ABSTRACT
Peter Xu and Golden Key Peter Xu (Xu Bailun) was an architect in Beijing. In 1971, his life was derailed when he contracted a rare illness and lost his sight at the age of 40. He struggled with depression for years. But then Peter, who had become a Christian, felt a “call from God.” He realized that, as an educated man with access to good health care and a pension, he was really quite fortunate. In China, most of the blind and visually impaired were poor peasants. As if their disability were not enough of a burden, the vast majority were illiterate. Their impoverished local schools were unable to serve children with disabilities, and their families had no money to send them to special schools for the blind. In 1986, Peter decided to start an organization to serve these people. Golden Key would develop resources so that blind and visually-impaired children could receive an education in local schools. Peter believed that education was the “golden key” for these people to raise their “human quality” (renkou suzhi) and have a better life. Golden Key developed teacher training modules so that even poorly-educated rural teachers could educate blind children. It also designed and produced low-cost tools to make learning accessible, such as reading lights, magnifying glasses, and braille writers. Peter visited provincial and local political officials, offering his products and prototypes for their school systems. Twenty-five years later, Golden Key materials were used in a number of Chinese provinces. Most of the funding for the organization came from foreign sources, including European foundations. It is hard to overstate how radical Peter Xu’s actions were at the time. When he started Golden Key in 1986, private charities and social welfare NGOs were all but unknown in China. For that matter, they would remain rare in PRC for another decade. Even in the 1990s, Chinese newspapers felt the need to define the term “charity” (cishan) for their readers. In 1998, an article in the China Society News noted, “ ‘charity,’ this long unheard-of notion, has come up again and is being relearned by the public.”1 Part of the problem with “charity” (cishan) was that it was associated with the Christian missionaries, those imperialist bad guys who had been ousted from China in the socialist revolution of 1949. According to a People’s Daily article published in 1994, for charity to be
accepted as part of Chinese society, it would need to be “rehabilitated” and cleansed of its taint of political incorrectness.2 What made a blind man in his fifties decide to become a social entrepreneur in the People’s Republic of China? How did he succeed, given that he had almost no experience with NGOs or private charities? Peter had spent his adult life working for a state institution, the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design. His wife and all their friends and relatives also worked for state organizations. What made Peter Xu decide that the right way to serve a vulnerable population was to personally start an independent, private organization, rather than to work through the Chinese government? On the other hand, why did Golden Key try to change the government-run public school system rather than to serve people directly? To make sense of Peter’s story, we need to understand how his life was embedded in a particular historical moment. When he was born, in 1931, China was in chaos, wracked by civil war and threatened by Japanese invasion. Twenty years earlier, the last Chinese emperor had abdicated, ending centuries of imperial rule. Twenty years after Peter’s birth, China was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong, who implemented his own version of Marxist socialism. The imperial and the socialist political systems had very different ideologies and structures for serving the poor and needy. Peter Xu’s charity would have been unimaginable in either. Yet Peter incorporated elements of imperial and socialist culture when he developed Golden Key.
