On October 30, 1989, the Communist Youth League and the China Youth Development Foundation announced that a fund would be set up to raise money from the public to help children from poor families stay in school, and the scheme was given the name Project Hope. It was one of the first large charities in the country to depend on donations from ordinary people and from companies rather than on the state budget, and it was aimed at the countryside, where many families could not afford the fees and the other costs of sending a child to school. The aim was simple.
The work was done through schools and through local branches of the league. Money was used to pay the costs of a pupil for a year, and donors were given the name of the child they had helped and were encouraged to write, and the fund also paid for the building and repair of school buildings, for books and equipment and for the training of teachers. The schools that were built were known as hope schools, and thousands of them were put up in poor counties in the interior, and the fund also ran a programme that helped students from poor areas to go to university. The fund grew.
The scheme was widely supported. Businesses, officials and private citizens gave money, and the fund became one of the best known in the country, and a large share of the donations came in small amounts from individuals, and the accounts were published. Its projects were also financed from abroad, including by Chinese communities overseas. There were also reports of mismanagement in some local branches, which led to changes in the way the money was handled, and the fund tightened its rules on how the money was collected and spent.
The scheme continued for decades and has paid for the education of millions of children and the building of thousands of schools, and it is often described as the model for later charitable work in the country. Its name is used for a series of related programmes, and the date of its announcement is marked by the foundation. Education spending by the state also rose greatly in the same period, and in the 2000s the state abolished tuition fees for rural primary and middle school pupils.