"Thank my parents for giving me precious life, thank heaven and earth for giving me space to live..." These grateful words comes from a Hui-style building in Fenghuang Mountain Scenic Area outside Beijing's West Sixth ring Road. Before lunch time, dozens of kids are sitting straightly behind yellow desks. They start eating without noises except the sound of chopsticks scrabbling bowls. All the kids dress in different clothes, some of their clothes are old-fashioned and washed-out. Two thirds of them are orphans from different areas over the country, the others are from poor families in Henan, Guangxi and Guizhou. This school is called Fenghuang Tai Chi and Chinese Classics charity school. Zhang Yujun, a middle-aged and slightly overweight man, is the founder of the school. He majored in Tai Chi in Beijing Sport University twenty years ago.
"I prefer to adopt orphans who come from the same family. In this way, each of them from the same family can learn different skills here in my school. When they grow up, at least one kid of the family can support the family to get rid of poverty." Zhang Yujun said.
Tai Chi school adopts 30 kids so far, with the oldest 16 years old and the youngest five. Zhang Yujun will specifically adopt orphans who come from the same family. He believes that in this way, different children in a family can learn different skills, so that they can get rid of poverty and become self-reliant through mutual support in the future. A family containing six siblings from Guangxi is by now the largest one that the oldest is eleven and the youngest is only five. Their father died of illness and their mother was mentally ill.
The youngest boy came to the school five months ago. At the beginning when he came, he was scared to tell the teacher when he wanted to go to toilet and would pee and shit his pants. The school adopts a family-like management system. Some older kids would be the masters of newcomers or young kids. So, every time when the youngest boy soiled his pants, his master Zhou Junliang would bring him away and helped him clean himself.
Not as educated as children in public school where they can receive various disciplines, children in this school learn and train intensively each day. They wake up at 4:30 in the summer and 5:30 in the winter every morning, run, exercise and learn all the time except the nap until 9:30 in the evening to go asleep. They learn both compulsory courses including the Four Books and Five Classics and Tai Chi and professional courses such as Go chess, wrestling, vocal music, martial arts, Chinese medicine, dancing, calligraphy, manual courses, etc. There are three full-time teachers in the school currently, Zhang Yujun, his wife and another female teacher. Most of the professional courses are taught by voluntary teachers, but continuity is not very good. Once some voluntary teacher couldn't come, the course would be cancelled indefinitely.
These kids in Tai Chi school are only a small number of 373,000 orphans in informal adoption system in China. Numbers of Chinese orphans has been in a downtrend. According to the latest statistic data released on August 2017 by Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, there are 460,000 orphans nationwide, this number is 511,000 in 2015. China's living standards rising and one-child policy are part of the reason why orphans’ number are declining. Among those orphans, only 88,000 were adopted by public welfare charities. Which means, 80 percent of adoption for Chinese orphans is informal, via relatives or privately founded institutions.
No accurate data reports how many of them are adopted by their relatives and how many are adopted by private charities. As professorQu Chen from HUST university says, people know well about the public welfare system charities and orphanages because they are exposed in the sunshine. Meanwhile, those private schools or orphanages exist in the dark corner of the society neglected by the government. Li Jinguo, a former government official of Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs and national director of China Association of SOS children's villages currently, points out the reason for this. It says the focus of Chinese scholars are on psychology, education, social work, but no research is from perspective of public policy. Thus,neither suggestions are proposed to the development of private charities or orphanages, nor regulators support research on relevant issue. Severe problems remain, like contradictory and conflicts between different policies, relevant laws are inadequate. In Qu Chen's eyes, those private charity schools like Tai chi school are mostly like small dramatic troupes in old society, which would teach and impart apprentices for some special skills.
Li Quan is a go chess teacher in Henan, who is devoted to public welfare for nearly eighteen years. He introduces that there are many orphans in Henan who live with their relatives. Most of them live in an awful situation. They would drop out from school during the period of compulsory education. Before they can go to cities for work, they have to help to do farming work at home. Actually, Chinese government provides a sum of public assistance to each orphans, which can support the adoption family with the orphan's education and living charge. But without relevant supervision, public assistance does no work for some orphans. Li Quan thinks this is very common in rural areas in Henan. Most of the kids lost their dad, their mother would then leave them and remarried.
Jin Yulin is from one of those unfortunate families, a poor countryside in Zhumadian, Henan. She is now 8 years old but shorter than average. Her dad passed away in 2015 due to liver cancer. At the day when her dad was buried, her mom packed up and left for her hometown Zhejiang. Jin Yulin never saw her mom again since then. She has an elder sister who is 13 and a six-year-old brother. They lived with their 82-years-old gramma whose left leg was broken years ago and was difficult to walk. Jin Yulin’s aunt sent her to study go chess and Chinese brush-writing with Li Quan in 2016. She was studious and diligent. Before long, Jin Yulin can write beautiful calligraphy. In Spring Festival of 2016, teacher Li Quan took her to the city square. Jin Yulin wrote many Spring Festival couplets. They sold it to passerby.
Zhang Yujun founded Tai Chi school in 2013. At that time, the school was profitable. He taught the students The Four Books and the Five Classics half a day and Tai Chi the other half. In early 2015, he received eight Tibetan orphans to the school and taught them Chinese for free. After visiting the kids’ hometown and worked as a voluntary teacher for a month, he was touched by the barren place and peaceful people there. So, he decided to stop receiving paid learners and devoted to running a non-profit school.
In late 2016, Li Quan came to Tai Chi school as a voluntary teacher to teach the orphans go chess. He went back to Henan serval months later and told the story of the school to Jin Yulin’s aunt. She was curious about the school and started to pay attention on it. After two months’ investigation, she decided to send Jin Yulin siblings to Tai Chi school. She believes that they can get well-cultivated and get a promising future. Another matter of her great concern is about the orphan identity of the three kids. According to relevant regulations, those kids who have lost both their father and mother or have lost one of their parents and the other one cannot perform his/her guardianship duty. Jin Yulin’s family doesn’t measure up because her mother is still alive, she and her siblings are called "de facto orphans". ChinaDaily reported that there are 580,000 children whose parents are still alive but do not offer proper care. The number of “de facto orphans” is far more beyond the data of orphans released by the government.
Jin Yulin was hit by the teacher when she first came here, because she didn’t say “thank you” to the teacher when she got food from the teacher. Each child in the school would be punished She learned the lesson and now she proudly alleged that she was barely beaten this year. Besides go chess and Chinese brush writing, she can play Tai Chi and martial art well.
Two months ago, Jin Yulin and the other three kids were selected by Zhang Yujun to attend a test by Beijing Martial Team, where the best professional sports team of Beijing. If they could pass the test, they would be luckily recruited by this professional team and became athletes. Zhang Yujun made an intensive training schedule for them to prepare for the test.
Zhong Fuming was one of the four selected kids. He is also an orphan from Henan. His mother died of disease in 2009. His father died of disease too in 2016. There are five siblings in Zhong Fuming's family. He is the youngest. His two elder sisters are over 18 years old. He and his another elder sister and elder brother were sent to Tai Chi school by his eldest sister in March, 2017. The process of submitting adoption application to Tai Chi school is simple. Zhang Yujun would verify the applicant’s family situation and decided by himself if he would adopt them or reject. Before they came to Beijing, Zhong Fuming’s elder sister Zhong Rui had just finished primary education and his elder brother was in Grade Four and he was in Grade Three. Zhong Fuming didn’t want to stay here. He is still eager for public school education.
The test was held in early late June. They came to the place early and started to exercise. They tried their best to performance, but no one succeed. Although the test results were not satisfactory, Zhang Yujun was very excited about establishing a relationship with a professional team like the Beijing Martial Art Team. The kids appeared calm. It seems that this was only a chance for them to go out of the school and play time.
Zhang Yujun believes that the orphans in the school would have a lot of options after they stay and practice for a few years. They could work as a martial art teacher, a stuntman or a Chinese medicine acupuncturist, etc. Yet for most of the kids, they are perplexed about the future.
