500 schools take part in the YaoMing Foundation’s basketball league.
egarded as one of the top basketball players in the history of the National Basketball Association, Yao Ming is one of China’s most recognizable and influential faces.
Throughout his time in the league, the Houston Rockets star was designated an NBA All-Star in eight seasons. He likely could have extended his success had it not been for a foot injury that pushed him into retirement at 30 years old in 2011. Still, over a decade after his U.S. debut, Yao was inducted into the NBA’s Hall of Fame.
“Well, they named the first Yao Ming day when I arrived in Houston, and then they named the second when I left, so what is that? Like a birthday?" he said of the city he called his"home away from home." Rather than sitting back and relaxing, Yao used his growing influence to raise money for medical research.
As China prepared to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, euphoria was building across the country, but then tragedy struck. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province in May of that year, killing tens of thousands. Thousands of children were killed, many of them students in classes killed by building collapses.
“A school is not only a building, but it should be content. And obviously, we are not good at education, and we don't want to pretend like we have educational expertise, or are the expert. We're good at sports.”Four years after the Sichuan earthquake, Yao’s foundation had built 17 earthquake resistant schools, many of them spread in rural parts of China.
The former Houston star has also helped curb China’s consumption of shark fin soup by starring in commercials and short documentaries exposing how the delicacy has made many shark species endangered. Shark fin consumption in China has fallen by up to 70 percent in the last seven years — almost the exact same period of time as Yao’s activism on the issue.
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