The Chinese-American man was standing with a group of 18 students and two teachers from the Zhaiying Primary School, in the small city of Dengzhou, Henan province, on July 4, handing out scholarship and prizes, something that he has been quietly doing in his old hometown, for 13 years now, using his own funds.

Gang Diancheng was born in a village near Dengzhou, in 1963, and got his primary and middle schooling in the village. Afterwards, he graduated from Henan University, in chemistry, in 1985, then went on to study at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan Institute of Technology, in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province.

Gang is now a tenured professor and doctoral tutor at Louisiana State University, in the US state of Louisiana, and he has been a guest professor at his two former universities.

He got the idea of providing a "Gang Guanghua Scholarship Fund" to encourage hard-working students and teachers and to help students from poor families to continue their studies, back in 2002, as a way of honoring his father, Gang Guanghua, who had just passed away.

The elder Gang was a simple farmer without much schooling but he regarded knowledge as the key to a more promising future and, no matter how difficult life was, he managed to send his five children to school. And thanks to that effort, three of the children graduated from university and the others at least finished senior high.

In commenting on Gang's help, Jie Pingwei, the principal of Zhaiying Primary School, said, "Prof Gang donates money for our children and also finds time to lecture them himself and sometimes delivers some inspiring speeches based on his own experience."

Jie added that, after the scholarship fund was established in 2003, no student has had to drop out of school and the teachers' performance has kept it at the top of the list of schools in the area.

Gang has been providing the scholarships for 13 years now and says that his own two children in the US have encouraged him and will even continue the scholarships after he passes on.