Book Club In China Launches Book Campaign For Needy Children

When someone drops a bottle post into an ocean or river, they generally hope that the tides will carry the message sealed in the bottle to a different shore where their missive will be discovered by someone else. The book club in China has taken the motif of a “message in a bottle” and built a campaign around it designed to provide books to needy children in China’s poorer regions. Last Thursday, the six-month campaign entitled “Drift Bottle: Sharing Books” was officially launched at the Club Center on Fuzhou Road in Shanghai.

The book club is partnering with the “China Juvenile & Children’s Publishing House” (CJCP), a Chinese imprint, to realize the campaign. Together, the partners have set out to support the government charity program “Project Hope,” which operates schools all over China, to give underprivileged children an opportunity to attend school regularly.

The event to kick off the “Drift Bottle” campaign took place last Thursday at the Club Center on Fuzhou Road. Fifty children from an elementary school in Shanghai were invited to the center, where each of them received a gift from the Chinese book club and CJCP: a book that they were allowed to keep only on condition that they pass it along to a “Project Hope” child when they finish reading it. To this end, the invited children each drew, at random, a stamped envelope bearing the address of a child at one of the “Hope” schools.

The envelope containing the book will now drift from child to child, like a message in a bottle.

The event at the Club Center was only the beginning of and one step in the “Drift Bottle Campaign.” In the next six months, customers at the club’s 48 shops in 13 Chinese cities can buy a book published specifically for the campaign, to be passed along to children in “Project Hope” after they have finished reading it. Customers can pick the child they want the book to go to from a list. The book club shoulders all shipping and handling costs.

To further the idea of “Sharing Books,” the book club also suggests that its customers review the book and submit their reactions to the book club. The best submissions will be published in “Literature and Art for Juveniles,” a popular magazine for teens.