On August 14, John, a British instrument engineer, sang at the Jingcheng community in Suzhou Industrial Park to raise fund for charity.
John and Tang Chongyan, his wife from Suzhou, helped students from a poverty-stricken region in Huxian County, Shaanxi Province, on October 15, 2007. He was deeply touched by the experiences of school dropouts. Since then, John and his wife visited more than 50 schools in poor mountainous areas of Guizhou, Qinghai, and Gansu provinces, offering nearly 40,000 children tuition fees, books, stationery, clothes, and clean drinking water. All his children's pocket money and family holiday funds have been used to help these disadvantaged children. As of December 31, 2018, the couple had raised 5.633 million yuan ($801,000), of which 1.2 million yuan was from his family.
To get the qualifications of teaching, John returned to England to attend football club training and got a FIFA coach certificate. He also went to the Beijing Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs to study and obtained a TEFL International Teacher Qualification Certificate. The children like his lessons and also like playing with him very much.
