Background

About a quarter of China's population lives in the western provinces and autonomous regions. In these areas, unlike the prosperous east coast cities and other urban areas, families may exist on the cash equivalent of $10 or $15 per month, and their entire life experience may be encompassed within a radius of 10 or 20 miles, according to James Fallows in How the West Was Wired.

In 2001, a Taiwanese businessman, Sayling Wen, initiated a project called “Town and Talent,” which aims to narrow the gap between the wealthier eastern and poorer western regions by using Internet technologies to help local schools and businesses. He invested $50 million to set up a software company, and installed ICT infrastructure, beginning with a village called Yellow Sheep River in Gansu Province. This project trained talented local people to be software engineers and recruited them into the company. It helped to improve local education and the economy. Wen then aspired to replicate the success to other villages and townships in rural China.

Although Wen died in 2003, his son continued his work and launched a new program in 2007, the "West China Story" project. The West China Story project is similar to a work-study program, in which students contribute their works and receive funding through an online platform. It is a private business supported e-literacy program and also helps students to adapt to the online environment.

The "West China Story" Project
1. How Students Participate in the Program
Students from primary and secondary schools in western provinces are eligible to participate in the program, and most of the schools which enroll in the program are members of the Town and Talent project. Currently 155 schools take part in the project, and normally they receive ICT aid from the company, which donates computers and help them get access to the Internet. Each school receives digital cameras which are used by students in turns for their work.

Participants of the program get about a $115 grant, but in return, they have to become bloggers and distribute their work periodically. They can write about history, the environment, or their hometown. Family, friends, and school lives are also topics that students could talk about. They use digital cameras to take pictures concerning their topics, and then post it on the West China Story website. Normally their articles will be corrected by their school teachers before going out to the public, and they will publish at least eight stories during the school year. Students will have their own pages under the website, which contains their biographies and articles.
Through practice, students learn simple web design skills and have the ability to connect with the outside world.

Visitors who register on the website can comment on students' work; most importantly, they are able to fund students whose work interested them directly through the website.

Currently there are more than 2,200 students participating in the program, and there are about 15,808 pieces of student work posted on the website; however, they are all in Chinese. Besides writing short articles for the website, they also encourage students to form teams and to attend web design contests. Some of them have won prizes in “cyber-fairs,” an international high school web design contest.

2. How Visitors Fund Students
The website of the West China Story basically serves as an

Sample of Student Work

Internet platform for e-charity. Visitors who sign up for the website can either email students and fund them directly or donate money through the website.

Evaluating the West China Story Project

The West China Story project can be viewed as a great example of e-literacy program incorporating fundraising initiated by the private sector.

1. Achievements of the West China Story Project
James Fallows has written in his article, “The idea is to remind them that they are earning their way and not being given a favor, while at the same time teaching them modern Website design skills.” Indeed, the project itself has served its way to improve e-literacy rates in some rural areas in China while providing funding for poor students.

People who can read Chinese and have visited the websites might notice that all of the participants in the program are from remote townships, some of which don't even have decent roads connecting with the outside world. Most students are from lower income families whose parents have to strive for minimal income and can't even cover their kids' tuition. And students usually live on campus during weekdays, since schools are sometimes more than two hours away from home, on foot or by bus. They cram in small dorm rooms with schoolmates, and a girl mentions in her story that they didn't get piped water until recently.

The project not only brings the Internet to these students' lives but also connects them to the outside world, which is something that can't even be imagined by their parents. And most importantly, the e-literacy program helps to mitigate the ICT gap between students in rural areas and kids from big cities. In order to adapt the low bandwidth online environment, pages made by these participants are simple: an article with a few pictures. But these skills could become assets of students for them to acquire the ability to compete with the world in the future.

This informal e-literacy program succeeds in educating students in remote townships, while providing them incentives to learn.

2. How to Adapt to a Low Bandwidth Situation
This project doesn't provide a teacher training system in educating students in low bandwidth areas about web design skills or other computer application skills. In remote township schools, the teachers who teach Chinese, mathematics, science and computer skills are the same person. And this project also lacks proper curriculum in e-literacy. Especially in low bandwidth situations or in areas that don’t even have access to computers, it is important for project planners to develop education programs suitable for students in the situation. Teaching students basic computers skill is as important as educating them in how to adapt to the online environment without being overwhelmed by the influx of knowledge.

3. Further Improvements
The official site of the Town and Talent project is in two languages, Chinese and English, and there is a small section introducing the West China Story project. Nonetheless, there is no English site solely for the project and no translation is made of the students' work. The language barrier would prevent non-Chinese speakers from reading stories written by students. Therefore, in order to increase the influence of the project, the company should translate it into other languages. In this way, donors would not be limited to Chinese Language speakers and spread the idea to the whole world.

Also, the sustainability of the project is doubtful. In effect, these projects are initiated by private business and rely deeply on private funds from the company. When the founder of the Town and Talent program, Sayling Wen, died in 2003, people feared that the project might come to an end shortly after Wen's death. Although his successors continued the project and initiated the West China Story project in 2007, the sustainability of these projects is still questionable. The company should seek ways to keep the e-literacy program running and to create a method that could fund students consistently. One solution is to turn to the Chinese government for support; another is to learn from other nongovernmental organizations.

Last but not least, the West China Story project is still limited. Only portions of schools in western China participate in the project, and the project couldn't reach all students in rural China. The company should carefully consider how to effectively increase the penetration rate of the project, to deepen the influence of e-literacy and thus to achieve its goal of boosting economic growth in western China.

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