Zhang Guimei

Zhang Guimei the Chinese educator of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (born 1957) who founded a free high school for girls in the mountainous Yunnan region and devoted her life to giving poor rural daughters an education. She is widely admired as a moral example of self-sacrifice in the service of the disadvantaged.

Early Life and Career

Zhang Guimei was born in 1957 in Heilongjiang province in northeastern China. She moved to Yunnan in the southwest as a young woman and trained as a teacher, taking up posts in the schools of the province. Married and settled in the region, she suffered a devastating personal loss when her husband died of cancer in the 1990s, a blow that she has said deepened her determination to devote herself to something that would outlast her.

She transferred to a middle school in Huaping county, one of the poorest parts of Yunnan, where she encountered girls who dropped out of school to be married or to work because their families could not afford to keep them in education. She began to give her own money to help students remain at school and to visit their homes in the mountains to persuade parents to let them continue studying.

Founding the Girls' School

Zhang Guimei resolved to build a school that would provide a free secondary education for girls from poor families in the mountains. She spent years raising funds, soliciting donations in the streets and from organizations, and in 2008 she founded a free high school for girls in Huaping, the first of its kind in the country. The school charged no fees and provided accommodation and meals so that poverty would not keep its students away.

The institution began with a small number of pupils and grew steadily as its results became known. Zhang insisted on high academic standards and long hours of study, believing that only rigorous work could allow her students to compete for university places and to escape the cycle of poverty that trapped their families.

She also created an environment of strict discipline and mutual support, mentoring her students and following their progress into higher education. Many of them became the first in their families to attend university, and some returned to the region as teachers and health workers.

Health and Personal Sacrifice

Zhang Guimei has suffered from serious illness for much of her adult life and has continued to work despite constant pain and a long list of medical conditions. She has often been described as living in poverty by choice, giving her salary and savings to her students and to the school and refusing comforts for herself.

She has said that her greatest wish is that her students should be able to live better lives than she has had, and that the education of girls is the most effective way to break the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next. Her example of personal austerity in the service of a cause has inspired many others to donate to the school and to volunteer in poor regions.

Her frail health and her refusal to retire or to spare herself became central to her public image, and she was widely praised for a dedication that many regarded as heroic. She has nevertheless insisted that she is an ordinary teacher doing her duty.

Recognition

Zhang Guimei has received many of the highest honours available in China, including recognition as a national model for teachers and praise from the leadership. Her story has been reported at length in the national media and has become familiar to a broad public, and she has been held up as an example of dedication to education and to the poor.

The free girls' school she founded became a widely cited model, and its graduates have gone on to universities and careers across the country. Supporters raised funds to expand its facilities and to endow scholarships for its students.

Her public role extends beyond the school itself: she has become a symbol of the value of education in overcoming poverty and of the special obstacles faced by girls in remote and traditional rural communities. Speeches and articles about her frequently invoke the theme of selfless service.

Legacy and Continuing Work

Zhang Guimei continued to lead her school into the 2020s, teaching and supervising despite declining health and repeated hospital treatment. She has trained younger teachers to carry on the work and has sought to secure the future of the institution after her death.

Her life has come to stand for the proposition that education is the most powerful lever for changing the prospects of poor children, and particularly of girls. In the mountainous counties of Yunnan her name is associated with the thousands of young women who have passed through her school and gone on to lives their mothers could not have imagined.

She is regarded as one of the most admired educators of her generation, and her example has encouraged debate about the resources devoted to rural schooling and about the continuing barriers to the education of girls in remote areas.

See also

• Education in China
• Girls' education
• Rural poverty
• Yunnan province