On January 20, New Oriental founder Yu Minhong announced that the education giant had appointed Chen Xingjia as a senior consultant covering New Oriental Education, the livestream arm Oriental Selection, and the group's cultural-tourism business, with an annual consultancy fee of RMB 1.5 million. The announcement also said Yu would join Chen's Henghui Philanthropy Foundation and that New Oriental would give the foundation at least RMB 1 million each year, tying the corporate group publicly to a youth-focused charitable effort.
Chen, a long-time figure in Shenzhen’s philanthropic scene, has recently signalled a transition of leadership at Henghui: he published a video on January 18 saying he would hand the reins to younger managers and stop drawing a salary from the foundation after an orderly handover. The move follows controversy after the foundation’s 2024 work report showed Chen’s salary at RMB 730,100, which provoked public debate over charity pay; Chinese civil affairs authorities examined the matter and — according to the foundation’s public response — found no irregularities.
The appointment serves several strategic aims for New Oriental, a company that has spent the past half-decade reinventing itself after the 2021 education crackdown that sharply reduced its core tutoring business. Oriental Selection, the company's livestream sales and content arm, has become a prominent income source and a vehicle for reshaping the group's public image; hiring a respected philanthropic operator and pledging funds to youth causes are relatively low-cost ways to augment social legitimacy and demonstrate corporate responsibility.
The episode also highlights a broader fault line in China’s public life: how to reconcile professional compensation with public expectations for charity. Pay for leaders in China’s NGO sector routinely draws scrutiny, especially when figures are disclosed alongside private-sector incomes; salaries that are modest by corporate standards can still prompt sharp debate once they enter the public domain. Regulators have tightened governance and disclosure requirements for foundations in recent years, and civil society actors operate under closer official and public supervision than in many Western contexts.
For New Oriental and Yu personally, the arrangement reduces reputational friction while signalling a commitment to youth development. The RMB 1.5 million consultancy fee is roughly double the previously disclosed foundation salary for Chen, but remains small relative to executive pay in large private companies, and the guaranteed annual donation creates an easily understood headline of social giving. Linking a prominent entrepreneur directly to a foundation is a deliberate public-relations choice: it ties the firm’s recovery narrative to social purpose and shifts attention toward charitable impact rather than purely commercial activity.
That said, the combination of corporate donations, personal involvement in a foundation, and paid consultancy raises governance questions that will attract attention. Observers and regulators will watch whether Chen follows through on his pledge to relinquish foundation pay, how the foundation’s leadership transition proceeds, and whether the donated funds are deployed with clear transparency and independent oversight. Poorly explained ties between companies and charities risk reinforcing suspicions about related-party benefits, even when transactions are lawful.
Ultimately, this is a modest but telling manoeuvre in the post-crackdown landscape of Chinese education and philanthropy. It reflects how leading firms are attempting to reconfigure their public role in ways that marry surviving business lines with socially palatable causes, while navigating heightened expectations about disclosure, governance and the optics of compensation.