The story of a retired Tsinghua University professor who anonymously donated his life savings to poor students despite being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer has touched Chinese netizens.
According to the Guangming Daily, Zhao Jiahe, a retired finance professor at Tsinghua University, donated his life savings of 15 million yuan ($2 million) to support over 2,000 high school students across the country.
Despite being diagnosed with advanced lung cancer at the age of 78 in 2011, he continued to donate his money to support poor students in high schools in West China, choosing to buy only inexpensive generic medicines for himself.
"The plentiful savings could have assured him the best treatment," Liu Xun, one of Zhao's former students, told the newspaper.
Zhao started to anonymously support poverty-stricken high school students from all over the country in 2006, when his savings reached 5 million yuan.
In 2012, he expanded his philanthropic efforts by establishing the Gansu Xinghua Youth Education Foundation, which supported 1,000 students in Northwest China's Gansu Province.
Zhao began teaching at Tsinghua University after graduating from the school's Department of Electronic Engineering in 1955, and he later helped establish the School of Economics and Management in 1985.
Zhao left a lucrative position at the University of Texas in the U.S. in 2001 in order to return to China to support students. He succumbed to lung cancer in 2012 and donated his body to scientific research.
