Yang Enze

On November 19, the Enze Development Fund donation ceremony was held at Tianjin University (TJU). The fund was named after Yang Enze, a centenarian professor at the university who died last year.

As instructed by his will, his son sold all of his properties and donated 1.5 million yuan ($228,000) to TJU, of which 500,000 yuan was used to purchase equipment for the optical fiber communication lab at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering where Yang used to work. The other one million yuan was used to establish a scholarship for TJU students in recognition of their outstanding performance in related research fields.

Born in 1919 in a small county in China’s southern Guangdong province, Yang was one of the nation’s trailblazers in microwave communication and optical fiber communication. Growing up in war and conflict, he aspired to build a strong country through education, even when he was a child.

Guided by this belief, he later served as the chief engineer on the construction of China’s first regular optical communication line, laying a solid foundation for China’s development in this sector. Yang was committed to cultivating students and scientific research. Over seven decades he trained a number of extraordinary students, including well-known academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), doctoral and masters students who have made impressive achievements. One month before he died, he was still participating in scientific research and teaching in the laboratory.

In 2004, Yang donated 300,000 yuan to a primary school in his hometown and set up Chenghe Scholarship there, promising to donate 20,000 yuan each year for the following 20 years to help financially-stretched students there. 

Li Jiajun, the Party secretary of TJU, accepted the donation on behalf of the University. “We will never forget the legacy Prof. Yang has left us with his noble deeds," Li said. "We will make full use of the Enze Fund to help more scientific researchers fulfill the historical mission of building a strong country through education."