



Meet the Chinese volunteer who'll do anything to help


John Garnaut and Zhao Chunmei

Host with the most ... Zhang Wenquan is addicted to volunteering since his Beijing Olympic experience.

Host with the most ... Zhang Wenquan is addicted to volunteering since his Beijing Olympic experience. Photo: Sanghee Liu

BEIJING: This week Zhang Wenquan took time from study to pace the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square, resplendently decked out for yesterday's 61st birthday of the People's Republic.

This year's celebrations are low-key and the 24-year-old has no role to play, but nostalgic pictures kept flashing through his mind from the greatest experience of his life at the same place one year earlier during the 60th anniversary celebrations.

Mr Zhang's responsibilities as a volunteer had been great, the hardships greater and the rewards greater still.

On a miraculous postcard-blue morning - after days of horrendous pollution - 100,000 meticulously choreographed people marched with 60 gaudy floats and countless guns, tanks and nuclear-capable ballistic missiles past the members of the Politburo standing on the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

''The Chinese people have stood up!'' said the Communist Party chairman, Hu Jintao, echoing the words of Mao Zedong a little over 60 years before.

''And the Chinese nation, which has a history of more than 5000 years of civilisation, has entered a new historic era of development and progress.''

For 10 nights Mr Zhang and thousands of other volunteers had stayed in the Olympic Tower. He worked late each night and left early each morning, sometimes getting no sleep at all.

His job was to provide food, drinks, credentials and badges to other volunteers undergoing their training. He was the volunteer's volunteer. Without people like him, the whole patriotic machine could not work.

''If the number of goods or materials was wrong, then somebody would go without food for their training,'' said Mr Zhang, a Communist Party member at Beijing Union University.

On parade morning he left for the square at 2am. The parade lasted 63 minutes.

Volunteering in China has had a particularly state-focused bent since March of the Volunteers became the national anthem.

Mr Zhang is a self-described volunteering addict. He sees himself differently to those who do it to gain extra points on their comprehensive evaluation - the non-academic part of China's university assessment - or otherwise climbing the greasy bamboo pole.

''I don't care about any of those things,'' he said.

Mr Zhang's passion began while trying to qualify as a volunteer for the Beijing Olympic Games.

''We had to pass a series of tests including the spoken English test, Olympic knowledge test and some psychological tests,'' he said.

He was named a ''core volunteer''- one of only five from his school - an honour bestowed by the university department of the Beijing Municipality Committee of the Communist Youth League, which feeds into the Communist Party.

This ranked Mr Zhang in the top 100,000 volunteers chosen to work directly with Olympics activities - his job was to print and courier baseball results - while another 900,000 volunteers participated in other roles, mostly relating to community ''security''. Mr Zhang puts his success down to his commitment to pushing beyond normal physical limits.

He ran all day in the thick Beijing heat and slept in over air-conditioned temporary housing with fellow baseball score-couriering volunteers.

But when the athletes and the VIPs went home, he and all his volunteer friends got sick, and he found it difficult to find meaning in ordinary life.

''So quiet and empty,'' he said.

Then he received an Olympic award as an ''advanced individual'' and the flame spluttered back to life.

''Everything starts with the Olympics but it doesn't end when the Olympics ends. From now on my mission and responsibility is to spread the Olympic spirit,'' he said.

''The flame of passion never died after the Beijing Olympic Games. It is becoming stronger and stronger,'' he said, referring also to his recent duties at the Shanghai Expo.

He bought a bright red shirt sold exclusively at the Shanghai Expo China Pavilion and wore it to the Herald's interview. ''Sometimes I was so passionate that visitors were even shocked by my enthusiasm.''


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