Chinese Tycoons Help Poorer Students Study Abroad

Pan Shiyi and his wife, Zhang Xin

In 2010 Zhang Lei, a Chinese fund manager who earned an MBA at Yale’s School of Management, decided to donate $8,888,888 to his American alma mater. “It’s no overstatement to say that Yale School of Management changed my life. I learned so much there, and not just finance or entrepreneurship. I learned about freedom and the spirit of giving, which to me is a great reflection of the American spirit.”

This act of generosity – the largest ever donation to Yale’s business school by one of its graduates – went on to trigger a furious debate in China. Many netizens accused Zhang of being a “traitor” to the country, claiming that he had humiliated Chinese education. Some even called him a “lunatic”.

Against this backdrop, China’s reaction to a donation from Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi to Harvard isn’t so surprising. Last week, the couple behind property developer SOHO China announced that they had signed a $15 million gift agreement with Harvard University. The couple also intend to gift another $100 million in scholarships to help Chinese students to study at prestigious universities overseas. After Harvard, their next target is Yale.

According to Zhang, SOHO China’s chief executive, studying abroad is a huge financial endeavour for most Chinese students, who have to self-fund their education in the US. So the SOHO China Scholarship will be aimed at encouraging less-well-off students to apply to study overseas. Zhang told Century Weekly that students with annual family incomes below Rmb65,000 ($10,500) would be eligible to apply for scholarships.

“I received financial aid when I studied abroad in England. Education changed my life. I hope the fund can help poor students afford college education,” Zhang also explained on her personal weibo page.

Pan and Zhang’s rag-to-riches story is well-known. Zhang worked as a factory worker in Hong Kong before studying on full scholarships at the University of Sussex and then Cambridge University in the UK. She later went on to become an investment banker at a US bank. Pan, meanwhile, grew up in impoverished Gansu province.

But the two are now the power couple of Chinese real estate, with combined wealth valued at some $3.6 billion, according to Hurun Report.

But like Zhang Lei’s gift to Yale, their act of generosity soon prompted a landslide of criticism at home. One popular conclusion was that the donation is designed to make it easier for their son – reportedly at high school in the US – to gain admission to a sought-after college. Other responses were similarly predictable, deriding the two for being “traitors” to China and “forgetting where they came from.”

Continue to read at Week in China.