Blood binds volunteer to people in need

Fu Qiang visits the Luojia Sanjiu Primary School in Tianquan, a county hit hard in the Ya'an earthquake on April 20,2013. [Photo provided to China Daily]

It is easy to do something good once, but it is hard to do good all the time, according to a time-honored Chinese saying.

But Fu Qiang, a 45-year-old native of Ma'anshan, Anhui province, has done the same good deed of donating blood to needy people for 16 consecutive years.

The amount of blood and platelets he has donated is equivalent to the blood in 15 adults and could fill 156 mineral water bottles, says Tao Yijun, an official with the Red Cross Society of China.

Fu's dedication to giving blood stems from an incident which almost paralyzed him permanently.

In 1990, Fu, who had served as a policeman for four years, started working as a repairer in the Ma'anshan Iron and Steel Co, Ltd in Ma'anshan, Anhui province.

Working night shift after a downpour of rain reduced visibility to almost zero, Fu was crossing a train track on the grounds of the plant to repair equipment on June 11, 1991, when he was knocked a distance of 9 meters by a small train transporting steel blocks.

He suffered vertebral fractures and had no physical sensation from his chest down. "Doctors said I had a 90-percent chance of being paralyzed," Fu says.

That summer, a catastrophic flood took place in eastern China. Anhui was one of the worst-hit provinces, with more than 48 million people, or nearly 70 percent of its population, being affected.