As stated in an article recently published by the Nanfang Metropolis Daily, universities in China have received a total of 92.7 billion yuan in donations since 1980. Of all the donations, 32 billion yuan came from alumni.
A list compiled by the Chinese University Alumni Association shows the top 100 Universities that received the most donations from alumni between 1980 and 2018. Peking University stands at the top, with total alumni donations of 3.143 billion yuan. Next in the list are Tsinghua University and Renmin University, with total alumni donations of 2.89 billion yuan and 2.157 billion yuan, respectively.
According to the 2019 Forbes China Philanthropy List, 48.57% of all philanthropic donations go to education. Real estate billionaire Hui Ka Yan, the chairman of the Evergrande Group, has topped the list with donations equal to 4.07 billion yuan, followed by Yeung Kwok Keung and Family, from Country Garden (1.65 billion yuan) and Jack Ma from Alibaba (980 million yuan).
Last year Hui Ka Yan donated 100 million yuan to his alma mater, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. As the single largest donation that the Wuhan University of Science and Technology has ever received in its history, it will be put to good use to support the teaching and research activities of the university. Apart of this, Hui Ka Yan also made donations of 1.1 billion yuan, 1 billion yuan and 50 million yuan to Tsinghua University, Sun Yat-sen University and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, respectively.
In October 2018 Yeung Kwok Keung, the founder of the Guoqiang Public Welfare Foundation of Guangdong Province and chairman of Country Garden, announced that his foundation will commit 2.2 billion yuan to Tsinghua University over the next 10 years to help foster talent and research into advanced technology. According to Qiu Yong, the president of Tsinghua University, this was the largest donation ever to a single educational institution in China.
In 2015, Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba Group, donated 100 million yuan to his alma mater Hangzhou Normal University, to set up an educational fund. This is also the single largest donation ever made to Hangzhou Normal University.
