Children from poor families in China will have the chance to watch the opening or closing ceremony as well as competition at the Beijing Olympic Games.

 

Vantage, a Beijing Olympics gas appliance supplier, together with China Youth Development Foundation as well as CCTV, will select 10 children in the "Underprivileged Children Realizing Their Olympic Dream" project launched on Wednesday.

 

These children will come out of the 1,000 students who were able to finish their elementary school thanks to Vantage's financial support.

 

Vantage also donated 500,000 to the Foundation on Wednesday for children from Gansu and Inter Mongolia to finish their school.

 

"These underprivileged children don't even have proper sports facilities as their counterparts in cities, let alone watching Olympics.The project is meaningful because they used to be so far from the Olympics but now they have the chance to get close to the Games," said Tu Meng, executive director of the Foundation.

 

"I hope that this project can draw people's attention to their poor conditions and hopefully there will be more people joining in charity," he said.

 

According to the Foundation's statistics last year, since the China Hope Project was launched in 1989, it has helped nearly 3 million children to return school.

 

(Xinhua News Agency May 31, 2007)