"They are excited about everything, but especially meeting Yao Ming. Most had never seen a big city and buzzed about visiting an amusement park. A teacher in Panzhihua, in remote Sichuan Province, she had come with the school team, traveling 14 hours by train. "Nobody could sleep last night," confided Ma Jing last year in Chengdu.
Read more: Asia's 2017 Heroes Of Philanthropy Boys and girls join teams that compete for local and regional honors, culminating in a weekend of playoffs, all-star events and a chance to meet and pose with the Gentle Giant. Volunteers are recruited from universities, trained as coaches and then sent to schools that often don't have physical education programs. Working in remote areas of China, the foundation-with an annual budget of roughly $2.5 million-equips and trains children aged 13 and under. Then Yao not only fuels your hoop dreams, but he may also be the sports saint providing your basketball court, shoes and sports training. So it's no surprise to find that his Yao Foundation is little known-unless you are a poor kid in some Chinese backwater. In February, he was elected president of the Chinese Basketball Association. Returning to Shanghai, he bought the Sharks basketball team that he played for as a teen. A perennial All-Star, injuries curtailed his career in North America's National Basketball Association in 2011, but he remains intensely involved in sports in China. Surveys say Yao, 36, is even more famous in China than Chairman Mao. And few are as celebrated as Yao, China's most famous athlete. Chinese stars regularly figure in nationalist causes, but few had leveraged their celebrity to personally challenge society.