The Chinese city of Longyan for education was handed a whopping 500 million yuan ($77.35 million) donation by Zhang Yiming – founder of ByteDance, Tiktok’s parent company.
In a statement by the city’s education bureau, the purpose of the donation is to aid the teachers of Fangmei Foundation with advanced education such as vocational and technical training.
One of the residents of the province said, the primary purpose of the foundation is to serve rural areas and that Zhang, whose hometown is Longyan, situated in Fujian province, has already spoken to the teachers to that effect.
Zhang’s latest donation, though commendable also comes as a shock due to the recent crackdown in the Chinese tech sector. In recent months, President Xi Jinping has had private after-school tutoring sectors under scrutiny, maintaining that schools should be independent in learning rather than rely on tutoring companies.
However, billionaires in tech are still showing support to education with founder of Meituan, Wang Xing donating $2 billion worth of Meituan shares to a Wang Xing Fund earlier this month.
Jack Ma, Alibaba Group founder despite fleeing from public eyes after a controversial he speech made in October 2020 which led to the suspension of his company, Ant’s $37 billion IPO, was observed to have participated in an online lecture organised for rural teachers, courtesy of the Ma’s charitable foundation.
As a result, antitrust authorities have had both Alibaba and Meituan under scrutiny.
This latest donation by Zhang comes barely a month after he announced he would step down as CEO of ByteDance to read more and daydream.
In 2019, Zhang donated $14 million to the Innovation Fund for Nankai University in Tianjin and $10 million to San Francisco-based Minerva Schools.
