CHARITY RECIPIENT BECOMES YOUTH LEAGUE LEADER Su Mingjuan,

34, the former poster girl for the Project Hope education charity, was elected deputy secretary of the Communist Youth League Committee in east China’s Anhui Province in December 2017. In 1991, the photographer Xie Hailong from China Youth Daily took a picture of Su in a shabby classroom in the poverty-stricken Jinzhai County, Anhui Province. The photo was later used as a poster for Project Hope, China’s most influential public welfare project, and has become a symbol of the country’s efforts to promote nine-year compulsory education among all school-age children. Su graduated from Anhui University in 2005 and found a job in a bank in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province. As a beneficiary of the education charity, Su herself has also been helping poor students. Since it was launched in 1989, Project Hope has built over 19,000 primary schools and helped over 5.5 million children in China’s rural areas stay in school.