CUHK student pleads for first lady Peng Liyuan to save China Red Cross

Please save the Red Cross Society of China, a mainland student in Hong Kong wrote in an open letter to Peng Liyuan, urging China's first lady to take over the beleaguered charity as chairwoman.

“I sincerely look to you to transform the present Red Cross system to be more transparent to re-establish Chinese philanthropy’s image,” she wrote in the letter.

In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake on Saturday, the student, identified by only her surname Xue, said she chose to donate to relief efforts via the China Siyuan Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, instead of the Red Cross association, “for obvious reasons”. 

The 109-year-old official charity organisation has been beset by a crisis of confidence in recent years after it was plagued by a series of scandals and rumours.

Xue, 24, who is from Hubei and is studying e-commerce and logistics technologies at CUHK, said she came up with the chairwoman idea after noticing that an NGO founded by movie star Jet Li drew more donations on the first day after the quake than a government-run charity.