor children, may have been common in the West for decades, but no one had seen anything like this before in China. Indeed, no one had ever heard of a child sponsorship program. Despite its novelty, the advertising campaign was extremely effective. Millions were moved to donate money to Project Hope and to sponsor children. The most famous Project Hope advertisement featured a little girl with big, pleading eyes, holding a pencil. The caption read, “I want to study, too” (see Figure 4.2). For people all over China, the weight of her gaze felt like an emotional blow. They gave her a nickname: “Big Eyes.” By some estimates, her image was used 100 million times. The girl in the photo was Su Mingjuan, and the photo was taken when she was eight years old and a beneficiary of Project Hope. She was the daughter of peasants who lived in the mountains of Anhui Province. She had no idea that her face was famous in cities all over China until three years later, when she was “discovered” by doctors in a nearby town when she became so ill she required a trip to the hospital. The farmer’s daughter from the little village found herself
treated like a celebrity, interviewed by reporters and invited to appear on television shows. When Su Mingjuan was accepted into a top university in her province in 2002, it made national news in China.1 When she was recruited for a position in one of China’s biggest banks in 2010, the People’s Daily offered photos of a sophisticated, glamorous Su Mingjuan, in a professional outfit and sleek hairdo, posed in front of her iconic Project Hope photo.2 It was the perfect fairy tale ending. Yet this particular fairy tale was a very different kind of story than the ones told in Mao Zedong’s China. This was not a socialist story of a paternalistic state that took care of its obedient citizens and led them to a bright future. It was a suzhi fairy tale, where an individual was given the right conditions to develop herself and raise her quality, thereby raising the quality of her community and of her nation. Instead of being saved by the Communist Party, the heroine was rescued by a charity started by a social entrepreneur. Instead of being transformed from exploited victim to socialist citizen, Su Mingjuan was transformed from a low-quality peasant girl into a highquality, modern, cosmopolitan professional. The key to her salvation was not communist ideology but education. Where did this fairy tale come from? And why was it that the Chinese found it so compelling that they were willing to open their wallets and give money to a type of organization that they had never encountered before?
