Boondocks ballet boosts girls' morale

Professional teachers from Beijing have been spending their weekend leisure time teaching deprived rural youngsters the basics of classical dance as a way of improving their self-confidence, as Zhao Xu reports from Duancun, Hebei province.

In August last year, Guan Yu, a ballet teacher from the Beijing Dance Academy, spent a few days in Duancun, a small rural town in the northern province of Hebei. "The day I arrived, at noon, I went to eat at a small restaurant. It was the height of summer. All around me, shirtless men were talking at the tops of their voices and happily washing down skewers of grilled meat with giant glasses of beer," he recalled.

As he waited for his food, Guan caught a glimpse of a girl jumping off a bicycle. She was Li Ziyi, a former student who quit his classes when she entered middle school earlier in the year.