We chose China as the first country to launch Smile Train primarily because our first major donor was Charles Wang and he was born in Shanghai. Wang was the largest client of my advertising agency and I’ve been cultivating him as a donor of Operation Smile for several years.
After Wang took a $700 million bonus from his company, he received a lot of negative press. I knew he could use some good PR, so I asked him for a large donation for Smile Train. Wang loved the idea and our plans to launch in China. He was very proud of his Chinese heritage.
We told Pres. George H. W. Bush about Smile Train and he liked the idea so much he recommended it to Jiang Zemin, the president of China when they met in 1997. A few months later I flew to China to meet with the Minister of Railways. That meeting was a disaster as the railways minister explained why our plans for an actual train were completely unrealistic.
Despite the fact that we couldn’t operate a train in China, we decided to keep the name and charge ahead. The next question was how would we operate in China? The Chinese told us that we should just give them all our money and they would take care of everything. We weren’t really comfortable with that.
We decided to set up our own program in China and manage it ourselves. But non-Chinese charities were not permitted to operate independently in China. We had to find a Chinese organization to partner with.
We ended up with the China Charity Federation (CCF) as our partner. It was run by a life-long politician and communist named Yan Mingfu.
I’ll never forget the first night I met Yan Mingfu. We had a kickoff dinner in Beijing to introduce our Smile Train team to the team at CCF. I was nervous because CCF was a government organization and they were all communist bureaucrats. I didn’t know what to expect.
But thanks to Yan Mingfu, it was a spectacular evening. He was warm, friendly and funny. When his wife called him to see when he would be home, he put me on the phone with her!
And his communist colleagues weren’t stiff bureaucrats at all. They laughed at our jokes and told a few of their own. Best of all, they really seemed to care about our project and promised to do whatever they could to make it a big success.
Despite the fact that we were at a fancy restaurant, up high in an expensive hotel, his colleagues sent someone down to the street to buy a bottle of Baijiu so we could all make a toast to the new Smile Train Project. Baijiu is the most popular alcohol in China and quite strong. They serve it in shot glasses for toasts and before you knew it, everyone was making a toast to the Smile Train and all the children we would help. Immediately after Yan Mingfu made a particularly eloquent toast, there was a giant bolt of lightning and a huge roar of thunder. I told him God must have liked his toast. He loved that. (You’re not supposed to talk about God in China.)
We were lucky to partner with CCF as they did a great job. With Yan Mingfu’s leadership, they moved very quickly helping us find partner dozens of partner hospitals all across China. And then local CCF offices helped find cleft patients and even transported them back and forth to our partner hospitals. Thanks to CCF our surgery numbers started to take off.
Over time, as I got to know Yan Mingfu, I learned about his background. It is an amazing story.
His father was a famous Chinese politician and Yan Mingfu good to go to the very best schools in China. He was very bright and spoke five languages. At the age of 27 years old, Yan Mingfu one of Mao Zedong’s interpreters when he met with Khrushchev in 1959.
Seven years later when the Cultural Revolution (The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) started, Yan Mingfu was stripped of his job, all of his possessions and like millions of other Chinese “elite”, he was sent “down to the countryside” to a farm to be “re-educated.”
A few years later, Yan Mingfu somehow ended up in prison in solitary confinement. His father was imprisoned at the same prison and just a few cells away from Yan Mingfu. But they never saw or spoke to each other and his father died in prison a few years later.
After the Cultural revolution, Yan Mingfu was released from prison. But he hadn’t spoken to anyone in seven years, so he had to learn how to talk all over again. Unbelievable for a man who had been fluent in five languages.
Yan Mingfu slowly worked his way up with the Chinese government again and became a senior government official. He played a pivotal role during the Tiananmen Square crisis.
He met with the students several times after they started their hunger strike. And he tried to talk them into putting their protests on hold and participate in talks. He even offered to let them take him as a hostage. But they refused. And soon thereafter the government sent in the tanks and crushed the rebellion killing more than a thousand and arresting more than 10,000.
Afterwards, Yan Mingfu was heavily criticized for his efforts to “help” the students and he was thrown in prison again for a couple years. When he got out, the government put him in charge of the China Charity Foundation.
I really admired Yan Mingfu for not being bitter or broken after all the horrible things that had happened to him, his father and his family. He still loved China very much and really embraced his job as the leader of CCF.
“My job with CCF is to teach China, how to have a loving heart,” he used to tell me.
CCF encourages the Chinese to make donations to help other Chinese during natural disasters like earthquakes and typhoons. CCF also raised money to help orphans and children born with birth defects and to promote adoption. (Believe it or not, clefts were not considered a birth defect in China.)
Yan Mingfu’s goal of teaching China to “have a loving heart” was noble but very, very difficult. God and religion are not allowed in China. They cut off the steeples of every church. There are no Ten Commandments or moral code taught in the schools. People are taught to worship the government.
As a result, philanthropy and charitable giving were virtually non-existent in China at that time. And just like Yan Mingfu, the Chinese people had been through quite a lot over just the past 50 years.
You couldn’t blame them if their hearts were somewhat hardened after all of the horrors, atrocities, and heartbreak of the past 50 years…
Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward created the largest man-made famine in the history of the world (The Great Famine) killing 20-40 million Chinese in just three years.
Just a few years later, the Cultural Revolution came along and paralyzed the entire country while it killed another 2 million Chinese.
The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 killed more than a thousand people and 10,000 people were arrested.
China’s One-Child policy over 35 years led to forced sterilizations of 100+ women and 325 million women were fitted with IUDs. Abortions and other deaths ended the lives of 400 million Chinese babies.
Ironically, now there are not enough young people to support all the elderly in China and the government is promoting a Two-Child Policy.
What amazed me the most about Yan Mingfu was that he, personally, did indeed have a loving heart – even after all he had been through.
His resilience, perseverance, and selfless attitude humbled and inspired me.
Whenever I am having a difficult day, I think of my old friend, Yan Mingful, and his “loving heart.”
Here is some more information on the remarkable life filled with ups and downs of my friend and my hero, Yan Mingfu….
Yan Mingfu is a retired Chinese politician. His first prominent role in government began in 1985 when he was made leader of the United Front Work Department for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He held the position until the CCP expelled him for inadequately following the party line in his dialogues with students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Yan returned to government work in 1991 when he became a vice minister of Civil Affairs.
Yan was born in Liaoning province in 1931. In 1949, he graduated from the Harbin Foreign Language College. He then became the official Russian translator for Mao Zedong, before being promoted to a high-ranking party position sometime in the late 1950s. During the Cultural Revolution he was arrested and did not reappear in a state position until 1985.]
His father, Yan Baohang, had been a member of both the Kuomintang and the CCP. Before Yan Mingfu was appointed head of the United Front Work Department in 1985, his father had held the position from the department’s inception during the Chinese Civil War.
When students began protesting China’s corruption and economic problems after the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, Yan was also serving as a Secretary in the 13th Politburo of the Communist Party of China.
From the beginning of the protests at Tiananmen Square, the Politburo’s members had been working towards finding a resolution that would pacify the students.
Some officials favored engaging with their demands, but others, such as Li Peng, felt that most pressing issue was to “get students back into their classrooms” before the situation escalated.
At a meeting held on May 10, the Politburo, under the leadership of Zhao Ziyang, decided that holding discussions with every group involved in the protests would be an ideal path to resolving the students’ issues; along with Hu Qili and Rui Xingwen, Yan was asked to speak to journalists from various papers throughout the capital.
According to Zhang Liang, the compiler of the document collection The Tiananmen Papers, the three officials saw in the protests “an opportunity to move decisively toward fuller, more truthful reporting.” Yan held his dialogue with Beijing’s journalists from May 11 to May 13; throughout these discussions, he repeatedly voiced his support for the student’s goals, downplayed the condemnation of the protest expressed in the April 26 Editorial, and maintained that Zhao was fully in favor of reforming the press.
After the students commenced their hunger strike on May 13, the Politburo sent Yan to Tiananmen Square to call for an end to the protests and implore students to return to class. For the most part, the meeting went badly. In his discussion with the student leaders, he acknowledged that the decision to protest was justified while reaffirming the Politburo’s desire to see the students return to their classrooms. He also condemned the decision to begin a hunger strike, telling the students that it “accomplishes nothing, either for the country or your own health. If you present your demands and suggestions through proper channels, I can responsibly tell you the door to dialogue is always open.” The meeting ended with both groups feeling misunderstood; when Yan reported back to Zhao, he noted that the student leaders “are in disagreement among themselves.”
On May 14, Yan returned to the Great Hall of the People and told students that a dialogue to be held later in the day would be recorded and broadcast on national television. During the discussion that afternoon, Zhang claims, Yan and Li Tieying maintained that their aim was “not to negotiate policy decisions but to exchange views and information.” After the dialogue broke down, Dai Qing and a group of eleven other intellectuals notified Yan that they were willing to meet with the students and urge them to stop their hunger strike.
When the intellectuals returned from the dialogue, they claimed that the students would listen if the government would compromise first. For Yan, this indicated that the “students are getting greedier, their demands are getting stiffer, and they’re getting less and less unified among themselves.” The intellectuals resumed the discussion, but it again ended without either party reaching a resolution.]
On May 16, Yan arrived at Tiananmen Square to advocate an end to the hunger strike. He offered himself as a hostage to demonstrate the sincerity of his belief that all issues would soon be resolved. The students believed his speech to be genuine, but they did not think that the government would truly capitulate.
By May 18, Yan had grown tired of the disagreements between the students and the government. At a meeting between Li Peng and the student leaders that day, he stated that the “only issue I am concerned with is that of saving the children who are hunger striking in the Square, who are now in a very weakened state, their lives gravely threatened.”
When Zhao was ousted on May 21, Yan lost his major source of political support; on June 23, the Politburo voted to eject him from his government positions. An article from The Asian Wall Street Journal contends that Yan “was criticized as handling the talks badly.”
According to Zhang, Yan’s speech to students on May 16 also “became a major count against him” when the government began to expel its reform-minded members.
Yan did not reappear in Chinese politics until 1991 when he was named vice minister of Civil Affairs. The promotion occurred almost exactly two years after the June 4 Massacre, but a New York Times article claims that Yan and other recently rehabilitated officials “did not mention their 1989 political disgrace or say why they were given new jobs.”
According to Josephine Ma, Yan “lost his political clout” in 1996 and retired from all government work, although he remained involved in charity work and continued to serve as chairman of China’s Charity Association.
In 2007, Yan became China’s chief negotiator with Taiwan for a brief period. While Yan’s promotion to vice minister of Civil Affairs indicated that he was “partially rehabilitated,” Ma reports that “observers” regarded his tenure as chief negotiator as “the famous liberal’s full rehabilitation.”
Apart from these positions, Yan has maintained a “low profile” since his retirement.[1] In November 2018, former Chinese primer Wen Jiabao visited him in a hospital on his 87th birthday.
