This story is about a playground that has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in rural China.
On Children's Day in 2026, the central kindergarten in Tongchang Township, Jinping County, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, welcomed an unusual morning. The school has 126 children, 77 of whom are boarders, and 80% are left-behind children. Years ago, when teachers asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?", many children gave simple yet disheartening answers: "Go home to herd cattle and raise chickens." It wasn't that the children lacked ambition, but the mountains limited their horizons; they had never seen a different life beyond the hills. The young female teachers at this kindergarten, born around 1998, traveled from places like Yuxi, Jianshui, and Mengzi. The one who came the farthest crossed over 300 kilometers of mountain roads to get there. Due to the long distance, these teachers can only go home once a month on average, or even less frequently.
Recently, a new playground was completed at this kindergarten. Blue and yellow interlocking tiles now cover the previously empty concrete yard. The children finally have a safe place to run and play freely. Teachers have started using the new playground for games, physical education classes, and to tell the children about the world beyond the mountains. When asked about their future dreams now, the children's answers are no longer limited, filled instead with hope and aspiration.
This playground is the 5,000th one completed under the Meituan Rural Children's Playground Project.
Initiating the Transformation
In Eryuan County, Dali, Yunnan, Yang Jiming has spent decades at the local Bai ethnic kindergarten. He started teaching there in his twenties. While his peers left one by one, he never left these mountains. He planted trees, watered flowers, and learned to draw mushrooms to teach children about food safety. His daughter, Yang Sifeng, grew up there, with her father as her teacher. She later went to a technical secondary school in Kunming, the provincial capital, truly leaving the mountains for the first time. However, in 2007, her 19-year-old brother passed away from leukemia while studying away from home, leaving behind a diary. She opened it and saw his words: "I really want to go home." At that time, her father had suffered an accidental injury requiring craniotomy surgery, with no one to care for him. Yang Sifeng decided to return. She came back to this kindergarten and became its second teacher.
Once, after a rain, a little girl slipped on the wet ground and fractured a bone, missing a week of school. When Yang Sifeng visited her home and saw the girl in a cast, she broke down in tears. Before a performance, the teachers pooled money to buy new dresses for the children. The children cherished them so much they only took them out the day before the show. But when they sat on the hard ground, the dresses still got dirty. Father and daughter bought paint and, referencing pictures of playgrounds online, got down on the ground to meticulously paint blue and yellow squares, one by one. From that day on, they shared the same dream: the children here deserved a real playground.
Over a thousand kilometers away, at the foot of Mount Everest in Shigatse, Tibet, at an altitude of 4,119 meters, there is another kindergarten. Xiao Ji, a six-year-old with a frail constitution, was introverted since childhood. When he first started kindergarten, he would sit motionless in the classroom for long periods, not responding when others spoke to him. In Yuping County, Tongren, Guizhou, a girl surnamed Zhu was also frail, disliked exercise, and was quiet and withdrawn when she first arrived at kindergarten. These two children, separated by thousands of miles and unknown to each other, shared a similar kindergarten environment: a concrete yard or an empty patch of land, with no safe place to run.
This was not an isolated case. Both the World Health Organization's guidelines on physical activity for children under five and China's own guidelines for preschoolers recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily for young children. What these children lacked was a place where they could "play without worry." And "play" is precisely the primary mode of learning for this age group. Research indicates that rural children often suffer from low self-confidence and delayed language development, stemming from a complex set of challenges: rural teachers have fewer training opportunities and high turnover rates; even if they learn something new, they might leave. Kindergarten curricula are often designed for urban standards, and the content is unfamiliar to village children, making it difficult to apply. Compulsory education starts at primary school, leaving preschool outside its coverage, and commercial capital often overlooks rural markets. Over time, these areas became forgotten gaps.
The Impact After Completion
In January 2026, the playground Yang Sifeng had been waiting for was finally built. On the first day of the new term, children dressed in traditional Bai clothing danced and sang folk songs on the new blue-and-yellow playground, happier than ever before. A year after the playground was built, Xiao Ji's smiles had increased. During that year, outdoor activity time at the kindergarten at the foot of Mount Everest extended from less than half an hour to two hours daily. Children there also learned traffic rules through specially designed traffic safety education zones and traffic sign play equipment on the playground. Xiao Ji gradually stepped out of the classroom, onto the playground, and began playing with other children.
In Tongren, Guizhou, after the playground was completed in 2024, teachers organized fun sports activities. Zhu, the young girl, slowly pushed her limits, showing marked improvement in physical fitness. She became a jump rope leader, standing confidently at the front of the line to guide the other children through each movement.
Evaluation data from the Beijing Normal University Behavioral Health Center shows that after playground construction, the average daily duration of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for children in kindergarten increased by over 12 minutes, an increment exceeding one-fifth of the recommended daily amount. The WHO clearly recommends that 3-4 year olds should not sit continuously for more than one hour. The project implementation reduced children's sedentary time during kindergarten hours by 14.53 minutes daily, with the advantage expanding to 22.39 minutes upon follow-up. Furthermore, 97.3% of kindergarten principals reported a significant increase in teachers' enthusiasm for organizing outdoor activities—prior to this, many kindergartens had almost no structured outdoor sports classes.
A playground changes not just physical fitness, but also how children interact with the world. Beyond the numbers, there are changes harder to quantify. After the playground was built at Xingfa Township Central Kindergarten in Guizhou, as children played and had activities on it daily, parents began to believe the kindergarten was truly doing meaningful work. Previously, many parents saw kindergarten merely as "childcare," not understanding the purpose of preschool education. Now, Xingfa Township Central Kindergarten has grown into a county-level demonstration school, transforming from experiencing student attrition to having a lottery system for admission due to high demand. The teachers even organized their own "Village Toddler Games" on the playground. No one asked them to; they simply felt the children needed it, and now the playground made it possible, so they did it.
In 2024, building on the playground project, Meituan and the One Foundation launched the "Village Toddler Games," partnering with the Beijing Normal University Behavioral Health Research Center to provide activity plans and material support to kindergartens across regions, helping teachers make full use of the playgrounds. Over a thousand rural kindergartens in Guizhou, Sichuan, Yunnan, Xinjiang, and elsewhere gradually held their own "Village Toddler Games"—featuring obstacle runs, fun vaulting, stilt walking, and balance bikes. Nearly a quarter of these kindergartens were holding a formal sports event for the very first time.
With playgrounds, children finally had a place to run. With games, they finally had a chance to be seen. Playgrounds also opened new doors for the children. In 2024, a rural kindergarten in Songtake Town, Atushi City, Xinjiang, got its playground, giving children their first proper space for running and playing soccer. The following year, with support from the Xinjiang aid working group, eight children from this kindergarten traveled to Kunshan, Jiangsu, for the first time. They walked onto the green field of a Jiangsu Super League soccer match as ball kids, cheered by the entire stadium. In that moment, the distance between these children and the outside world shrank.
The Guardians of the Playgrounds
The playgrounds were built, but it is the teachers guarding them who truly bring them to life. Lhamo, in Baila Village, Tibet, never imagined she would one day design games. A post-95s generation teacher, she came from Lhasa to this village kindergarten. Before the playground was built, the most common phrase teachers said by the concrete yard was "run slowly, don't fall." The concrete was too dangerous for real running. After the playground was built, the children ran outside, but Lhamo found them standing there, unsure what to play; she herself didn't know how to guide them. So, she began to experiment: what games could involve both younger and older children simultaneously? How to get the quiet children to move too? She tried little by little, adjusting repeatedly. Later, the changes in the children delighted her: "They used to be afraid to speak, unwilling to join group activities. Now they love playing together on the playground, running around. Their physical fitness has improved, and so has their teamwork and language expression."
How to design outdoor activities, how to use games to help children with delayed language development, how to turn hopscotch on the playground into part of math启蒙—these things come with lesson plans, teaching research, and guidance from experienced teachers in urban kindergartens. But in the villages, teachers need to figure it out themselves and seek external help.
The Funding Mechanism
A single playground costs tens of thousands of yuan. For 5,152 playgrounds, the total is 520 million yuan. Where did the money come from? The answer is from 1.92 million公益商家 doing business on the Meituan platform. They simply set a donation amount—a few cents or a few毛钱—per transaction on the Meituan App, and the system handles the rest automatically.
Ma Jian is one of them. From Fuhai County, Altay, Xinjiang, he took over his parents' barbecue shop at 18, only to run it into the ground soon after, losing money and going into debt. He didn't give up, starting a new local business—a restaurant specializing in local特色 cold-water fish. His business gradually picked up. In 2020, he saw the rural children's playground公益 project on the Meituan platform and joined without much thought. He said his parents taught him two things: do business with integrity, and help the less fortunate within your means. To date, he has participated in donating to build 38 playgrounds across Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Gansu, and other places. He has never been to those locations, but through the Meituan backend, he can see where each playground is located.
In Chengdu, there is a chain restaurant called "Xiao Man Wu Sheng" where all 30+ employees are hearing-impaired, communicating with customers through gestures, eye contact, and occasional notes. One day, the owner mentioned the playground donation plan. The more than 30 people discussed it in sign language. When it was Wang Yue's turn, she signed: "I was a left-behind child too. I know what it feels like to be helped. I want to help others too." No one spoke; everyone nodded. All six outlets joined. As of now, Xiao Man Wu Sheng has participated in donating to build 15 playgrounds.
Bai Xianyin, a homestay owner in Xuzhou who grew up in the countryside, runs five homestays on the Meituan platform. He joined the project because he found it "convenient, and the cause is tangible." In 2022, during lockdowns, all five homestays were closed, but salaries and rent still had to be paid. Watching the funds in his account dwindle daily, feeling helpless, he would just sit indoors. He started opening the Meituan backend, searching the map for the playgrounds he had helped donate to. "When I found them, I felt at peace. I had still done something for society." Later, he received a hand-drawn painting from a child in Guizhou, depicting children running on that very playground. He showed it to his daughter, who stared at it for a long time, then took a piece of paper, made a copy, and hung it at home.
Xu Jing, co-founder of the parent-child乐园奈尔宝, was involved more deeply. Beyond "donating a sum per ticket redeemed," she also brought urban parent-child activity courses into the rural children's playgrounds, allowing children in Guizhou and Yunnan to experience启蒙 activities commonplace in cities. She said: "Every little bit adds up. Doing small acts of kindness in daily life can warm the hearts of many."
Public welfare often runs on热度. A report touches you, you donate; the热度 fades, and the goodwill is hard to sustain. The key feature of Meituan's mechanism is its "seamlessness." Merchants only need to set up automatic donations, with a门槛 so low it requires no extra effort. The 5,152 playgrounds were built penny by penny, accumulated from donations of a few cents per order. Among the 1.92 million merchants, most might not specifically check where the money went, but the children far away know. From the foot of Mount Everest to the China-Vietnam border, from the戈壁 of Xinjiang to the mountains of Yunnan and Guizhou, behind a donation of a few cents per order is an ordinary business person; on the other end of the playground is a child running freely for the first time. They have never met, yet through a quietly operating digital mechanism, a connection is made. This is perhaps the most heartwarming aspect of China's digital commerce: a platform that helps people order food delivery, book homestays, and buy tickets more conveniently is also using the goodwill from a few cents in every transaction to fill the gaps in forgotten corners.