Mr. Xu Bailun's Brief Introduction

Xu Bailun was born in 1930. He was from Yixing, Jiangsu Province. After graduating from the Architectural Department of Nanjing Industrial University in 1955, he was assigned to the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design where he devoted himself to a career of building the homeland with his heart was filled with the passion of patriotism.

His father, Xu Zhucheng was a journalist famous throughout the whole country and a successful chief editor of Dagong Newspaper and Wenhui Newspaper. He sought after the truth and spoke out from a sense of justice during the War of Resistance against Japan, saving the nation from extinction, building the people's democracy, while under persecution by the enemy and the puppet regime. In 1957, he was condemned as a Rightist by Mao Zedong.

Because of his father, Xu Bailun was treated differently from the others. Therefore he became an abandoned child of his motherland and suffered ups and downs in an abyss of misery with tears. During the Cultural Revolution, he was listed as one of "the young ones that can be educated well" and felt extremely flattered. He worked very hard with all his might, both of his eyes were on the verge of total blindness caused by a medical accident when he was 41.

In order to prove his value, he had to throw away his formal profession, architecture, and he learnt to write. He suffered from all the kinds of pains of a blind person; he published his first short story after ten years. Then he published over ten thousand words of fairy tales, allegories, poems and science fictions in succession. His works once were collected into a Contemporary Fairy Tales Collection and a Modern Allegories Collection.

Just when his destiny appeared to be improving, his wife, who was engaging in biochemistry study in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was mentally and physically exhausted and broken down from constant overwork. She left the world only eight months after finding out that she had advanced lung cancer in 1983, when she was only 52.

After Xu Bailun's family was broken up, tears soaked his face. He suffered pain and doubt for a whole year, he recalled the painful experience, put himself in the place of another, decided to help those blind children who were more unfortunate than him and desired all of them to have a valuable life.

A 55 years old blind man who had lived in a warm harbor built by his wife for 14 years, shabbily walked up to the world, earnestly asked for trust and support from society. He wished to try his best, with his small effort, to help those blind children. We can imagine how difficult that was.

He worked with the spirit of selflessness and perseverance, eventually set up Ode to Joy, the first bi-monthly Braille magazine for all blind children, in 1985. It was given free to blind students in the whole country and has continued for 24 years till now. It has become a good teacher and helpful friend accompanying blind children as they grow up generation after generation.

In 1986, 1989 and 1991, with the help of society, we conducted three "National Summer Camp for Blind Children" in Beijing, Qingdao and Inner Mongolia with the themes of "Relatives Are Everywhere in Motherland", "Equally Return Mainstream Society" and "United Nationalities" successively. These filled up the blank in Chinese special education, produced a good social ethic, was praised by Ba Jin, Ye Shengtao, Bing Xin, Xia Yan and Wu Yunduo and energetically supported by Liu Bocheng, Kang Keqing, Deng Pufeng, Li Yuanchao and Gu Xiulian.

During contact with blind children in other countries, Xu Bailun found to his surprise that the enrollment rate was only 3%. What blind children need more is education. After busily running around and appealing to a lot of people, but failing, with the decision of "going deep into the mountains, undeterred by the tigers there", he and his current wife, Ji Yuqin, took up reform on Chinese education for blind children in 1987. They successively set up integrated education pilot areas in Shanxi, Jiangsu, Hebei and Heilongjiang, which was named "Golden Key Blind Children Education Plan" by Kang Keqing. Combining international advanced special education concept with the Chinese practical situation, the education reform experiment tried to explore a way to popularize visually impaired education as soon as possible. In 1990, the Sate Education Commission and China Disabled People's Federation (CDPF) held a national experience communication and identification meeting, which confirmed the necessity and feasibility of the practice, decided to name it "integrated education" and expand it to the whole country. A new page of Chinese special education was turned over.

Since 1996, Xu Bailun and his wife, Ji Yuqin, introduced foreign funds into China, invited international famous experts to provide guidance, implemented "Golden Key Project" in Guangxi and the entire Inner Mongolia area and helped poverty areas to rapidly popularize visually impaired education in a large area with high quality. After achieving a great deal of experience, they set up "Golden Key Project Pilot Area" in Shaanxi and Heilongjiang. The accumulative total of enrolled visually impaired children was more than 5,000 and a much experience was gained from a wide area of southwest, northwest, north and northeast of China. It was internationally praised as "Golden Key Mode". At present, Golden Key is summing up experiences; publish monographs and spreading Golden Key Project to a larger area under support of UNESCO, UNICEF, CDPF and CBM and the other organizations.

Xu Bailun was appraised as "Excellent Party Member of Beijing” twice, was awarded "National May 1st. Working Medal", "Beijing Working Medal", "Song Qingling Camphor Award" and "Neiteng Education of Children" which was a Chinese and Japanese combined award; the Women and Children's Committee of the State Council awarded Xu Bailun a title of "Staff Working for Children with Excellent Achievement" and "Award of Loving Children"; To commend Xu Bailun for his outstanding contribution in education research and his creativity, UNESCO awarded him Comenius Medal in session of the International Conference on Education (ICE) in Geneva in 1996. He became the first man who received such an honor in educational circles of China.